Nonprofit Capacity Building and Training

Planning learning spaces becomes more complex every day. Whereas once this process amounted to providing mainly places for quiet, individual concentration, today it means creating more places that accommodate a wide range of activities, technologies, and participants – both in-person and connected virtually. In these spaces, people need to be able to create, retrieve, combine, display, share and information, then do it all over again, all in a space that they can easily reconfigure and is well supported by staff that meet and anticipate their needs.

North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries and its Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) are partnering with strategic consultants brightspot strategy and AECOM to design, share, and promote an updated model for institutions to plan and support technology-rich informal learning spaces. This Learning Space Toolkit will include a roadmap to guide the process along with tools and techniques for assessing needs, understanding technology, describing spaces, planning and delivering support services, and assembling space, technology, and services to meet needs, even as they change.

The Toolkit will be freely available as a resource on the web and will be developed using a collaborative process that shares thinking early and often from the broader community. The resources developed will support the full lifecycle of a project, from defining the goals and needs early on to constructing the space to supporting and assessing it. By using the Toolkit, institutions will be better equipped to orchestrate the planning process so that learners are better supported and space, technology, and services are effective.

A new era of personalized professional development is sweeping into schools. We've created this guide to capture the extraordinary changes in PD tools and in the cycle of learning. We look here at tools that support how teachers engage with colleagues; that help teachers learn or find support for implementing fresh strategies and approaches; and that measure how that learning impacts practice in the classroom.

FlippedPD is a modern approach to professional development. It is a way to maximize and respect teachers’ time for professional learning. FlippedPD was developed specifically to meet the instructional and technology integration needs of classroom teachers and is based on a blended learning model that combines personalized and on-demand digital resources with face-to-face coaching support for technology integration to meet instructional goals.

Throughout each variation, the success of FlippedPD comes from its essential components:

• Documentation - maintaining consistency and accountability through record keeping
• Ongoing – creating time for teachers on a regular schedule
• Coached – providing teachers access to an instructional technology coach
• Personalized Content - providing relevant digital resources to support learning
• Collaborative – personalizing learning by creating small collaborative groups

The great organizational psychologist Edgar Schein argues that true organizational learning and change happens only when there is a real threat of pain. Schein says: “Anxiety inhibits learning, but anxiety is also necessary if learning is going to happen at all. But to understand this, we're going to have to speak about something managers don't like to discuss—the anxiety involved in motivating people to ‘unlearn’ what they know and learn something new.”

History of Post-It notes as an innovation toolkit.