Teach time management: Challenge students to use their time to do what matters most to them by using lesson plans like
this one from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Provide opportunities for students to work on skills that teach collaboration and teamwork – two skillsets required for their future success in career and life.

Create internship programs with local businesses or organizations, such as Chamber of Commerce. Work with business partners to embed on-the-job projects and scenarios into curricular pathways.

Set up a process for students to annually engage in capstone projects focused on real-world issues. Have each student reflect and apply several key ideas they have learned in the classroom throughout the year to their projects.

Create prep time for teachers to collaborate across subject areas to develop key multidisciplinary projects and assignments that show how subjects are connected to each other, and to real life.

Provide students with opportunities to become more comfortable with discomfort.

Using MyNexMove.org, have students explore career options. Have the students make connections between what they learned, and the careers they are most interested in.

Challenge students to learn something new. Develop a space within classrooms to celebrate and reflect on the failures and successes in learning something new.
This is a great opportunity to focus on and practice effort-based learning and disrupt fixed mindset habits.

Redesign and commit to a schoolwide framework and curriculum that uses Project Based Learning and/or cross-curricular experiences for all students.

Livingston is a large, diverse school in California’s Central Valley. After working with Inflexion to define their maxims, they reinforced them everywhere. Here are ideas and tactics for making yours actionable, so student outcomes improve.

Plan a film or arts festival to showcase students’ creativity and original work. Consider developing the projects in a core class that most students participate in.

Ask students essential questions. This activity is a great way to learn more about your students, while fostering a sense of self-reflection. These questions revolve around the learner’s identity, and can set a tone in your classroom emphasizing self-knowledge as the ultimate goal of learning.

Give students the opportunity in classrooms, or a common area, to identify a current challenge (either in or out of school), and have them connect two things they have learned in the last week in their classes to the challenge.

Identify a THINK framework, such as design thinking, to set up as a foundational backbone that can be embedded every period, every day throughout your school. Check out Waipahu High School in Hawaii for examples.

Create CTE or career pathways schoolwide so that every student experiences project-based learning throughout their school experience. Check out Valley High School in Santa Anna California for a success story.

Have teachers in a specific grade, subject, or PLC focus on embedding THINK skills or behaviors in their lesson planning for the next 6 months to a year. Have them share what changed with the community.

Create grade-level projects or capstones that give students the opportunity to do hands-on work in the community. These can be set up as projects students choose on their own, or opportunities set up through community partnerships with organizations like Habitat for Humanity or a local community center.

Plan and implement a school-wide or whole grade maker event, science fair, or entrepreneur day and have students develop projects for the event in a specific course. Shark Tank Events is one example and Scholastic has free lesson plans to support teachers.

Include divergent thinking strategies in your lesson plans using instructional strategies. Divergent thinking is the process of generating multiple ideas to maximize the range of possible solutions, applications and examples.

Discuss with your leaders about how better understanding each person’s strengths can create more distributed and inclusive leadership practices. Identify three behaviors or habits you can do as a team to make sure you lead in ways that use everyone’s strengths and distributes leadership to every member on the team.

This activity will help you examine your leadership team makeup, decision-making practices and protocols, as well as communication strategies.

This activity, designed for the leadership team, will help you learn strategies using the Four Keys framework .– THINK, KNOW, ACT, GO – to align instructional programs with the 21st Century skills students need to be prepared for their futures.

Facilitate the Future Ready Protocol with all your key stakeholder groups to assist you in developing a shared understanding of the need for a holistic vision for student readiness.