Project Documenting Innovative School Practices Gets Needed Update
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 10/26/20
There's
very little that's ordinary about schooling this year, and that's why
the Canopy
Project
has added new schools and new terminology to describe just what
instructional practice looks like these days. The project is intended
to help school leaders understand how education innovation can work
by documenting the practices of innovative schools and sharing it
publicly. Nonprofits the Christensen
Institute
and Transcend
and "dozens" of other contributors are refreshing the
project and updating the contents of the database to make it as
timely as possible.
According
to the organizers, the project now includes:
-
New
data, collected in August and September and covering 144 schools,
including 78 that weren't part of the original project;
-
Inclusion
of new practices, such as "fully remote," "hybrid"
and "fully in-person" instructional modalities;
-
Coverage
of up to five models that are "core" to each school and
information about how long the school has been implementing them;
-
An
interactive portal that allows for searching by geography,
demographics and innovative practice;
-
Addition
of a public contact for each school on its profile page, to allow
people to reach out directly; and
-
More
detailed implementation information, to show readers how each school
has implemented its innovative model.
The
project recently released findings from the new data (with more to
come).
-
Almost
all schools (89 percent) have cited the use of social-emotional
learning, followed by blended learning and project-based learning;
-
A
new practice that has shown up this year is "culture of
anti-racist action," referenced by 60 percent of schools;
-
More
than three-quarters of schools (78 percent) are reporting remote
accommodations for students with disabilities; and nearly seven in
10 (69 percent) are offering virtual enrichment activities;
-
Most
schools are citing fully-remote learning (64 percent), followed by
hybrid (46 percent) and fully in-person (20 percent).
Materials
from the Canopy Schools dataset are openly available on
the project's website.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.