MyWays helps school designers and educators like you to address the big questions challenging public education in the United States. 

The through-line connecting those questions is the integration of understanding, redefinition, and redesign.

• Fully understanding why a changing world requires that we reimagine our public schools.
• Redefining the skills, knowledge, and habits of success our students need to develop if they are to thrive.
• Redesigning our school, learning, and assessment models to proactively support students’ development of those competencies.

Explore each of the big questions below.

Understand the Changing World

Today’s youth face an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world. Adolescent youth face a number of developmental tasks as “apprentice-adults” as the job market transforms and the opportunity gap widens, challenging the nation’s ideal of equity and economic mobility. This age of accelerations offers extraordinary opportunity—for young people who are prepared to embrace it.

To succeed in this world, students need a broader and deeper set of skills, knowledge, and habits of success than those they develop through K–12 schools’ traditional focus on academic content knowledge.

Find Out More

What are the economic and social-change trends that make rethinking learning and school design so urgent?

Explore the Reports

Read the five reports in Part A, "Adolescence in an Age of Accelerations" of the MyWays Student Success Series to learn more about these real-world trends.

Take the Next Step

Are you ready to do more with these ideas? Use the tools in the MyWays toolkit with your school and local community.

Reimagine What Success Looks Like for All of Your Students

The 20 competencies in the MyWays Student Success Framework provide a unifying definition to support next generation practice and innovation. They reflect contemporary research in education, youth development, and work and workforce development.

The framework is not intended to replace success definitions in which your school or district is already invested. Use it to deepen and build on your current practice and to integrate other frameworks you may already be using.

Find Out More

Why is the MyWays Student Success Framework like learning to drive? Continue browsing for a brief introduction to the MyWays competencies.

Explore the Reports

Read the "Broader, Deeper Competencies for Student Success" reports to gain a deeper perspective on this unifying framework.

Take the Next Step

Are you ready to do more with these ideas? Use the tools in the MyWays toolkit to examine how your school or district defines success.

Redesign Learning

Most of the MyWays competencies require an integrated combination of thinking skills and real world abilities. Schools can ensure that their learning model actively, directly, and fully supports the MyWays competencies with three learning constructs:

• Whole learning

• Wider learning ecosystem

• Levers for Capability and Agency

Find Out More

How and why do these three learning constructs help students develop a range of the MyWays competencies simultaneously?

Explore the Report

Read Learning Design for Broader, Deeper Competencies for a deeper look at whole learning, the wider learning ecosystem, and the levers for capability and agency.

Take the Next Step

Are you ready to do more with these ideas? Use the tools in the MyWays toolkit to map your learning design to the MyWays Student Success Framework.

Redesign Assessment to Enrich Student Learning

MyWays helps educators rethink their approaches to assessment so that they actively support the kind of learning that can lead to genuine readiness for the challenges of 21st-century life.

Schools can assess for holistic learning through greater authenticity—enhancing and predicting student performance in the outside world—and by using multiple, varied measures, just as a driver’s license involves a written test, classroom instruction, student driving practice, road test, and more.

Assessments need to integrate learning and measurement, with a variety of strategies to better develop and gauge progress on the broader, deeper MyWays competencies.

A note of caution: Schools should use care when assessing for the full range of MyWays competencies. Students develop Habits of Success, for example, in varied ways that are often difficult to measure. These assessments are more useful, at this early stage in their development, for learning and not for accountability.

Find Out More

What are the five categories of assessment strategy that would be reflected in a fully comprehensive school or district model?

Explore the Report

Read Assessment Design for Broader, Deeper Competencies to take a deeper look at assessment strategies in next gen schools.

Take the Next Step

Are you ready to do more with these ideas? Use the tools in the MyWays toolkit to map your assessment design to the MyWays Student Success Framework.