Academy 21 Framework for 21st Century Change






Academy 21 Framework for Creating Change Leaders

Schools today are increasingly unprepared to help students succeed in the context of a rapidly evolving, global knowledge economy. The failure to give students complex skills – Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, coined these as the seven “survival skills” – leaves our youth, and our country, at an alarmingly competitive disadvantage.

Academy 21’s Chief Executive Officer, Robert Witt, puts it plainly: “the future of our economy, the strength of our democracy, and even the health of our planet’s ecosystems all depend on our educating future generations in ways that are very different from how the vast majority of us were schooled and how most schools function today.”

In direct response to this growing crisis and opportunity, the objective of Academy 21 is to strengthen 21st Century leading and learning in Hawai‘i schools so that our students are positioned for triumph in today’s global economy and for success as global citizens. Academy 21 provides leadership development services to school administrators, and helps them transform school culture, increase their own competencies and those of their faculty and staff, and change conditions (policy, infrastructure, technology platforms etc.), all in support of 21st Century teaching and learning. Designed by Hawai‘i education nonprofits in partnership with the Change Leadership Group (CLG) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the resulting suite of Academy 21 products, services, and methods of delivery teach clients a new way of working within and across their schools to improve educational delivery throughout the K-12 system.

Through the Academy 21 approach, school leaders design and build the framework that provides the basis for sustainable, adaptive changes in their schools. A process of meaningful inquiry, shared responsibility, trust and collaboration yields solutions that are customized and specific to the school or the community of schools being addressed.

Within this Academy 21 process, we all become continual learners, continual adapters, and continual assessors of where we are and where we wish to be in the near-future.