Advisory Board: Advancing the Learner-Centered Vision

The Advisory Board is a coalition of leaders committed to the spread and growth of learner-centered education across the country.

In April 2013, Convergence, a national non-profit that convenes sustained dialogues among leaders, doers, and thinkers with conflicting views to create breakthrough solutions on issues of national concern, brought us together in Washington, DC to reimagine education. We were a group of 28 ideologically diverse actors in education. No two of us held the same view of how to fix the current system. What we did share, however, was a fundamental commitment for all children to love learning and thrive regardless of their circumstances. We knew it was time to stop debating how to fix the system and start imagining a new one.

Through six two-day meetings over 18 months, we engaged in a dialogic and challenging process to reimagine education. Working with highly skilled facilitators, we went to work to:

• Create a shared, powerful vision of extraordinary education for the next
  generations of American children;
• Map key pathways to realize this vision;
• Define the essential actions and actors needed to begin moving forward; and
• Launch a partnership of leaders committed to realizing this vision together.

After the meetings concluded, we came to an agreement that the current system’s one-to-many approach to teaching, standardized curriculum, age-based cohorts, and classroom-contained instruction were all limitations on our children’s opportunities to learn and thrive in this changing world.

We saw that it is not enough to continually measure, tweak, and improve the system bit by bit. Such adjustments will not ultimately produce the results we want because they iterate a system fundamentally structured for standardization. In order to fulfill the purpose of education for all children and create extraordinary learning for each and every child, we agreed that our system must be entirely transformed.

Over the next nine months, “A Transformational Vision for Education in the U.S.” was shared among friends and colleagues while the purpose and design of Education Reimagined was developed—culminating in the vision and Education Reimagined officially going public in fall 2015.

Today, the Advisory Board serves as partners in leadership advancing the learner-centered vision. To learn more about our Advisory Board members, head on over to our About page.