The WCE’s Adolescent Learning & Development Project

The Opportunity Institute proposes the Adolescent Learning and Development Project (ALDP) as a means of advancing practical knowledge and use of scientific principles of adolescent learning and development and equity in middle and high school-aged youth.

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ALDP’s Expansion

Starting in Mississippi and advancing to California, Illinois, Michigan, and New York.

Through the ALDP, OI will provide targeted science-informed training and coaching to help district and school leaders work collaboratively with community-based and other sector leaders to rethink the design and implementation of district and school-level policies and practices and set specific transformation goals to address the learning and development needs of every middle and high-school-age student and youth.

These efforts will build upon the pre-existing advocacy and state policy work of OI’s state and local partners, including Southern Echo in Mississippi and the Alliance for Quality Education and Citizen Action in New York who already undertake community organizing activities that include youth civic engagement and empowerment programming, school climate and discipline reform, and collaboration with allied civil rights groups, organized labor, and state legislators on school funding reform.

The ALDP is customizable but includes three broad phases:

  1. Resource gathering, information sharing, onboarding of districts

  2. Planning, professional learning, stakeholder meetings, coaching for education leaders; gathering lessons learned

  3. Sharing lessons learned and disseminating tools and resources

The project will be guided by a Continuous Improvement Process where leaders set specific goals around what practices they will sustain and strengthen, ones they will start doing, and ones they will stop based on their intentional application of whole child equity principles and adolescent learning and development.

Through the ALDP’s work with local school communities, OI plays a key role in advancing racial equity and the science of learning and development in advocacy of our local partners and in statewide policy efforts.