When high-quality teaching is infused with the dynamic use of technology, personalized student learning becomes possible.
The Future Ready Framework is designed to set out a roadmap to achieve that success and to commit districts to move as quickly as possible towards a shared vision of preparing students for success in college, career, and citizenship. This roadmap can only be accomplished through a systemic approach to change, as outlined in the Future Ready Framework. With personalized student learning at the center, a district must align each of the seven (7) key categories, called “Gears”, in order to ensure a successful digital conversion.
The outside rings of the framework emphasize the need for collaborative leadership and the cycle of transformation where districts vision, plan, implement and assess continually.
#1 – Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
In a Future Ready district, curriculum, instruction, and assessment are tightly aligned, redesigned to engage students in the 21st Century, personalized, technology-enabled, deeper learning. Curricula and instruction are standards-aligned, research-based, and enriched through authentic, real-world problem-solving.
Students and teachers have robust and adaptive tools to customize the learning, teaching, and assessment, ensuring that it is student-centered and emphasizing a deep understanding of complex issues. Data and associated analysis serve as building blocks for learning that is personalized, individualized, and differentiated to ensure all learners succeed.
#2 – Personalized and Professional Learning
In Future Ready Schools, technology and digital learning expand access to high-quality, ongoing, job-embedded opportunities for professional learning for teachers, administrators, and other education professionals. Such opportunities ultimately lead to improvements in student success and create a broader understanding of the skills that comprise success in a digital age.
Digital Professional learning communities, peer-to-peer lesson sharing, and better use of data and formative assessment, combined with less emphasis on “sit and get” professional development sessions eliminate the confines of geography and time.
#3 – Budget and Resources
The transition to digital learning will require strategic short-term and long-term budgeting and leveraging of resources. All budgets at the district and the school should be aligned to the new, personalized vision for learning, with consistent funding streams for both recurring and non-recurring costs to ensure sustainability. During the transition, district leaders should strive for cost-savings and efficiencies through effective uses of technology.
#4 – Community Partnerships
Community partnerships include formal and informal local and global community connections, collaborative projects, and relationships that advance the school’s learning goals. Digital
communications, online communities, social media, and digital learning environments often serve as connectors for these partnerships.
#5 – Data and Privacy
Data privacy and security are foundational elements of digital learning. The district ensures that sound data governance policies are enacted and enforced to ensure the privacy, safety, and security of confidential data sets. Such policies and procedures ensure that access to authorized persons is secure. Education professionals have a range of resources, training, and services available to build their awareness and capacity to implement such policies and procedures with precision.
A personalized, learner-centered environment uses technology to collect, analyze, and organize data to provide continuous cycles of feedback to students, teachers, and other education professionals, with the intent of increasing the depth, breadth, complexity, and efficiency of learning. All policies and practices ensure student data privacy.
#6 – Robust Infrastructure
When employed as part of a comprehensive educational strategy, the effective use of technology provides tools, resources, data, and supportive systems that increase teaching opportunities and promote efficiency.
Such robust environments enable anytime, anywhere learning based on competency and mastery with empowered, caring adults who are guiding the way for each student to succeed. High quality, high-speed technology, and infrastructure systems within a school district are essential to the advancing of digital learning. In these environments, the use of technology is seamless, and students have ubiquitous access to broadband on high-quality devices both at school and while they are at home.
#7 – Use of Space and Time
Personalized learning requires changes in the way instructional time is used and the learning space is designed. Many schools are shifting away from Carnegie units to competency-based learning. This type of system adapts learning to meet the needs, pace, interests, and preferences of the learner. As the pedagogy shifts, so too must the learning space.
This transition is made possible through innovative uses of technology for diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments, for managing learning, for engaging students in learning, and for providing anywhere, anytime learning. Such transitions required districts to rethink and more effectively leverage the use of instructional time and space.