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Our Approach

We believe teachers and students are partners who construct an effective teaching and learning space together. For their shared space to be effective, teachers and students BOTH need:

The appropriate mindset

For students this means understanding:

  • Their role as partners in building the learning space
  • How to move from passive recipients to active partners
  • How to use mistakes as growth opportunities (what many call resilience)

For teachers the appropriate mindset requires understanding:

  • How people learn
  • What makes teaching and learning spaces effective

Knowledge, skills, and resources that align the partners with each other

For students this means having:

  • Clear learning goals
  • Clear paths to those learning goals
  • Strategies for learning, organizing, and integrating new information

For teachers this means having:

  • Sound curriculum and instructional design strategies
  • A variety of evidence based teaching practices they can use well
  • Resources for engaging students in positive challenges
  • Techniques for diagnosing and resolving specific teaching & learning challenges

Appropriate, ongoing, informative evaluation

For students this means having:

  • Useful, meaningful self-assessment tools and strategies
  • Actionable guidance and feedback from their teachers

For teachers this means having reliable ways to assess:

  • Students’ individual and collective learning outcomes
  • Impact of specific instructional activities on learning outcomes.

 

We start by looking for barriers that keep teachers or students from creating effective shared spaces. Then using 9 practical pedagogical principles as our guide, we design, build, and assess resources aimed at reducing or even eliminating those barriers.