Personalized Learning

This binder is a one-stop tool for protocols, resources, and guiding materials to support school-based design teams in meeting the needs of their school communities. These resources help educators respond to the constraints placed on them by local and state policies and health concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Visit the Fall 2020 Back to School Planning Resource Binder

This guide provides educators with a framework for driving equity-focused, innovative school change—along with the tools they need to bring this to life in their own school settings. Our framework aims to bind together the personal learning, process considerations, and design principles that drive sustainable, equitable school change.

Visit the Building for Equity home page
Download the guide

This paper highlights the unique, authentic stories of six micro-credential initiatives, exploring the various approaches to micro-credential implementation at schools across the United States. We interviewed district administrators in Utah, Wisconsin, Florida, Arkansas, and Maryland to investigate effective strategies for using micro-credentials in professional development for educators. As micro-credentials continue to develop on a wider scale, this paper hopes to provide insight into the benefits and challenges surrounding this new model of teacher learning.

Our white paper investigates the commonwealth's strong reputation for educational achievement to reveal entrenched achievement gaps and to suggest that the very measures we use to evaluate schools and students do not align with important indicators of preparation for college, career, and civic life in the 21st century. As an antidote to this mismatch, the paper describes the promise of equity-embedded personalized learning practices and creates a vision for schools that embrace this promise. After exploring the five key principles of Essential Personalized Learning, the paper closes with a delineation of policy and practice steps at the state, district, and school levels that will aid Massachusetts in becoming a more authentic beacon for excellent, equitable education.

On December 10, 2015, President Obama signed the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) — a long-overdue replacement of its predecessor, No Child Left Behind. ESSA marks a new chapter in public education and we see some promising signs.“ESSA opens the door to enable states to rethink what schools and learning of the 21^st century should look like. If we believe that every school should nurture life-long learning in every student, in which classrooms are places of exploration, creativity, and discourse, where learning is meaningfully connected to the world outside the school walls, and in which teachers are respected and empowered to design engaging curricula and assessments, then state accountability systems should be recast and reimagined.”