The Louisiana Department of Education announced Thursday a new workgroup that will seek solutions to problems deemed classroom disruptions.

“One of the best ways we can value teaching professionals is by simply protecting their time to do the important work entrusted to them,” Cade Brumley, state superintendent of education, said in the news release.

The department announced the Let Teachers Teach workgroup to find solutions to certain problems that take up teachers’ time. The news release specifically listed excessive training and paperwork, scripted lessons and student discipline as some of the problems they plan to address with the workgroup.

The goal of the workgroup is to limit these disruptions so that teachers have more time to devote to classroom instruction.

The group will be made up of pre-kindergarten through high school teachers, but its members have not been chosen yet. Kylie Altier, Louisiana’s 2024 Teacher of the Year and a first-grade instructor in Baton Rouge, was named chair of the workgroup.

The workgroup was formed based on feedback Brumley received through engagement, including classroom visits and the Teacher Advisory Council, a group of 22 classroom leaders from throughout the state.

The goals of the workgroup align with recommendations from one of Gov. Jeff Landry’s transition councils. The K-12 Education Policy Council , released last month, highlighted several issues, including teacher recruitment and retention.

The report recommends legislative action to reduce time-consuming mandates and “examine unnecessary licensure burden… understanding that professional experiences can be more valuable than licensure processes in many cases.”

Students’ learning needs are enormous, with showing they’re making gains, but not fast enough to close gaps associated with the pandemic in a timely way. And student well-being, which directly affects academics, is in crisis: More than 44% of high schoolers feeling persistently sad or hopeless over the past year.

The picture is bleak for teachers, too. Some schools face high levels of , meaning teachers will continue to have to cover other classes, staff bus lines and monitor lunchrooms rather than giving struggling students extra help and working on lesson plans. 

Given these extraordinary circumstances, a return to traditional methods of teaching and anything resembling a one-size-fits-all approach just won’t work for many school communities. Students who’ve lost ground will stay behind, as will those who continue to miss class. 

While in-person teaching is essential, it needs a refresh. Kids no longer need to spend the bulk of their class time listening to teachers talk from the front of the room and passively taking notes or answering questions. Instead, teachers can more effectively use whole-group instruction, reserving it for things like rich class discussions, and can replace routine lectures with short video lessons they create and pair with assignments. Students can then work at their own pace, while teachers address kids’ needs individually and in small groups.

I made this change, toward differentiated, mastery-based learning, which more schools are trying, when I was a math teacher at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C. Today, I train teachers to redesign their classrooms by replacing live lectures with their own instructional videos, letting students work at their own pace and assessing them based on mastery. It isn’t a model that is tied to a particular grade level, content area or curriculum; any teacher can do it anywhere. 

The challenges I faced, though pre-pandemic, were somewhat similar to those that educators grapple with today. I was teaching traditionally, and students were tuned out. Some found my lectures too slow, while others couldn’t keep up. I had no time to work one-on-one with students and get to know them, and many kids missed class because of responsibilities and challenges outside of school. 

Thankfully I had a colleague who used innovative methods and helped me transform my instruction to respond to student needs. Today’s teachers are even more prepared than I was to try something like this. Schools have new technology tools, and students and teachers have new digital skills. Educators and school leaders are open to and excited about innovative approaches that personalize instruction and help students keep up when they are out of school. This can look a little different across subjects and grades. For example, young students should get more structure than older students, their videos should be shorter and they should spend less time working on their own.

In , students came to appreciate moving through the content, toward mastery, more independently. This approach freed me up to help them — a kind of personalized instruction I couldn’t offer before. If there were 10 lessons to complete over three weeks, students worked on them at a pace that was right for them. I could assess them and intervene when necessary. Struggling students always got extra support, while those moving at a quicker pace could deepen their learning and work on extension lessons, getting the kind of educational experience they deserved. 

All students could access the video-based lessons at any time, which was particularly helpful for those who were absent or wanted to press pause and rewind. Overall, my students were happier and felt more supported, and I was less stressed and found my passion for teaching again.

Changes I noticed immediately in my classroom included an improvement in attendance and engagement. One student who rarely came to class started showing up almost every day. He knew he could pick up where he left off without feeling embarrassed, but he also knew I wasn’t going to let him slip through the cracks. He approached me one afternoon and said, “Mr. Farah, I can’t finesse your class anymore.” 

More recently, I was visiting a sixth-grade English language arts teacher’s classroom, delivering training on this approach, and one boy, an emerging bilingual learner, whispered to me that it was the first time he was able to comfortably ask his teacher for help. 

It’s urgent that leaders and policymakers take this moment to listen to students and trust teachers to create new and better learning environments. In doing so, the nation just might emerge from this crisis with schools that meet the needs of diverse learners and empower all kids to reach their full potential. 

But plenty of the challenges schools are tackling have long predated COVID. Indeed, schools are not just facing the need to recover from the pandemic — they must that was never designed to provide high-quality learning opportunities for every student.

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Fortunately, a diverse array of communities are working to reinvent schooling in pursuit of their visions for thriving young people and families. The learning environments they’re designing and redesigning don’t all look the same — in fact, far from it. But what they have in common is challenging key assumptions about schooling to create more equitable, joyful, and responsive learning environments that reflect community values and priorities.

Many of these learning environments are featured in the , a nationwide effort lifting up knowledge from hundreds of organizations to build open data about schools that are innovating. Originally founded at the , the Canopy is now stewarded by the Center on Reinventing Public Education and , and is fueled by participation from hundreds of organizations and schools.

The project’s existing dataset documents innovative practices in 232 schools, many of which had a track record of innovating even pre-pandemic. The rates at which schools report various unconventional practices clearly show that they are challenging a range of assumptions about what school is and should be.

Here are five of the big assumptions being challenged by Canopy innovators:

1.Learning Must Happen on a School Campus

First is the assumption that learning must happen inside school walls. For instance, in Michigan, the in Tacoma, Washington, and in Melbourne, Florida, anchor students’ learning experiences in local institutions like museums and zoos. They are the vanguards of more flexible systems that blend schools with community institutions to create rich learning opportunities.

2.Virtual Learning Is Subpar 

Second is the notion that virtual learning is inherently inferior. , for example, is a virtual program that students in Washtenaw County, Michigan, can enroll in as an alternative to their home districts. In the school’s interdisciplinary, project-based, “enriched virtual” approach, students join in-person meetings and workshops a couple days a week. This allows them to build relationships and get direct support, while experiencing greater flexibility and autonomy. Virtual learning programs like these are valiantly challenging the short-sighted conviction that just because fully in-person learning is best for most students, it should be mandated for all students. These programs are also showing that students and families who value more time at home or more flexibility in how they spend their days don’t have to give up face-to-face contact with classmates or caring adults.

3. Equity = ‘Achievement Gap’

Third is the assumption that equity just means closing the academic achievement gap. In fact, half of Canopy school leaders shared in surveys that one of their school’s reasons for innovating was to counteract inequities hard-wired into systems. , for example, aims to close the wealth gap for Black students in four communities around the country, and works to ensure that students graduate with a college acceptance in one hand and an offer for a job with growth potential in the other. And , a laboratory public charter school in Kaneohe, Hawaii, immerses students in the Hawaiian language as part of its mission to create a culturally responsive learning environment.

4.Academics Are Distinct From Social-Emotional Supports

Fourth is the assumption that academic learning can be separated from whole-child supports. Among schools in the Canopy database, 71% report integrating social and emotional learning throughout the curriculum. At , for example, educators teach mindfulness practices and use trauma-informed techniques to nurture students’ critical thinking and disrupt the traditional narrative about rigor and high expectations as the main ways to drive academic learning. And , in rural Oklahoma, has worked with community partners to provide telehealth services for students who lack access or would otherwise have to miss school for an appointment. These schools and many others are embracing the showing that learning depends on other critical building blocks of wellness and social and emotional development.

5. Passions Are For Electives (or Afterschool)

Fifth is the assumption that extracurriculars and electives are the only appropriate place for students to explore their personal interests and passions. For instance, all students at schools in the Big Picture Learning network pursue internships based on interests they want to explore. These internships aren’t extras—they’re a core part of every student’s learning experience and contribute to graduation requirements. and , two Big Picture schools in Washington State, were important advocates for the state’s first credit waiver program, which enabled the schools to award credit for internships instead of the number of hours students spent in a class. Other schools are building on lessons they learned during the pandemic about how to engage students around their interests and passions: , in North Carolina, is building a new curriculum and schedule in which part of the school day is dedicated to interest-driven projects.

What’s Next for the Canopy Project

Studying schools like these is critical because a myopic focus on COVID recovery will fail to address the fundamental inequities and outdated assumptions that are baked into the K–12 system. As CRPE and Transcend guide the Canopy project forward, we hope these innovative learning environments can demonstrate what’s possible in a sector struggling with exhaustion, burnout, and a long road ahead to deliver on public education’s promise to every American student.

We plan to update and expand the Canopy dataset to feature information about innovative learning environments that challenge our current definitions of school, including unconventional alternatives that many families flocked to during the pandemic. CRPE’s and Transcend’s suggest these spaces—often led or co-led by families and community leaders—are worth watching as they expand the notion of what could be possible in public education. We’ll also be supporting Canopy users, including school and system leaders, education advocates, and policymakers, to get value from the data by taking a closer look at schools to learn from, and making sense of trends in school practice around the country.

Here’s how teachers and education organizations across the country can help:

— to search for innovative schools by region, level, focus, and more.

— for the Canopy project, especially organizations with insight into innovative learning environments that deserve more recognition than they are currently getting.

— with the project leads to discuss a customized workshop or roundtable using the Canopy data to answer the questions that matter most to your community or organization.

Along with the hundreds of schools that contribute to the Canopy project, we’re on a mission to continue tracking and uplifting schools’ efforts not just to recover, but to reinvent toward learning environments that are equitable, joyful, and responsive to students’ strengths, preferences, and needs.

This piece originally appeared . Chelsea Waite is a senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education