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Focus Area:
Innovation and the Future of Learning

In public education, we need to challenge our assumptions and recognize that we can’t get dramatically different results by doing the same things over and over.

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?

States and districts should be using this moment as an opportunity to reassess how they support adolescents and their families.

When schools closed down last spring, some parents and educators responded by forming “pandemic pods,” or small groups of students who came together outside of school to learn during the pandemic. These experiments from last...

Samantha* had been a veteran educator for fourteen years, first as a classroom teacher and then a principal, when the pandemic shut down schools. Last year, when she learned about the then-growing learning pod movement,...

For the second year in a row, many school districts are not ready to switch kids to remote learning if in-person school is interrupted. While most large districts offer full-time remote learning, parents had to...

Margarita Muñiz Academy’s development of its “Portrait of a Scholar” project led to a number of changes focused on providing greater opportunities for student voice and participation.

Lanya McKittrick shares CRPE’s special education research in EdSurge. Visit Edsurge to learn more.

This profile of Map Academy from CRPE and the Christensen Institute details the school’s practices that have proven successful, how they have adapted in the face of the pandemic, and how other school communities can...

The start of spring brings a source of stress for some parents; it’s time to figure out what their children will do over the summer. Summer activities can provide necessary childcare—and vital support for student...

This brief provides an initial, formative assessment of lessons learned in the first year of ReSchool Colorado’s initiatives to expand access to out-of-school learning opportunities for children in the Denver area.

In education policy debates, we often talk about inequality as if it was primarily driven by learning that happens—or doesn’t happen—in schools. But out-of-school learning matters too. Sports and recreational programs can cultivate teamwork, passion,...

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