Change Management

 

Educators have faced unparalleled challenges and opportunities as they’ve navigated the COVID-19 crisis, marshalling new resources and engaging their communities in novel ways. Students, teachers, and leaders have mastered new skills and capacities as they’ve worked to engage every learner anywhere and anytime.

As we look to the future, TLA believes that systems need to advance rather than re-trench. We offer guidance grounded in our national research and deep coaching with districts from across the country to help leaders make decisions about recovery that move us towards better models of learning and realizing the promise of public education. 

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Moves for Personalized, Whole Child Practices

At TLA, we believe effective planning and change-management requires not just plotting forward, but also looking back, taking stock of where we are and understanding the resources — old and new — we can bring to bear. In early 2021, TLA launched Hop, Skip, Leapfrog, a research project that identifies, codifies, and makes sense of new school system strategies and capabilities that emerged during the pandemic. Through interviews with over 30 district teams and subject matter experts across the K-12 education field, the team explored the different concrete “hops, skips, and leaps” educators made towards more personalized, mastery-focused, and whole-child practices during the 12 months of school closure, remote learning, and reopening. 

The guide offers school and system teams concrete, doable, yet aspirational examples of strategies they can adopt or adapt in their own communities.

Planning for Resiliency and Equity

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, TLA, along with Bellwether Education Partners, created a new networked learning community focused on equity and resiliency called the Strategy Lab. The twelve-month, pro bono, cohort-based learning experience supported seven school systems in their reopening planning in the fall and winter of 2020 through expert support and targeted coaching before engaging in a process to make real-time, meaningful, and lasting improvements to teaching and learning.

The Real-Time Redesign toolkit reflects the process our Strategy Lab school systems used for targeted, short-cycle improvement in the midst of the pandemic. It has been updated to be accessible and feasible for any school system or individual school to follow on their own, benefitting from the examples of the Strategy Lab districts’ work.