We need to rethink traditional models for teaching and learning. Finding ways to use the innovative technology of the 21st century can improve public education by maximizing teacher expertise, and creating new ways for parents to engage with their child’s schooling. Some technology can also create more flexible learning environments for students to receive curriculum and instruction tailored to their unique needs. Using these technologies in the classroom can greatly increase the efficiency of teaching, learning, and administration. Our work addresses policy barriers that make many of the most promising innovations impossible to implement.
Current Work: A Learning Agenda for Taking Personalized Learning to Scale
With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CRPE is conducting a multi-year, multi-method effort to learn about how school districts and regional partners can support the successful implementation, expansion, and sustainability of personalized learning (PL) in schools. CRPE researchers will use a combination of field studies, surveys, and secondary data analysis to explore how schools, districts, and partner organizations outside the school district help to seed and grow PL and with what results.
Key questions for the project include:
What do principals, teachers, and system leaders need to know and be able to do to successfully support, implement, and scale up PL?
What policies and practices, at the classroom, school, district, partnership, and state levels, offer important supports (and barriers) for successfully implementing and scaling up PL?
What are the early results for teachers and students?
The pandemic created further opportunity and accelerated a movement toward nontraditional learning environments, such as independent microschools, homeschool cooperatives, and hybrid or virtual schools. Though nationally representative research on this movement is scarce, research reports...
Inevitable demographic shifts are about to create a fast-growing population of skilled older workers: in a decade, adults over age 65 will outnumber children under age 18. At the same time, advances in public health...
An unconventional approach Professor Manoel Andrade Neto anxiously scanned the list of students admitted to Brazil’s Federal University of Ceará. He hoped that one student, Toinho, had been prepared enough to qualify. He turned to...
CRPE director Robin Lake and Travis Pillow, Director of Thought Leadership for Step Up for Students (formerly a senior innovation fellow with CRPE), contributed an essay to this year’s edition of NASBE’s State Education Standard,...
This piece was originally published in The 74. Districts are responding in divergent ways to artificial intelligence’s potential to reshape teaching and learning, and most have refrained from defining a districtwide stance for schools to...
Educators nationwide are forging their way in a landscape rocked by pandemic-induced disruptions. Training resources designed to spark new thinking among school staff often feel outdated—especially if they were published before 2020. To address this...
The work of post-pandemic learning recovery will take many years. As researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon noted in an opinion piece in The New York Times: “Especially in the hardest-hit communities, it is increasingly...
As Americans, we love innovation and we’re good at it. We pride ourselves on ingenuity. We celebrate inventors. We are, generally, more tolerant of failure than other countries. And our federal government has long allocated...
This piece was originally published in The 74. Lake: Other countries are quickly adopting artificial intelligence in schools. Lessons from Singapore, South Korea, India, China, Finland and Japan. Rapid developments in artificial intelligence, especially generative...
Small learning environments that operate outside public schools—such as microschools, hybrid homeschools, and learning pods—exploded into broad public consciousness during the pandemic. While many children who were in these programs have now returned to public...
Current Research
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