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Focus Area:
Innovation and the Future of Learning

At CRPE, we study how public education can evolve to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing world. Our research on innovation and the future of learning examines how schools are rethinking teaching and learning models—from personalized and competency-based approaches to the use of technology and AI—to better prepare students for life beyond school. We investigate how these innovations take shape in real contexts, what barriers and enablers schools encounter, and how systems can support sustainable change. Across this work, we aim to understand how schools and communities can design learning environments that are more equitable, adaptable, and responsive to the diverse needs of students.

  • Research Reports    

Statewide districts: A way to unleash creative new learning options—and study them as they grow

Robin Lake, Kelly Young

How can school systems possibly find the bandwidth to act on new visions for public education when their leaders are constantly trapped in crisis mode?

  • Research Reports    

Perspectives that bind: Reshaping partnerships in education

Femi Vance

Partnerships between schools, families, and expanded learning providers are a powerful tool that could be used for lasting change in education.

  • Research Reports    

“The most professionally satisfied I’ve been.” How could the best aspects of learning pod staffing be scaled up?

Bryan C. Hassel

Pod staffing arrangements have the potential to be replicated at a much larger scale and in a way that endures beyond the pandemic.

  • Research Reports    

Use of personalized learning platforms in one pandemic-era microschool: A case study

Christopher Doss, Elizabeth Steiner

This paper poses the question of how personalized learning platforms might affect students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes.

  • The Lens    

Voice and choice: New England students highlight which pandemic-era changes should stay—and which should go

Lisa Chu, Maddy Sims

Research on the pandemic’s negative impact on student learning, peer-to-peer relationships, and teenagers’ mental health makes it easy to assume high schoolers are eager to “return to normal.” Yet recent conversations with high school students throughout New England reveal very different hopes for this period of recovery.

  • Research Reports    

Progress and potential: The innovations of pandemic learning communities led by leaders of color

Eupha Jeanne Daramola

What seven initiatives led by community leaders of color can teach us about advancing racial justice in K–12 educational spaces.

  • Research Reports    

Pods in Action: The Central Florida Urban League

Juli Kim, Sharon Kebschull Barrett

CFUL opened Whitney M. Young Academy, a microschool designed to meet the individual needs of low-income, African American students.

  • The Lens    

From a Lakota-focused microschool to service opportunities for kids with disabilities, innovations from 161 schools to aid marginalized students

Chelsea Waite

This year’s Canopy data suggest schools are innovating is to design solutions to the problems most often faced by marginalized students and families.

  • Research Reports    

Pods in Action: African Leadership Group

Juli Kim, Paola Gilliam, Sharon Kebschull Barrett

The African Leadership Group created a learning pod that in most cases not only helped students keep up but actually improved their academic performance over the 2020–21 school year.

  • Research Reports    

Pods in Action: Community Works

Heather Gomez-Bendaña, Elizabeth Steiner

When school buildings closed in March 2020, Community Works started offering more versatile programming options to meet the needs of their students.

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