Professional Learning

Four teams selected to reimagine student success with NGLC's Bravely

At Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), we are excited to announce the four teams that were selected to participate in the 2024-25 cohort of Bravely. These teams will be working to solve one of their highest priorities to reimagine student success in their schools.

Please join us in congratulating the selected teams!

• Citizens of the World Charter Schools (CWCS), California and Missouri. A Bravely team consisting of leaders across this K-8 public charter network will explore opportunities to develop and strengthen a shared understanding of what success in school looks like. The team aims to support all learners—students and adults—with tools and strategies to bring the network’s Graduate Dispositions to life in their classrooms and schools.
• Franklin School District, New Hampshire. The district began its Portrait of a Graduate process in 2019, and is now ready to take the next steps to bring the portrait into practice at the middle school. The middle school-based Bravely team will be exploring opportunities to transform learning in ways that align with the district’s portrait and prepare students for redesigned learning in high school.
• Hinsdale School District, New Hampshire. The middle school-based Bravely team will be exploring ways to bring stakeholders—students, parents, teachers, and others—together to revolutionize the middle school experience, in a commitment to the common goal set out in the district’s collaboratively-developed Portrait of a Learner.
• The Workshop School, Pennsylvania. This Philadelphia high school’s Bravely team will be exploring how the school can define, communicate, and support common expectations for students that are fair, transparent, and forge a bridge between where students are when they start at the school and where they need to be when they graduate: students who value learning and growth, build community, and know how to shape their lives and our world.

Selected through a competitive application process, each team will receive a $12,500 grant to collaboratively design systems for equitable learning that bring a new vision for student success to life. In addition to the grant funding, Bravely provides professional learning over the course of the next year, so that team members can help lead a long-term learning transformation in their communities.

"We can’t wait to start working with these four teams to reimagine student success," said NGLC Co-Director Carlos Beato. "We believe that each of these teams have the potential to make a real difference in the lives of their students. With Bravely, they will build the foundations that our research shows are necessary for change in education to last well beyond the year they spend with us."

Guided by NGLC facilitators, teams will learn to lead change in a human-centered way that is more iterative, imaginative, and inclusive than traditional educational change management approaches. NGLC calls this approach liberatory transformation design, and it brings together NGLC’s Transformation Design practices with the Liberatory Design mindsets developed by National Equity Project. Liberatory transformation design takes the principles behind equitable next gen learning and reflects those principles in the changes communities make to bring next gen learning to life.

Bravely Reimagining Student Success

K-12 education spaces in the U.S. are struggling to keep up with our fast-changing world because it was designed for stability and continues to reproduce inequities. It’s time to rethink what outcomes define student success and how schools nationwide can better address diverse learner needs. 

It is our systems, not our people, that need to transform. “Our students have faced innumerable challenges yet have found a way to persevere,” echoed Workshop School co-founder and executive director Matthew Riggan. “They are singers and artists and mechanics and poets and programmers. They are wage earners and care givers. They are generous, loving, and often hilarious.” Teams participating in Bravely will focus on systemic changes in teaching and learning practices and school culture that are needed so that ALL students in their schools have an opportunity to find success as a thriving, contributing citizen of the 21st century.

There is broad agreement about what students need from their school in order to be successful in learning, work, and life, but the work of reimagining student success is deeply local. That’s why each team is choosing a specific challenge or opportunity to explore through Bravely based on their own community’s interests, goals, and aspirations for student success. “We believe that by transforming how students learn,” said Hinsdale’s superintendent David Ryan, “through a personalized approach designed to appeal to their passions and interests, it will build their levels of competence, persistence, knowledge, and character. We also believe that our middle school students, as they progress through their education journey in Hinsdale, will lead the way in subsequent systems transformation at the high school level and drive systems change throughout the school district.”

Bravely is generously supported with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.