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      • Check out some of the examples below of Open Way Learning's work with partner districts, schools, and organizations from around the country...and please consider supporting our work!

        Open Way Learning is a Benevity Certified Nonprofit

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      • A Legacy of Making A Difference!

         

        The above video is a celebration of OWL's 3rd anniversary as an education nonprofit, with educators from around the country sharing how we are making a difference! 

         
        If you have donated to Open Way Learning in the past, thank you so much for your continued support! We are once again able to match up to $10,000 in donations for our current campaign so that we can reach our overall goal of $20,000. And as in previous years, we will continue offering discounted and pro bono services (such as those described to the right) so that we can scale and sustain learner-centered innovation in more schools and districts, especially those that have been historically underfunded or underserved.
         

        Click on the donate button above to help us have an even greater impact!

        How Are Your Donations Used?

         

        In 2022, we provided over $21,000 in discounted and pro bono services that aligned with our mission and vision. This included projects such as...

        • Working with a historically high-poverty district in Eastern North Carolina on ways to integrating Community-Facing Project-Based Learning and Makerspaces across all district schools.
        • Partnering with Google to facilitate a series of design sprints in a Central North Carolina community to help create more equitable pathways for opportunity for all of its residents.
        • Facilitating Virtual Monthly Gatherings as a forum for free networking and professional learning for all participants. These "VMGs" featured national experts and current practitioners on topics such as collective leadership, innovative teaching and learning strategies, creating a living mission & vision, building a learner-centered culture, and more!
        • Working with higher education partners including Appalachian State University and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington to help new service teachers better understand how to use and apply the design process to in their classrooms and schools.
        • Helping create living missions at the school level in North Carolina and at a district level in Los Angeles.
        • Supporting an effort to get students from several schools in the Boston area involved in citizen science related to water conservation and local impacts due to climate change.
      • More Case Studies of Our Work & Impact...

        Sprinting Towards Innovation

        One of Open Way Learning’s primary support tools is facilitation of Design Sprints using the principles of human centered design. Starting with empathy, we help education stakeholders get insight needed to define a problem, ideate and prioritize potential solutions, and then prototype and test ideas with their primary users - in most cases, students. Examples include a sprint to help a California district develop a living mission & vision, a North Carolina district “rethink time” for its calendar and school schedules, a Colorado school develop a learner-centered culture to match its new state-of-the-art facility, and a sprint in a South Carolina district that helped school leaders and teachers bring more student agency across all of their schools.

        Making a Splash with Community-Facing Experiential Learning

        Open Way Learning is proud of our work helping schools bake learner-centered strategies into their culture, especially when they align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One such example is Union Academy in Macon County, NC - a school that has made a commitment to rethinking its "alternative school" model to leverage local assets to address local needs. The school serves students who have faced challenges in traditional settings and is finding tremendous success by using experiential learning as its primary mode of instruction. OWL is facilitating targeted coaching & co-design with teachers and staff as they help students not only work on issues relevant to their own lives, but also make a real difference in their local community and beyond.

        Making STEM Work...for ALL!

        Too often STEM efforts, including makerspaces, can be intimidating for students and teachers not proficient with math, technology, and coding. Open Way Learning works to break down these barriers by helping schools design inviting spaces where creativity, tinkering, and failure are essential components that are integrated into all curricular areas and all students. For example, we hold routine workshops in partnership with the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching to help all teachers embrace a “Strategies That Engage Minds” approach to STEM and makerspaces. This work has led to more intentional Maker Culture work in schools in North Carolina and across the country.

        A Bridge to Deeper Student Engagement & Learning

        Change can be hard, especially if you have never experienced what you are striving for. This is the premise behind Open Way Learning’s work with districts in New England to create “summer bridge” projects that allow teachers and students to work together over the summer to co-design and then facilitate engaging Project Based Learning experiences. By working with partners such as the Cohasset Center for Student Coastal Research, we are able to model change in this lower-stakes environment, thus help stakeholders see what's possible in terms of student engagement and deep learning. By "shrinking the change," we are able to help the, bring authentic projects into their own classrooms and schools.

        Pinch Points to Possibility

        Open Way Learning was one of the sponsoring organizations (along with Transcend, Education Reimagined, HundrED, Next Generation Learning Challenges, PBLWorks, the Prichard Committee, and Student Voice) who led a series of virtual conversations early in the pandemic to share ideas and best practices with colleagues from around the world. This conversations, hosted by Fielding International, created an open forum that would help participants move from “triage to transformation” during the most disruptive event in recent education history. OWL then replicated this effort in North Carolina by partnering with EdNC to facilitate a series of similar webinars that used principles of open design to allow education stakeholders across the state a platform to highlight and address historical inequities in our education systems - ones exacerbated by COVID-19.

        Moving Towards Mastery

        Competency-Based Education (CBE) is a highly effective way to address fundamental inequities with the traditional method of ranking, grading, and tracking students. But it’s not a trivial undertaking to move from a legacy A-F model to one aligned with the core elements of CBE. Open Way Learning has helped schools develop the localized, systems-level supports needed to make this transition possible, including leveraging their CBE expertise in support of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab as they developed and launched an online MOOC focused on "the Why, What, & How" of CBE.

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