Advice: Establish a statewide vision and plan

Overview

As schools across the country innovate and shift to blended and personalized learning, changes are occurring at almost every level of instruction and district management. The impacts are felt at the classroom level with new instructional practices and materials, changes in classroom and school management, and in some instances revised school staffing models. School and district technology infrastructure need to be enhanced as do educator training and support. The larger community must also understand the reasons and benefits for the change in practice.

State and local funding and policy frameworks need to be revised to support these myriad changes. Statewide success in large part relies on education leaders embarking on comprehensive and strategic planning for the shift to blended learning. Several states have already developed such planning processes and in some cases have already published and are working from comprehensive strategic plans.

The Friday Institute developed a Digital Learning Plan for the state of North Carolina that presents a long-term strategy for setting priorities and identifying resources to support innovation. Delaware released Student Success 2025, which is a student-centered, 10-year plan produced by the Vision Coalition and developed from the input of 4,000 Delawareans, including 1,300 Delaware students and recent graduates. The plan contains multiple recommendations including those that revolve around Personalized Learning.

Rhode Island developed and implemented a design-based, community-based, crowd-sourced strategic plan for public education. The Rhode Island Department of Education captured and shared the narrative, process, and key materials used in their process on a free website for others to use.