BetterLesson Partners with Tennessee Department of Education Bring Personalized Learning to Math Instruction
Tennessee Department of Education and BetterLesson have recently agreed to a partnership to support 53 high school teachers across the state to develop their capacity to bring blended and personalized learning strategies to their students in the 2016-17 school year.
The partnership will be driven by Personalized PD, BetterLesson’s innovative professional development platform. Teachers from 35 schools convened in Nashville on July 11-13, where they were trained on Canvas, a learning management system that will serve as the home base for all student work and curricular materials. Teachers will work with BetterLesson’s expert blended learning coaches to design the new systems and structures they will implement in the coming school year. Teachers in the pilot project will receive ongoing support throughout the 2016-17 school year from BetterLesson’s coaches as they implement this new teaching model.
“One of the driving goals for the Department’s work is supporting districts and schools to meet the unique needs of each and every Tennessee student,” Deputy Commissioner Kathleen Airhart said. “This pilot is an opportunity for Tennessee teachers to explore tools that can help them individualize their instruction, something that is particularly challenging in high school.”
Jeff Liberty, Vice President of Personalized Learning at BetterLesson, described the partnership with the Tennessee DOE in this way: “We are thrilled to support the Department’s blended learning initiative in Algebra, a content area that is critical to students’ future success and a particular strength of our very experienced coaching team.”
The goal of the pilot is to assess if personalized learning is able to: mitigate the achievement gap in Algebra I and Integrated Math I; influence teacher instruction leading to positive impacts on student scores and on The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS); and increase student engagement. The data collected from this pilot will be used to inform the Tennessee DOE on future personalized learning policy and programmatic selections.
BetterLesson asserted itself as a leader in the blended and personalized learning space with the launch of its Blended Master Teacher Project. In 2014, the company partnered with The Learning Accelerator to showcase the practices of expert blended learning teachers nationwide. The Project’s free online content uses videos and teacher artifacts to demonstrate how each strategy was developed and implemented. Each year BetterLesson’s PersonalizedPD coaches support hundreds of teachers across the country to redesign and improve their craft.
