Advocacy Kit
You’ll need to recruit friends and allies to generate momentum for an all-out collaborative effort to remake learning in your community.
To help you get started, we’ve developed a simple advocacy kit you can use to make the case for learning innovation in your community by convincing your peers, colleagues, and leaders to join in a collaborative effort to remake learning. You can take a leading role in this important work by spurring your community to action.
This first edition of the Remake Learning Advocacy Kit includes the following:
- Slide Decks: Pre-designed presentation slides that outline the current challenges and opportunities in teaching and learning, examples of how the Remake Learning Network is transforming education in Pittsburgh, and suggestions for how other communities can build on the Pittsburgh Model. Several slides include space for you to make your own notes and localize the content to your specific community needs and opportunities.
- Talking Points: A presentation script elaborates on each slide to guide your remarks and give your audience a better understanding of how an approach like Remake Learning would be meaningful in your community. Talking points are saved in the presentation notes field for quick reference and also provided in an editable Microsoft Word document. Both sets of talking points also include helpful tips called out by brackets.
- Media Assets: A collection of photos, videos, and other materials you can show at presentations, or share with your colleagues. As visual evidence, these media assets help convey the impact of innovative learning in the lives of students and educators. Short videos feature testimonials from Pittsburgh, as well as footage of each Case Study, showcasing learning innovation in schools, museums, libraries, communities, and elsewhere.
- Outreach Kit: A collection of materials to help you raise awareness of your efforts with local press and the general public. Press release and media advisory templates give you a starting point for announcing new efforts to remake learning in your community. Sample language and imagery for posting to popular social media outlets help you jumpstart the conversation about the need for more innovative learning in your community.
Custom Advocacy Kits are available for reaching specific target audiences, including:
- Schools
- Community Organizations
- Civic Leaders
- Museums and Libraries
- Higher Education
- Parents
- Private Sector
You can download audience-specific kits at the bottom of this page.
Below we’ve inserted slide images and talking points from the generic version of the Advocacy Kit.
Use this slide as the opening title slide for your presentation. Customize it by inserting your community, your name, and the date of your presentation
Customize this slide by inserting a description of challenges your community is facing in the midst of a changing educational landscape.
No one institution can overcome these challenges alone.
Schools are still the core of most young people’s educational experience, but today’s students aren’t limited to learning between the hours of 8am and 3pm.
Learning happens any where and at any time.
Across the country, educators and innovators are taking advantage of this new reality to create radically new & innovative approaches to learning.
And proving students with engaging learning experiences that prepare them to thrive.
For example…
Elizabeth Forward School District empowers educators and students to re-imagine the future of K-12 education and then make it a reality.
In the 2008–09 school year, 15 of Elizabeth Forward’s 800 students dropped out, and more than 70 district students opted for charter or cyber schools. Teachers were struggling to keep students engaged.
The Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent knew something had to change. They reached out to community partners and began transforming their district — one space, one program, one teacher, and one student at a time. From their Entertainment Technology Academy (a classroom that adopts a flexible, collaborative learning space instead of desks) to their SMALLab (an interactive digital media space that uses games to educate middle school students), they are showcasing how a new way of learning can work in today’s classroom.
Elizabeth Forward’s dropout rate is now almost zero, and only 11 students are enrolled in charter or cyber schools.
MAKESHOP at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh creates space for kids to use their hands and minds to bring ideas to life.
A permanent exhibit space housed in the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, MAKESHOP is a space for hands-on exploration and family learning. Working with talented artist educators and maker mentors, young people and their families use real tools and materials to explore the process of making.
Developed in partnership with learning scientists from the University of Pittsburgh, MAKESHOP challenges and nurtures creativity, turning the museum into a place where all the signs say do touch.
As an outgrowth of their success, MAKESHOP staff now offer an annual Maker Educator Boot Camp for school teachers interested in using maker learning practices in their classrooms.
Important research — creating a common language around making as a learning process — has created definitions to help educators in the Pittsburgh region and across the country deepen their understanding of making, giving them the ability to apply these practices to their work and lives.
Children’s Innovation Project is an effort to provide young children, from kindergarten through third grade, with meaningful and age appropriate introduction to technology and innovation through broad, interdisciplinary approaches.
Created by a robotics artist and a kindergarten teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, the Children’s Innovation Project considers technology a raw material children can use to explore and learn about how the world is made and how they can re-make it.
The project is providing a unique platform for children to develop precision of language, collaboration and flexibility in problem solving.
Children’s Innovation Project was catalyzed for just a small amount of money and piloted in a single kindergarten classroom. In just five years, more than 328 students, 13 teachers and 9 Teaching Fellows are participating in the project.
Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab and Entertainment Technology Center are connecting university students and researchers to the communities they serve.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has connected with a network of regional educators to co-develop innovative, effective education solutions that work in the Pittsburgh region. The Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab and the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) are two examples of CMU’s commitment to putting innovation to work in the Pittsburgh region.
The CREATE Lab — exploring socially meaningful innovation and robotic technologies to address community challenges — has engaged 260 teachers, 650 pre-service teachers, 7,200 students and 90 schools! The ETC, a two-year graduate program offering a master’s degree in entertainment technology, has supported 175 community projects over the past 15 years. With a focus on co-developing “games for good,” many amazing and impactful initiatives and ideas have come from the ETC.
As a hub of innovation, CMU helps to raise the level of awareness and understanding of the new technologies that exist among K-12 educators in the Pittsburgh region.
These remarkable learning initiatives didn’t happen by accident. And they didn’t appear overnight.
They are the result of an intentional effort by hundreds of people who saw an opportunity to harness all the assets and resources of their community to reimagine where and how learning happens.
Pittsburghers have come together to create an environment that nurtures education innovation. And they call this community of practice the Remake Learning Network.
The Remake Learning Network got its start in 2007 when a group of educators and innovators began meeting informally to exchange ideas and collaborating on pilot projects.
Representing a diverse cross-section of Pittsburgh’s education, technology, and research sectors, the network has spent the better part of a decade building, testing and refining a model for 21st century learning.
They’re building on the regional strengths of Pittsburgh and channeling those strengths into areas where they can make the biggest impact for students in the Pittsburgh region.
Today, Remake Learning includes the active participation of more than 200 organizations in the Pittsburgh region.
These member organizations represent five distinct sectors:
- Learning environments like schools, museums, libraries, and afterschool programs
- Innovation research & development institutions like universities and labs
- Learning scholarship & advocacy organizations to evaluate and support innovation
- Commercial & entrepreneurial enterprises to develop new learning products and content
- Strategic stewards like elected officials, philanthropists, and nonprofits to support and sustain the network
In the years since the network first began, Remake Learning has evolved into a fully-fledged movement that is changing the landscape for learning in Pittsburgh.
In Pittsburgh, it’s normal…
- For teachers and technologists to work side-by-side.
- For learning scientists to be on-site at museums, libraries, and afterschool programs, helping to make them more effective…
- For ed-tech startups to work hand-in-hand with teachers and students to develop better products.
Remake Learning provides a supportive structure to help make this happen citywide.
With nearly a decade of experience, there is a lot our community could learn from what they’ve been doing in Pittsburgh.
- What can our community rally around?
- What local strengths can we build on and what community resources can we tap into?
- How do we organize ourselves and set up a structure that strengthens our efforts without stifling them in bureaucracy?
- How do we even get started?
Lucky for us, Pittsburgh’s Remake Learning Network is making a Playbook to help other communities learn from their experience and build on the Pittsburgh model.
This resource, created by The Sprout Fund, the Pittsburgh nonprofit that stewards the Remake Learning Network, serves as a roadmap for building collaborative innovation networks for teaching and learning in communities across the country.
By sharing insights, key resources and critical lessons learned, the Playbook provides educators and community leaders with practical and actionable information, enabling anyone to take advantage of new and innovative learning practices.
Perhaps most valuable to us, the Playbook describes the practical steps that people in Pittsburgh have used to build the Remake Learning Network.
Remake Learning recommends five strategies:
- Convene the community
- Catalyze innovative projects in our schools
- Communicate within and outside of network
- Coordinate network members to maximize impact
- Champion the network’s accomplishments
The Playbook describes 31 different “Plays” that we can use to put these strategies into action.
To convene our community we can…
Insert action steps you will take to convene your community based on the plays you selected when building your Game Plan
To catalyze local learning innovation we can…
Insert action steps you will take to catalyze learning innovation based on the plays you selected when building your Game Plan
To communicate about our efforts we can…
Insert action steps you will take to communicate within and outside of the network based on the plays you selected when building your Game Plan
To champion our network accomplishments we can…
Insert action steps you will take to champion network accomplishments based on the plays you selected when building your Game Plan
To coordinate our efforts we can…
Insert action steps you will take to coordinate network efforts based on the plays you selected when building your Game Plan
Customize this slide by inserting one or more calls to action that ask your audience to take specific actions to signal their commitment to remaking learning
We have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to provide all of the children and youth in our community with the kinds of learning opportunities we know they need to thrive.
Learning now happens anywhere, at any time and at any pace. And so, communities of caring adults — teachers, youth workers, mentors, as well as gamers, technologists, artists and others — need to think differently and collaboratively about how we light up every child to the joys and wonders of learning.
By working together and building on the model that Pittsburgh has established, I’m confident that we can remake learning in [Insert Community Name].
So please, join me in taking these next steps:
Insert specific action people can take as a next step
As we start (or continue) working together to remake learning in our community, we can reach out to the people in Pittsburgh with questions and ideas.
You can learn more about Pittsburgh’s efforts and read the whole Playbook yourself by visiting playbook.remakelearning.org.
This slide acknowledges the producers and supporters of the Remake Learning Playbook. It may help answer questions about where the Playbook came from.
Download Advocacy Kits
Choose from the options below based on the audience you anticipate speaking to.
- For General Audiences
Best for presenting to groups of community members who represent a variety of interests and organizations. - For Schools
Best for presenting to teachers, principals, district leaders, school boards, and others who work in formal K-12 education. - For Community Organizations
Best for presenting to out-of-school educators, youth mentors, and community-based youth-serving organizations. - For Civic Leaders
Best for presenting to elected officials, funders, and other civic leaders who can lead change on a community-wide scale. - For Museums & Libraries
Best for presenting to museum educators, teaching artists, librarians, and leaders of cultural institutions. - For Higher Education
Best for presenting to researchers, learning scientists, school deans, and college and university leaders. - For Parents
Best for presenting to parents, families, and other caring adults engaged in education. - For Private Sector
Best for presenting to entrepreneurs, employers, and corporate sponsors.
