Transition to 21st Century Learning

Thinking skills for the 21st century include collaboration, innovative problem-solving, and entrepreneurship. How can we equip the next generation of teachers, school principals, and education leaders for the education transition?

Inspired by the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Transition to Learning for the 21st Century Fellows Program (TL21) provides education graduate students and Ed school faculty with a platform to engage in the education transition within their contexts and constraints. By supporting them with adaptive leadership tools, they can attempt to navigate the intellectual, cultural, and political shifts in order to usher in 21st-century learning to their own schools and education systems.

The TL21 Fellowship is a community for individuals seeking to cultivate transformative change in educational institutions. We will go beyond the usual managerial approaches such as strategic planning and organizational development and engage in the difficult deeper conversations about the often-hidden structural challenges and organizational biases and how to address them.

In this community, we’ll work through common obstacles and political dynamics. This is dynamic, ambiguous, and often exhausting work, and we'll labor as a community in order to renew ourselves and learn from each other.

Who is it for?

This Fellowship is for educators and academic leaders/administrators who want to engage in the work of leading transformative change in the educational system. Working in the area of confronting biases and reimagining the mental models in the educational system requires a time and space for reflection, and this Fellowship aims to organize and support a community of advocates willing to take on this work individually and collectively.

How does it work?

The TL21 Fellowship has three elements:

1. Biweekly Discussions: The ongoing asynchronous discussions are an important way deepening our diagnosis of how our systems are reacting to our interventions. This is the place to take a step back from the fray and discern patterns of behavior that reflect the institutional dynamics that we are in. These conversations will happen through an online message board where Fellows can type in their thoughts and have peer-to-peer exchanges at their own convenience. There will also be regular Zoom conversations among small groups of six, as well as the entire cohort of up to 60 Fellows. Recordings of the Zoom conversations will be made available to Fellows.

2. Adaptive Change Prompts: Biweekly discussions and the collective conversations will be cultivated along seven categories (mindsets, narratives, thinking politically, teacher and student engagement, tensions, tactics, balcony views). With the Adaptive Change Prompts, we’ll help you diagnose the social and organizational systems of your organization and deploy your influence using techniques drawn from adaptive leadership.

3. Community Learning: Throughout the program, you will have the support of peers who will challenge you to go further and dig deeper. There will be activities for Fellows to gather online, share insights, and help renew each other. The heart of this Fellowship comes from connecting with your peers. Its spirit comes alive when Fellows support each other on this journey.

What is the time commitment?

The duration of the TL21 Fellowship is 11 months.

The commitment we’re asking for is that you do your best to deploy your changemaker interventions at least twice a week. Most of these changemaker interventions will be in the form of nudges - thoughtful, often low intensity, and frequent interjections in your various arenas. Transformative change happens bit by bit and often results in subtle emergent changes. We hope that you get to spend 1-2 hours per week on your social transformation project, mostly by reflecting on and diagnosing the systems that you are in (including yourself), as well as interventions that you deploy in the classroom, faculty meetings, or other spaces in the academy. We’ve built a place for you to share your experiences and to give and get advice on your ongoing work.

What technology is required?

• Computer - Desktop or laptop

• Internet access

• Discourse - This digital platform serves as our 24/7 discussion board and learning portal. It’s where you will find all the prompts, post your work and engage with your peers.

• Zoom - We'll be using Zoom to participate in live biweekly conversations.

• Camera and microphone - To participate in the Zoom calls we encourage you to have both a mic and a camera.