You are invited to join us for a special series of education research webinars this summer, offered as prologue to the Aurora Institute Virtual Symposium. Mark your calendars for August 18, 2020, from 2-3 pm ET for our first session, “Taking an Equity-Based Approach to Advancing a Research and Learning Agenda” with City Year.

City Year is on a learning journey focused on taking an equity-based approach to research and evaluation while gleaning information on effectively personalizing learning for students. Participants will learn how City Year is managing its portfolio of research projects, designed to highlight effective approaches to personalizing learning environments, while ensuring practices are equity-based. Participants are invited to provide feedback, ask questions, and determine how we might move forward.

Learning Objectives:

• Explore six current evaluations focused on learning how to take a holistic approach to personalizing the learning environment for students.
• Discuss best practices for ensuring research implementation remains equity-focused.
• Collaborate on imagining a future that ensures an equity-based approach to learning about best practices in personalized learning.

Presenters:

• Carolyn Trager Kliman, Vice President, Education Strategy and Policy, City Year
• Jessica Proett, Director, External Evaluation, City Year
• Jade Eckels, Education Research Fellow, City Year

This webinar series is generously sponsored by The Leon Lowenstein Foundation.

Eliot Levine Joins the Canopy Project Advisory Group

Dr. Eliot Levine, Aurora Institute’s Research Director and leader of the CompetencyWorks initiative, was invited to join the Research and Data Advisory Group of the Canopy Project, an initiative to build better collective knowledge about how schools are innovating. Levine will join four others in the Advisory Group to offer feedback on the project’s instruments, analytic methods, and interpretation of findings. This year’s Canopy Project work is focused on conducting rapid-cycle rounds of crowdsourcing to surface schools with particularly comprehensive, equitable, and innovative responses to COVID-19. The findings will then be published and promoted through a collaboratively developed open portal for sharing data and emerging evidence about innovative school models.

The findings from the learning sciences support the shift to student-centered learning models, such as competency-based education. Many of the necessary elements of designing environments based on how students learn best are embedded in student-centered learning models. For all students to succeed in K-12 education, they must be provided with multiple ways to demonstrate their knowledge, and educators must continuously monitor student pace and progress and provide interventions to keep students on track to meet their goals. This requires a shift in how we currently design teaching and learning in schools and enable supportive policies for student-centered learning.

To determine whether our current K-12 education system is aligned with best practices and recommendations from the learning sciences requires reviewing the latest existing literature and research. In our publication, Aligning Education Policy with the Science of Learning and Development, we reviewed and discussed nine resources to answer this question. Click on the button below to learn about nine valuable resources from the literature on the learning sciences.

The Promise and Peril of Education Technology

With the ever-increasing use of technology in education, and especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, advocates and educators find themselves at a crossroads. The use of high-quality and accessible technology in schools can support higher levels of learning, facilitate rigorous learning opportunities, and close opportunity gaps. On the other hand, inadequate access to these technologies for some groups of students or the spread of inaccessible technologies or those that fail to enhance learning only threaten to widen existing opportunity divides. A new report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, Promise and Peril, and the accompanying suite of resources for parents, educators, and policymakers, aim to spotlight key ed-tech issues before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic and empower schools to innovate and serve all learners effectively. Click on the below button to view the resources.