Giving Thanks to Leaders of the Personalized Learning Effort

This year, at iNACOL’s annual conference on blended and online learning, we were honored to host and celebrate the launch of Michael Horn’s and Heather Staker’s book, “Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools.” For a special edition of the book, they allowed me to write a preface focused on how superintendents should think about blended learning, and I’m grateful for that. If you didn’t make it to the book launch party in Palm Springs, you missed some good fun, but don’t worry, you can still get a copy of the preface here. Both Michael and Heather are two amazing people who truly care about innovation in education. I’m thankful for the work they do to provide thought leadership in making blended learning and innovation a way of life for all educators and students.

We work with hundreds of schools across the country helping districts implement personalized learning with technology. In every case, the districts doing it right understand it’s a people effort and culture matters. In the preface, I talk about some of the reasons why personalized learning should be a high priority for every district: 1) workforce development, 2) better schools to drive the local economy, and 3) students become productive citizens.

I’m personally grateful for the professional and personal relationships I’ve developed over the years with district leaders across the country. With every meeting I have with them I better understand obstacles and opportunities they face as well as learn from them as formidable leaders in the field.

I’m particularly thankful for some of the district leaders who really pushed my thinking this year:

• Middletown Enlarged City School District, Ken Eastwood, Superintendent

• Horry County Schools, Cindy Elsberry, Superintendent

• DC Public School, David Rose, Deputy Chief of Education Technology

• Newark Public Schools, Cami Anderson, Superintendent

• Uinta Public Schools, James Bailey, Superintendent

• Piedmont City Schools, Matt Akin, Superintendent

• Yuma School District One, Darwin Stiffler, Superintendent

• Fulton County Schools, Scott Muri, Deputy Superintendent

I’m excited, thankful, and anxious about our upcoming new release of Highlight, our personalized learning platform. In this release, we are making data-driven instruction easy for teachers, new to data-driven instruction or veteran, to understand. We are taking large amounts of data from our content partners and assimilating the data using some secret sauce logic to give each teacher a story of what is happening in their classroom every day. No more red, yellow, green reports-- my new motto for this release is “No more stoplights.” It’s about giving teachers information to make it easier for them to determine instructional strategies for each student. We couldn’t do this work without the cooperation of our partners, including but not limited to: Achieve 3000, Curriculum Associates, Mind Research Institute, Dreambox Learning, Compass Learning, Gooru, Imagine Learning, Aleks, Stemscopes, Curriculet, and MyOn. (As a side note, we have some really cool exclusive partners for 2015 we are getting ready to announce. Stay tuned!)

Finally, I couldn’t do this work without an amazing team of people. If you haven’t met our folks, you should. Our whole team is incredibly passionate about personalized learning and how it can change the lives of students and the work of teachers. Our Design and Implementation Consultants are truly highly regarded. Each has extensive experience leading change in schools and districts and has supported hundreds of schools with exemplar school models of innovation. The product and engineering team is uniquely made up of a mix of former educators, software developers pioneering education technology, cloud computing experts, and data scientists who want to make a messy complicated data story understandable for every teacher.

We couldn’t have had the impact we did in 2014 without our partner districts, our edtech partners, and the Education Elements team. I’m proud that we saw 154% growth in reading and 125% growth in math which will help us spread our good work further. (Download the report if you want more details, or just drop me a line to talk more)  Finally, Education Elements thanks our district, school leaders, and teachers who do the hard work and take risks everyday to make learning more engaging and personalized for students.  Excellence is a journey, not a destination.