Professional Learning

Bring Your Vision for Student Success to Life with NGLC and Bravely

Now is the time to rethink what outcomes define student success and how schools can better address diverse learner needs. We know that young people need to become knowledgeable and skilled in the core subjects. They also need to become fluent in listening, loving, continuously learning, and embracing responsibility. They need to know how to work competently and collaboratively to solve problems, analyze information, and understand complexity. They need to embrace differentness, recognize oppression, reject hate, and care for our planet.

Schools and districts like yours are stepping up to the plate with a willingness and a commitment to provide the high-quality learning experiences youth need to develop this wide range of competencies. Whether it’s working community-wide to develop a graduate portrait, developing senior capstones and portfolios, designing innovative learning models, creating supports for specific student populations, or rethinking evidence of learning, NGLC’s Bravely initiative is here to move your community forward in ways that make a real difference for students and will last.

What Is Your Most Important Student Success Challenge?

Today, NGLC opened the application for Bravely for the 2024-2025 school year. We invite you to gather a team and submit an application by April 15 to work on your highest-priority challenge related to reimagining student success.

DOWNLOAD THE BRAVELY APPLICATION OVERVIEW

If you are a public school, district, and charter—at any grade level, anywhere in the U.S.—making a Bravely commitment means that your team can select a specific challenge of reimagining student success based on your community’s own interests, goals, and current initiatives. You’ll turn that challenge into a Brave Question that will guide your team throughout the Bravely year.

Here are just a few challenges we are excited to work on with you:

• From Portrait to Practice—activate your graduate portrait so that every student has high-quality learning experiences that help them continuously develop the skills in your graduate portrait.

• Reimagine Success for MultiLingual Learners—apply strategies that tap into the strengths of multilingual learners and remove barriers to their success.

• Centering Equity in Learning—redefine student success in culturally-responsive ways, develop learning experiences that recognize the unique gifts and talents of all students, or redesign structures, policies, and practices that sustain inequitable experiences and outcomes.

• Growing a Safe & Healthy Culture—reimagine your school environments so that students have transformational experiences and all students and adults feel seen, heard, and valued and are respected, supported, and engaged.

• A Self-Identified Challenge—work on any challenge of reimagining student success that your community identifies as high-priority.

What Will Bravely Do for You?

In addition to a $12,500 grant, Bravely provides a team of 5-6 leaders with monthly team meetings and coaching connections with skilled facilitators as well as access to proprietary tools and strategies.

In this year-long, hybrid experience, teams take on a challenge of reimagining student success in ways that build new systems and structures—and ways of working together—that align with the equitable, student-centered learning envisioned for students.

The experience is grounded in National Equity Project’s liberatory design and NGLC’s own transformation design—the research-based mindsets and practices that successful school districts have used to equitably transform learning over the long-term. Teams try out their change ideas and collect data to understand them while developing internal leadership capacity for liberatory transformation design that will guide your ongoing work to transform learning.

The experience builds to a Showcase of Learning celebrating the progress made and inviting everyone in your school, district, or charter community to join in the next steps. We can think of no better “achievements” to celebrate than the brave human-centered, systems-building work of creating more equitable learning experiences and outcomes for your students!

How Can You Apply?

Download the Bravely Application Overview to review eligibility requirements, selection criteria, and the application process. You’ll also find more details about Bravely, the grant, and commitments made by participating Bravely teams and NGLC.

Applications are due by 12:00pm noon on Monday, April 15, 2024.