Advancing Innovative Models

Robotics is a machine that will build the people who will change the world and our future for the better. On February 27, 2023, 4–5 p.m., join students and educators from Curie HS, IMSA, and Phoenix STEM Military Academy who are passionate about robotics for a conversation.

Please join the Future of Learning Coalition to hear why the time is right for significant innovation, review some of our initiatives, and share our priorities for the future.

Join IDEA for at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield to exemplify the importance of innovative learning. Students from across the state are selected through an application process to present their innovative projects.

In 2021, LUDA published a white paper detailing the experiences and lessons learned from seven CBE pilot districts in Illinois.

The Chicago Equity-Centered Innovation Forum (CEIF), launched in the spring of 2021, promotes models of personalized instruction, competency-based approaches, performance assessments, project-based learning, and other emerging innovations that provide promising education frameworks.

At the CEIF Resource Hub, you will find links to webinars and blogs, competency-based education resources, relevant publications and articles, and links to supports for innovative education models.

The LEAP Learning Framework is a research and evidence-based pedagogical framework for personalized learning. This guide includes research and example strategies for implementation that are focused on, led with, and demonstrated by the learner and are connected to career-relevant, real-world skills and opportunities.

Watch an “impact story” of how one Englewood, Chicago school’s transformation to personalized learning with LEAP Innovations positively affected the development and leadership of an eighth grader named Deon.

Watch the “impact story” of how Belmont-Cragin Elementary School, on Chicago’s West Side, successfully shifted its school-wide practice to personalized learning, in partnership with LEAP Innovations.

Watch the “impact story” of Steve McWade, a fifth grade teacher at Lovett Elementary School in Chicago. Throughout eighteen years of teaching, Steve has always seen trust and human connection as the foundation of powerful learning experiences. Working with LEAP, he developed structured ways for building relationships and honed tangible and rigorous tools and practices for helping each and every one of his students advance.

Education has changed very little over the past century. If Rip Van Winkle fell asleep in his math class in 1919 and woke up a hundred years later, he would immediately recognize the structures and routines of the school day. We must seize the disruption of the pandemic to build a new normal that is both more effective and more equitable.

This initiative will create an Illinois high school math badging system as an alternative credentialing mechanism wherein students can certify learning gained through a broad range of sources including coursework, independent study, summer school, and work-based learning.

In June 2022, the Chicago Equity-Centered Innovation Forum (CEIF) hosted a webinar featuring final products from a spring performance-based assessment professional development for CPS competency-based education teachers.

Leaders from Chicago Public Schools and Education Systems Center at NIU share how Competency-Based Education (CBE) CPS high school teachers developed and implemented academic performance tasks that integrate social-emotional learning.