In working to prove their worth in an ever-changing education landscape, virtual and hybrid schools across the country are looking to hone their craft and make improvements. Over the past year at The Learning Accelerator (TLA), we have supported 20 district-based virtual and hybrid programs to do just that, guiding them to identify actionable ways […]
Teachers have a history of being underappreciated and overworked. Teaching in and beyond the pandemic has been particularly thankless and unsustainable, as schools respond to the unfinished learning needs of their kids while curricula became a political football. Teacher job satisfaction hit an all-time low last year. Unsurprisingly, teachers flocked to virtual schools during the […]
Amanda Pelukas joined Plymouth-Canton Community Schools (P-CCS) in Michigan to transform P-CCS’ Virtual Academy. “COVID remote learning,” as Pelukas described it, needed to improve. Instead of solving the problem on their own, Pelukas and her team joined a network of peers facing similar challenges called Strategy Lab. Months later, Pelukas and the P-CCS virtual team […]
For decades, quantitative, randomized control trials (RCTs) have been considered the gold standard of education research. The What Works Clearinghouse even prioritizes studies that randomly assign participants to conditions and show statistical significance. However, at last month’s American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Annual Meeting in Chicago, we sought out sessions from a growing cadre of […]
How do you unite a diverse set of organizations that believe in the same cause but haven’t worked collectively yet? And how do you ensure meaningful change and impact results from bringing the leaders of these organizations together? This is exactly the challenge the organizers of the Educating All Learners Alliance (EALA) faced in launching […]
It’s easy to conjure a mental image of a science fiction-inspired dystopian future when we hear cautionary tales from the classroom about ChatGPT completing homework assignments, anecdotes of the chatbot fooling a human into bypassing bot controls in its stead by claiming to be a person with a visual impairment, or even an admission from […]
Recently, districts from across the U.S. converged at Dell’s Innovation Summit to tackle problems of practice around innovating in schools, including: designing innovative learning models, implementing new structures of high school through a conference-style approach, and creatively leveraging human capital. For one district, Newport News Public Schools, the challenge was clear — how could they […]
