FOR Researchers

Learning environments in the Canopy project represent the seeds of a vibrant movement to reinvent public education as a resilient, equitable system that nurtures the unique potential of every student. This movement needs support to take root, demonstrate efficacy, and spread.

  • Read our 2023 findings on how schools around the country are dreaming and designing equitable, student-centered learning environments.

    Read Reports

  • Dig into our open data files and frameworks, which can make it easier to find and collect information about innovative learning environments.

    Use data

  • Share the Canopy data with colleagues interested in researching innovative learning environments.

    Share Findings

Recommendations

Education researchers play a critical role. Researchers should:

  • Design studies that build evidence for the impacts of innovative learning models, especially on students who have been marginalized. Since four in five Canopy schools are designing to meet marginalized students’ needs, finding and elevating approaches that work should be an urgent priority for researchers in the next five years. 

  • When doing so, involve schools in defining the outcomes they are aiming for. Canopy schools have a wide range of outcomes in mind—well beyond traditional metrics. Help them develop a range of measures to formatively evaluate progress toward those outcomes. 

  • Partner with schools to develop and refine measurement tools that go beyond traditional metrics. Many Canopy schools are hamstrung in their abilities to assess and demonstrate impact in areas other than academic proficiency, and want to learn more about assessments for social-emotional skills and deeper learning.

  • Describe more precisely the emerging innovative practices that schools are developing. Continually updating our collective understanding of patterns in the K–12 innovation landscape requires conceptual clarity around practices that are still emerging. Partnering with practitioners to describe and categorize new approaches will have added power when researchers utilize field-wide taxonomies, like the Canopy tagging system, for sharing information across organizations and projects. 

Interested in discussing these recommendations?

Photos by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages