Education Week - October 19, 2016 - 16

Educational Innovation and Evaluation

Q&A
With Andrew Calkins

Next Generation Learning
Challenges

PHOTO BY
GRETCHEN ERTL FOR
EDUCATION WEEK

Andrew Calkins, the deputy
director of the Next
Generation Learning
Challenges, has seen a wide
variety of personalized
learning approaches in
schools around the country.

BY MICHELLE R. DAVIS
evamping the way a whole school
or district meets students' needs
requires changing the mindset of
educators and experimenting with
new approaches that may or may
not work.
Over the past four years, the sixyear-old Next Generation Learning Challenges grant program has poured millions of
dollars into K-12 school models that use technology,
personalized learning, and new forms of assessment
in an attempt to overhaul the traditional educational
process.
Underwritten by organizations including the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation and The William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, and overseen by education
nonprofit EDUCAUSE, the Learning Challenges grant
has awarded $40 million directly or through partners
to 130 schools, districts, and organizations looking to
overhaul and disrupt traditional models to boost college readiness and completion, said Andrew Calkins,
the deputy director of the learning challenges grant
program. (The Gates Foundation provides support for
coverage in Education Week of college- and careerready standards and the use of personalized learning.)
During that time, grant officials have learned a lot
about the challenges, tools, and strategies needed to implement those innovative learning models and evaluate
their success. In June, the organization released a report,
"Measures That Matter Most," which took a closer look
at how Next-Gen educators gauge their success.
Calkins spoke with Education Week about the evolution of grantees' efforts. The interview has been
edited for brevity and clarity.

What is the goal of the Next Generation Learning
Challenges?
[Our grants] are intended to surface people, organizations, and schools trying to rethink the entire thing: the
nature of learning models, the definitions of student success, the organization and budget models necessary to drive
the learning models. It's a little different from just thinking
of personalized learning-it's part of a bigger opportunity to reimagine the entire experience students have in
public schools. Personalized learning is a big part of it, but
Next-Gen learning incorporates aspects of what is gradually
coming to be thought of as personalized learning, as well
as competency-based learning, blended or technology-enabled learning, and experiential learning all pitched around
these richer, deeper definitions of student success.

What trends are you seeing around personalized
learning and the role it's playing in pushing the entire
Next-Gen model forward?
Districts and schools are working on learner profiles in
lots of different ways and figuring out how they can know
each student better than they have in the past. Some of
those efforts are technology-fueled, and some start as early
as kindergarten. There's the development of individualizedlearning pathways for students, going as fast as they can or
as slow as they need. They're doing this through a mixture
of learning modalities, sometimes using individual diagnostic prescriptive software or involving some team-based
project work, peer-to-peer tutoring, direct instruction in
small groups-a whole set of different kinds of experiences.
Almost all of them are doing some form of competencybased student progression. Students are not all proceeding
as a cohort in lock step.

How are schools measuring student progress with
these new strategies?
All of our models are deeply immersed in experimenting around assessment design. Some are the classic ones
that we all recognize as tests, but making them part of a
much more comprehensive multimodal set of approaches
designed to generate a much more nuanced view of what
students need and how well they're progressing and how
they themselves can use the assessment measurement data
to fuel and inform their own learning.

So how can these Next-Gen assessments home in on
how much an individual student is learning, especially
if that student is on a personalized learning path?
A whole bucket of [the assessments] belong to the
category of performance-based assessment. A student's
demonstration of progress or competency happens in the
presentation of their work product. Sometimes, that happens in an exhibition or an oral presentation that often
includes some form of written work. Sometimes, that

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Education Week * October 19, 2016
Education Week - October 19, 2016

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