Enabling Change

How can our education systems best enable next generation learning?

Our education system was designed for stability and conformity, not change nor diversity. To provide students with excellence, we need an education system that is dynamic and flexible, adapting at the speed in which our culture and world are changing.

Every parent wants his or her child to benefit from an excellent education. But the strategies that defined excellence yesterday will likely not generate excellence tomorrow. Our schools have to be more proactive in meeting the changing needs of our world and the students we serve.

The hardest part of creating new designs for school, however, may not be the designs themselves. It may be how to move these new approaches into common use without losing the power, promise, complexity, and depth of the original ideas.

Solving the challenge of Enabling Change means that every person, from child to adult, is a learner. And each learner has a community of supportive partners, opportunity to reflect on current practice and redesign the school experience (yes, even students!), and license to pilot new ideas. When every person recognizes that they are change agents, with permission and choice to take action, they make next generation learning possible. And in the process, begin to change the national culture within which our K–12 system operates.

Transformation Design and Next Gen Change

NGLC is advancing the field’s understanding of what it takes to solve the challenge of Enabling Change through its Transformation Design Project. With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, NGLC partnered with six leading school districts across the country—Vista, Arcadia, and Lindsay in California; Kettle Moraine in Wisconsin; St. Vrain in Colorado; and Henry County in Georgia—and other partners including the Deeper Learning Dozen and Transcend Education to identify, synthesize, and disseminate systems change strategies capable of supporting genuine, equitable transformation of learning and student outcomes. Over time, we invited and engaged additional districts and education change experts to help us refine these findings based on their experience.

Together, we created a framework of core practices, based on what these successful districts actually do, with a suite of resources and tools specifically designed to help schools and school districts moving toward next gen learning and school redesign. Find out how your district community can use what we learned to achieve a reimagined, equitable version of teaching and learning: Explore Transformation Design.

NGLC also offers direct services to support educators who are leading change in their own communities toward next gen learning and new designs for school. Learn more.