This site presents draft data and analysis exploring the learner-centered innovation and improvement ecosystem. As a portrait of the landscape (and a developing one at that!), we hope it will help provoke ideas, enhance discussions, and support connection-making.
See below for a few key ideas from the data that the TLA team will be exploring more as we deepen our own understanding of the sector and opportunities for advancement.
Integrating student learning experiences across learning environments (in particular, bridging the "public" and "private") will be key to unlocking opportunities and resources for learners and the people who help them learn.
The learner-centered ecosystem is rich, diverse, and evolving.
Many organizations are orienting to the future but operating within the constraints of the present.
Priorities and focus points for change vary widely, and differences in language and definitions operate in tension.
Integrating student learning experiences across learning environments (in particular, bridging the "public" and "private") will be key to unlocking opportunities and resources for learners and the people who help them learn.
The COVID 19 pandemic accelerated interest in and the development of learner-centering educational experiences. From new tools deployed in the classroom to meet individual and local needs, to innovative public school designs, to the development of private learning communities and home-based experiences, opportunities have proliferated. Students and families can and are tapping into a greater range of public and private learning environments and experiences, both within and outside of traditional K-12 public education bounds. Bolstered by their support and resources at home, it is possible to imagine learners working with educators in a variety of roles, across a variety of spaces, with a variety of tools, to get what they uniquely need to reach their full and unique potential.
Public Delivery
Benefits: access, experiential consistency, traditional credit-building
Challenges: customization, flexibility, modularity
Supply of experiences is enterprise, stable, and governed by “public” via politics and regulation.
Providers work through those governing learning environment and procurement
Private
Delivery
Benefits: customization, flexibility, self-determination
Challenges: coherence, way finding, credit-building
Supply of experiences is dynamic, volatile, modular, and market-governed.
Often, providers work directly with learners or guardians
Yet, there is significant work to be done to realize the potential of new models and resources for each and every student. Access to quality experiences remains inequitable. There is little interoperability between environments, and credit for evidence of learning rarely transfers across bounds. Where experiences have become more modular, the burden for quality control, way finding, and integration remains high and largely on the shoulders of learners. Traditional accountability and policy structures remain challenges for scale. The resource boundaries between public and private environments remain impermeable.
Making good on this moment will require the presence of and coordination across a robust ecosystem of entities positioned to support new learning environments and redefine the organizing architecture in which they operate.
As we look at the ecosystem we wonder...
how might our current public education systems evolve to better leverage and integrate the tools, experiences, and expertise present in emerging learning environments?
how might they do so in ways that drive greater equity and opportunity for those students who need it most?
what sector supports, capacity, and infrastructure would help do this?
The learner-centered ecosystem is rich, diverse, and evolving.
Prior to the pandemic, TLA maintained a map of a variety of capacity builders and actors across the education innovation sector. As we turned to update this map post-pandemic (or rather, in our new endemic state), our diligence lists expanded five-fold (and likely could have doubled beyond that had we had more time and capacity!).
Part of this expansion relates to increased interest in and commitment to learner-centering approaches and practices. Survey responses from a subset of mapped entities found that roughly half of the respondents had increased focus on learner-centered innovation over the last five years (and half of those over the last two).
Another factor driving a more expansive view is the rapid proliferation of new, often private or out-of-system, models that arose during the pandemic. Making sense of how these new learning environments and experiences-- ranging from new online resources for self-directed learning, to micro school networks and wraparound support providers-- relate to one another is of critical importance. Understanding who is positioned to support their growth, integration, and quality improvement is one objective of this project.
As noted that this mapping exercise is focused on ecosystem agents operating around and through learning environments and experiences and currently excludes a variety of emerging learning environments and standalone models, policymakers, and funder entities. There is work to be done to make connections with other datasets and relationships between entities.
Many organizations are orienting to the future but operating within the constraints of the present.
We considered entities' mission- and operating- horizons relative to the future as one lens for analysis. Who is trying to deploy innovations within more traditional paradigms? Which entities are building future models that operate as provocations for others?
Put simply, and understandably, many entity visions and missions articulate more future-oriented, learner-centered aspirations than the realities in which they operate. On one hand, this disconnect means there is work to do to create the conditions in which entities can bring their visions to life (a key topic for this convening). What market demands might be reinforcing current ways of working? Which parts of the sector need to most support and investment to break free?
On the other hand, the apparent disconnect between missions and the operational present implies significant, under-tapped potential for greater buy-in across the system for futures of learning that don't yet exist. This represents significant inchoate sector capacity for change, provided we can build the coalitions, shared understanding, and pathways and mechanisms for collective movement.
Priorities and focus points for change vary widely, and differences in language and definitions operate in tension.
Making sense of entity missions and work required a fair degree of subjective analysis. The words and ideas entities use to create meaning for visions require some interpretation.
We tried to be consistent, but to supplement the map data and test some of our assumptions, TLA sent a survey to entities asking about where, how, and why they undertake learner-centered innovation work. These qualitative data helped us better understand how respondents were thinking about their work, and where differences in perspective and language might be creating tension to navigate or misunderstanding.
Three tensions are worth calling special attention to:
1) Distinctions (or not) between mastery-based and competency-based learning.
Based on early conversations with the LearnerEngine team, we wanted to test whether or not organizations made a distinction between the terms "mastery-based" and "competency-based." From our experience working with many operating in the field, the words offer distinction without a meaningful difference. But this is certainly not true for others. So we asked.
Most organizations reported no difference (literally 0 points). However, organizations focused on policy and/or mindsets and vision change expressed much higher support for competency-based than mastery-based (14 points and 25 points respectively). This indicates that those operating in different positions in the sector likely hold differing definitions relative to their mission and operating horizons.
This is clearly an area to dig into. Why might these differences in definition exist? Is mastery-based learning on a pathway to a competency-based? Is it a competing vision? (Explore more analysis on definitions here.)
2) Understanding and tapping into differing motivations in the work.
When we asked about entity priorities for innovation and improvement, there were some that consistently rose to the top, such as improving the quality and consistency of learning experiences through shared aligned materials, tools, and infrastructure or modernizing K-12 learning experiences in response to future global needs and challenges. Yet, entities also proposed nearly two dozen additional urgent needs they were centering in the work. when we dug below the surface of rankings across groups and looked at different segments, it became clear that this movement is made up of organizations with many viewpoints on what is most needed and why.
As we consider what coalitions exist, and which new ones might be created, understanding these priorities will be critically important. (Explore more analysis on priorities here.)
3) Closing gaps in achievement and access to more traditional content versus redefining the content valued by the system.
As we talk about closing equity gaps and supporting all learners, it's also worth acknowledging that entities are orienting towards different end games. As one entity wrote about their organization's relationship to learner-centered innovation: "The interpretation [of these questions] depend[s] on how we view standards and curriculum relative to personalization/mastery and being learner centered. I could see those in the ecosystem seeing our organization answering not true for all of these questions, but given our perspective that grade-level standards mastery is critical to success and that curriculum is a resource meant to be implemented skillfully in service of students, we answered partially true to many of these questions."
This also came up in priorities. Comments related to content ranged from "increasing math and science skills for students of color" to "activating student-driven, real-world learning." As we observe entities across the market, some organizations are working to optimize learning in traditional areas, while others are working to completely redefine the framing for what students should learn altogether. These aims are not orthogonal, but how we measure success will depend very much on how we hold them together in tension.