In August 2021, our team published Launching Forward, the culmination of our six-monthlong Hop, Skip, Leapfrog project. Hop, Skip, Leapfrog aimed to identify, codify, and make sense of new school system strategies and capabilities that emerged during the pandemic as well as understand how these shifts could benefit learners and schools in the future. Drawing on the expertise and experiences of over 30 districts, charter management organizations, and field leaders, we explored how new strengths built through the crisis might accelerate current efforts and offered six “launch points” for sustained, equity-oriented progress into the future.

These six launch points have served as an organizing agenda for our work over the last year, and we’re tackling topics ranging from measuring and responding to unfinished learning, to selecting, implementing, and evaluating equitable edtech materials, to holistically supporting wellbeing and retention, to capturing and offering concrete teaching and learning strategies that help to personalize and accelerate learning. Across all of them, our overarching goal is to help educators — from the classroom to the boardroom — advance towards helping every student meet their full and unique potential.

In this blog series, I want to share lessons we’re learning from one specific launch point, which is how leaders might leverage emergent virtual learning capabilities and approaches to enable new experiences and outcomes. We saw that making good on this opportunity would require additional collective work: K-12 leaders would need a better understanding of these new models, including the existing knowledge base for how to drive quality as well as practices and examples to build from. Systems would need to explore and demonstrate pathways to achieve greater effectiveness and equity in their own contexts.

Read the full article about virtual learning capabilities by Beth Rabbitt at The Learning Accelerator.