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.

Strong school leadership starts with assembling a team that reflects your school’s values and vision. When you surround yourself with colleagues who are trusted, connected, and deeply invested in the work, you create the foundation for meaningful, schoolwide impact. These aren’t just people with titles—they’re the ones others turn to, who model what it looks like to lead with clarity and purpose. When aligned around a shared vision and given space to lead, they help move the whole community forward.

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.

In education, our purpose often begins with a story. Maybe it was a meaningful interaction, a personal turning point, or a moment that sparked something deeper. That initial sense of purpose is what draws many into this work. It also helps us lead with clarity, consistency, and heart.

Here’s how student self-reflection at Savanna High School helped launch a new learning culture throughout AUSHD and became a new model for the district to benchmark how well students are gaining key skills.

School administrators are coping with fires, storms, and floods on top of the deep disruption from COVID-19. Here are advice and resources from educators Tim Taylor (Executive Director, SSDA), Casey Taylor (Executive Director, Achieve Center), and Mike Walsh (Director-at-Large, CCBE) on how to manage a school community following a disaster based on their experience from the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, CA.

This chart lists high-yield instructional strategies, what the research says about them, and how to implement them in classrooms. The information has been adapted from Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement by Robert Marzano.

Through its work with Inflexion, MUHSD is seeing strong results in student outcomes and in closing the opportunity gap for underserved students. California School Dashboard data show College/Career Indicator scores for African American, Hispanic, English Learners, students with disabilities, students who are homeless, and students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged are 16 to 29 points higher than the state average.

Over the course of the 2016-2017 school year the leadership team at Ocean View High School decided to take a step back and, specifically looking at their student outcomes, evaluate whether or not they were striving toward a holistic definition of student readiness.