Learning Accelerator
Project Title
For general support
Date
Mar. 09, 2023
Duration
33 months
Description
Educators and innovators across the country have proven that it is possible to deliver high-quality learning experiences that support students’ diverse needs and interests. However, the field lacks the capacity to sustain these innovations at scale such that all students benefit. The Learning Accelerator (TLA) addresses this by connecting and accelerating efforts and catalyzing national transformation through greater collaboration, coordination, and action across actors at every level. With prior Corporation support, TLA developed and led several large, cross-sector initiatives to produce open resources for the field and support widespread change. This was especially critical during the pandemic, when TLA launched immediate response efforts including a coaching network that supported over 200 district leaders serving two million students in making strategic decisions about how to deploy their stimulus resources. Continued Corporation support will allow TLA to build the education sector’s capacity for aligned action by ensuring decision-makers have access to the information, tools, and networks they need to advance this vision in their contexts and catalyzing collective change to tackle critical shared challenges in service of a more equitable future.
Project Title
For general support
Date
Mar. 04, 2021
Duration
24 months
Description
Innovators across the country have proven that it is possible to deliver high-quality learning experiences that support students’ diverse needs, strengths, and interests. However, these actors often operate in siloes, lacking the capacity to connect and achieve meaningful scale such that the most underserved students can benefit from these innovations. The Learning Accelerator (TLA) fills this gap, serving as an engine to connect and accelerate efforts and catalyzing national transformation through greater collaboration, coordination, and learning. With prior Corporation support, TLA has developed and led several large, cross-sector projects to produce open resources for the field and support widespread change. A recent example is the partnership that TLA has forged with Ariadne Labs, an innovative health care organization in Boston. Together, they created tools and strategies to support education leaders in minimizing health risks while maximizing learning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Continued support would position TLA to lead similar collaborative efforts.
Project Title
As an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic to support the remote learning rapid response network
Date
Jun. 04, 2020
Duration
7 months
Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented disruption of our public education system. As of May 1, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories had transitioned to distance learning, resulting in forty-seven million public school students learning remotely for a quarter of the school year. Districts are navigating both urgent short-term needs such as connecting students with technology and long-term concerns such as mitigating learning loss. The Learning Accelerator (TLA) drives improvement in the education sector through knowledge development, networked learning, and strategic dissemination in service of ensuring that all students receive high-quality, personalized learning experiences. TLA seeks to enhance the quality of remote learning by launching a rapid-response coaching network for high-need school districts as they implement remote models and plan for an uncertain future. Corporation support will enable TLA and its partners to provide timely, individualized coaching to at least 200 districts and disseminate tools and lessons learned to inform the response of the field more broadly.
Project Title
For general support
Date
Mar. 07, 2019
Duration
24 months
Description
Years of education innovation have yielded proof points of effective practices and models, but a lack of systemic capacity to scale these innovations has meant that they continue to benefit only a fraction of students. Launched in 2012, the Learning Accelerator (TLA) addresses this challenge through three interconnected strategies that drive learning and change across the sector: knowledge development, networked learning, and strategic dissemination. Together, these strategies comprise a collective impact model that TLA uses to move new, high-potential approaches from experiments to broader adoption. For example, with current Corporation support, TLA has worked directly with twelve schools to develop education toolkits featuring their work, and with well over 100 additional schools to showcase specific strategies. TLA then shares these models and strategies in actionable formats to support practitioners outside of these schools, making personalized, mastery-based learning experiences accessible to more students.
Project Title
For general support
Date
Jun. 01, 2017
Duration
24 months
Description
Personalized learning demonstrates increasing promise to create effective, student-centered learning experiences, but more work needs to be done at the schools, tools, and systems levels to enable personalized experiences for all students. The Learning Accelerator (TLA) works across all three of these levels to catalyze implementation of high-quality models at scale. They translate initial proof points developed by innovators into actionable knowledge and support for districts; build the capacity of other organizations to do innovative work; and inform policy conditions for this work to be successful. With general operating support from the Corporation, TLA will tackle three specific challenges in today’s education landscape: inadequate knowledge capture; fragmented learning networks; and a lack of sharing and dissemination across organizations. TLA will aggregate best practices and share knowledge, network regional learning communities, and support the development of data infrastructure that makes it easier for educators to access personalized learning resources.
Project Title
For general support
Date
Jun. 04, 2015
Duration
24 months