Audience: Secondary educators

In this activity, you will reflect on a possible definition of equity, identify your equity imperative and share with your educator team. An equity imperative is a call to action representing an urgent and deeply felt need to address inequity. An equity imperative empowers you to answer the question, “What do I stand for and why?”

In an effort to shift the ownership of learning from educator to student, SPARK School at Kyrene de las Manitas has implemented a system for students to reflect on their learning and progress, identify the academic support they need and schedule time to meet with the appropriate educator(s). This resource guides educator teams through steps to implementing student-selected support.

The educator team at Kyrene de las Manitas Innovation Academy co-plans project-based units that support deeper learning. The 10 tips appearing in this document are drawn from their approach to planning. To get started, consider how your team might implement these tips.

Community educators provide capacity and insight in service of deepening and personalizing student learning. They enrich learning environments by forging authentic relationships, sharing expertise and expanding networks. Use this template to guide your communication with community educators.

Next Education Workforce team-based structures can strengthen the project-based learning instructional approach. This unit planning template takes educators through the steps of designing a PBL unit, while also planning for how to maximize distributed expertise.

An asset map is a visual way to identify resources within your community. The act of creating a map of expertise can help you discover connections you already have, organizations you’d love to know about, and talents and resources near your school or available virtually.

Explore this resource to learn six tips for engaging a community educator in schools, community-based organizations and anywhere that learning happens.

Principled Innovation emboldens us to be able to ask the question, “We can, but should we?” This video, created by MLFTC’s Principled Innovation Team, introduces Next Education Workforce models and explores how their development is an example of principled innovation.

Riverview High School serves 90–120 students in grades 7–12. Many of these students have left their assigned district schools due to disciplinary reasons or are transitioning out of juvenile detention or residential treatment centers. In this resource, you’ll see the layout of their learning space.

Approximately 900 ninth grade students at Westwood High School in Mesa, Arizona are distributed across six Academy Teams. In this resource, you’ll see the layout of their learning space.

In this Google Sheet, you’ll be able to describe your strategy, input the costs, make intentional shifts and see your choices summarized on a dashboard.

In this document, you’ll read about how two school leaders and one district-level leader make strategic shifts in funding and time to cover the costs of their new staffing models.

This resource, created in collaboration with MLFTC’s Principled Innovation Team, proposes a quarterly, one-hour protocol intended to help teams reflect together and build the “muscles” of empathy, awareness and resiliency. The protocol guides the team through sharing quarterly wins, reflecting on an intentional set of questions, debriefing and identifying next steps.

Design principles are four to seven ideas that align with the school’s mission and vision and act as a guiding light for the school-level team implementing change. This tool suggests steps a team might take to prepare for a design session on co-creating design principles, offers a protocol for facilitating the session and proposes next steps for taking design principles from draft form to final state.

Hear from MLFTC Dean Carole Basile about the relationship between deeper and personalized learning and teams of educators with distributed expertise.

This collection of implementation briefs is a companion piece to Teacher Preparation and the Next Education Workforce (Thompson et al., 2020) and goes deeper into several facets of the initial team-based models with teacher candidates, including: role descriptions, readiness conditions for district partners, financial models, and implications for teacher preparation.

In this resource, you’ll find several recommendations for how all-remote teams might deploy their educators to best meet the needs of students.

Exploring a new topic can be exciting. We want to help make sure your exploration is productive, with targeted searches from reliable sources. This list, while not comprehensive, offers good resources for planning and implementing deeper learning.

Levels of Student Autonomy is a simple system that supports student independence and personalized learning. The resource below explains how you might implement this system in your learning space.

There is no one-size-fits-all Next Education Workforce model. The diverse contexts, assets and needs of each school inform the design and implementation of each model. However, all Next Education Workforce models share several common elements. This document describes the Elements of the Next Education Workforce found across dozens of schools that have launched successful team-based models.

Hear from MLFTC Dean Carole Basile about why Next Education Workforce models are critically important, especially today.