Dear Friends,
The country continues to make great progress implementing blended learning, and the examples are becoming increasingly tangible and exciting. Several weeks ago we visited a classroom in Los Angeles, part of a school located in a neighborhood that is really struggling: bars in many windows and barbed wire on the tops of fences. But we were thrilled by what we saw in this classroom:
- Students were having the kind of learning experience we want to create for kids all across America: personalized, competency-based, and using real-time data.
- The classroom had the technology infrastructure required to enable this experience for every student: sufficient Internet connectivity, devices, and software.
- The teacher had the support he needed to thrive in this environment, so his students could thrive.
- There were no inherent barriers to nationwide scale. Any classroom in the country could implement this approach if they chose to.
This is a snapshot of the kind of impact TLA is trying to catalyze across the country, and we are starting to have dramatic success. We have raised $15M to date, and mobilized much more, to enable blended learning at scale. While we still have much to do to finish the job, we are now starting to shift our focus to the specifics of what happens in the classroom: How exactly do the student, the teacher, the learning content, and the data interact to personalize learning and make it competency-based?
As more schools have Internet connectivity, devices, resources for teachers, communications tools, and other key enablers for blended learning, we will start to see more examples like the one we found in Los Angeles: exciting, effective changes in teaching and learning for America's kids. Great progress, and much more to come in the months ahead!
As always, we appreciate your support and partnership, which help to make all this possible. Below are a few highlights of our recent work.