KnowledgeWorks partners with school districts to deliver the right mix of professional development opportunities focused on growing personalized learning practices for school leaders and staff. All KnowledgeWorks workshops and design labs are designed to help teachers meet each child at their own level with high expectations of academic growth, social-emotional development and student ownership of learning.
We facilitate conversations, work alongside teachers to scale student-centered approaches and model the practices of a personalized, competency-based environment in all interactions. And when a design lab or workshop ends, we stay connected and available to give feedback on approaches or provide a different perspective.
Based on a customized work plan and growth goals, KnowledgeWorks professional development design labs and workshops could include:
- Laying the foundation: Using the most recent research on the future of learning and work, practitioners consider why they want to personalized learning, refine their vision for how learning should prepare students and focus on creating a supportive culture and transparent practices.
- Establishing conditions for student agency: District and building leaders and teachers understand and begin to implement foundational elements of personalized learning, including brain literacy, classroom procedures, social-emotional learning and strategies to develop a growth mindset.
- Developing learner-centered practices: Leaders and educators take a deep dive into practices to develop student ownership of learning, from universal design for learning framework and personal learner profiles to student voice and choice.
- Deeper learning: Using the design thinking process, district leaders, principals and teachers develop problem-solving experiences aligned to the curriculum to enable students to practice inquiry, apply learning and personalize how they demonstrate mastery.
- Developing a personalized, competency-based learning system: Based on state standards and national trends, district design teams partner to create a competency-based student learning continuum with identified progressions and learning targets, and develop system-wide implementation strategies including real-time student supports, learning pace and reporting.
