Colleagues and friends:

As I shared in a recent newsletter, the TLA team has been working over the last six months to take stock of progress and look forward to the future. Weaving together feedback, planning insights, and lessons learned, the team has been setting goals for the future. As we kick off the new year, we’re putting this evolved plan into place. I’m excited to share where we’re headed in our five-year plan with this 10-minute video update. 

Over the next few months, we’ll be sending more updates on specific projects and our learning agenda, as well as about the impact we’re celebrating a decade in. In the spirit of offering the big headlines, here are our four big commitments for 2023 and beyond. 

1. Advance a vision for equitable, effective, and engaging learning — for students and the sector — and ensure decision-makers and practitioners can act upon it. Powerful, research-informed learning is personalized to the uniqueness of the student, focused on mastery-based outcomes and progress, and comprehensively developing. We’re continuing to make that vision — and the knowledge that exists for enacting the practices and conditions needed to achieve it — actionable and openly accessible for decision-makers, communities, and organizations across the nation.
2. Address persistent challenges to collective learning and action. Most of the solutions that we need exist in the knowledge and capacity of the thousands of organizations already tackling the development of new approaches. But our sector’s work is hampered by a lack of collective understanding, resource inequities, fragmentation, and over-emphasis on single-point solutions. Broader, sustained (and equitably distributed) progress demands coherent, coordinated collective investment, action, and knowledge-sharing across a complex ecosystem. Overcoming these shared 'learning challenges' to accelerate learning across the sector is TLA’s unique role and purpose.
3. Harness the ‘urgent’ to realize the transformational. Education leaders are navigating what feel like competing priorities across multiple time horizons. Through our learning agenda, our team will help leaders link urgent needs and initiatives to the demands of the proximate and future, building bridges between educators and the knowledge, tools, and networks they need to move forward in the 'now' but doing so in ways that put our educational systems on a pathway towards more resilient and equitable change. For those ready to leap forward, we’ll be working alongside to catalyze the closure of gaps in knowledge, resources, and action as well as provide foresight for the challenges ahead.
4. Lead and contribute in partnership. Too often, education organizations are asked how their work will uniquely 'scale' to transform K-12 learning. True system change will require many organizations to work in complementary ways to achieve this goal. Further, it will require listening and collaborating humbly with those closest to the challenges we’re trying to solve. Given this, we’re focusing on maximizing partnership and getting great at cooperation, offering expertise and distinct learning and intermediary services we’ve honed over the years in the form of research and measurement, network development and facilitation, insight and knowledge capture and codification, and landscape assessment and program strategy and support. By bringing our skills to the table — with a commitment to learning proximately and making all knowledge universally accessible — we’re leaning in hard as a partner to aligned organizations in this next phase of work.

Thank you in advance for holding us true to these commitments and for leaning in with us! If you’ve read this far or gotten a chance to check out the video, please shoot me a line with feedback or thoughts. Better yet, let us know how we can work together to accelerate individual, organizational, and sector learning to ensure every child gets the engaging, effective, and equitable education they need to reach their full and unique potential. We’re so excited to partner with you in our next chapter.

With gratitude for your partnership,

Beth Rabbitt

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