Rhode Island, a state committed to implementing blended and personalized learning, developed and implemented a design-based, community-based, crowd-sourced strategic plan for public education.
Produced by Innovation Partners America in partnership with The Learning Accelerator, State Profiles in Innovation: How Four States Are Advancing Blended and Personalized Learning Statewide, features profiles of state actors who are on the leading edge of cultivating blended and personalized learning.
Watch this strategy session from the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s National Summit 2015 to see experts discuss the differences between innovative education models and explore a range of policies and steps toward implementation states can pursue to encourage innovation.
States and districts have traditionally controlled the resources that go into schools and regulated the practices that governed them. Today though, school leaders who are empowered to make the decisions they think will most benefit students are organizing in new ways and attempting to provide students with a more personalized learning experience.
But even principals who use their newfound independence to aggressively reallocate resources say that persistent district, state, and federal barriers prohibit them from doing more. The authors of this report investigated the barriers principals cited, sometimes with the assistance of state education agencies, to determine whether there were work-arounds that principals didn’t realize. What the authors found is simultaneously troubling and encouraging: principals have far more authority than they think. Only 31% of the barriers cited were “real” – immovable statues, policies, or managerial directives that bring the threat of real consequences if broken.
A case study of how Boston Public Schools updated their AUP. View their actual AUP here (link broken on ed.gov site).
This whitepaper came out of a COSN Leadership Initiative.
This guide provides straightforward advice for teachers on how to manage devices in their classroom.
Narragansett School System set these guidelines for students as Expectations of Care for their assigned devices.
The Foundation for Excellence in Education developed this state policy communications toolkit around competency-based education.
Lovett reports students’ progress based on their skill level instead of their grade level. This video discusses why and how they do this.
