The Canopy is a collaborative effort to ‘see the forest’ of innovative schools.
Communities nationwide are building student-centered schools where extraordinary learning is the norm. While these schools don’t all look the same, they all set aside old assumptions about what ‘school’ must be and are working to design more engaging, flexible, and empowering learning environments. Many of these learning environments are designed by or with the communities they serve.
But where are these innovative learning environments, and how are they reimagining school? Whether you’re a local school leader or national supporter of education, it can be hard to find schools to learn from, especially outside of your own network.
The Canopy Project builds collective knowledge about a diverse set of innovative learning environments. Launched by the Christensen Institute in 2018, the project is a collaborative effort involving hundreds of organizations and schools, stewarded by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Transcend. Every year, we collect nominations of innovative learning environments, gather details about each learning environment through a school leader survey, and share information publicly in a school database and research reports. Read about our approach to collecting data in our summary of Canopy methodology.
