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Jim Rickabaugh

Dr. Jim Rickabaugh serves as the Senior Advisor to the Institute for Personalized Learning, an education innovation lab dedicated to the transformation of public education. The Institute serves a growing number of member school districts engaged in personalizing learning and is a part of the multi-state Innovation Lab Network coordinated by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Jim formerly served as the Director of the Institute for six years and as a superintendent in several districts in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Dr. Rickabaugh was Wisconsin Superintendent of the Year in 2008 and Minnesota Superintendent of the Year in 1996. He is a member of the boards of the Wisconsin Education Business Roundtable and the Innovative Schools Network and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Midwest Comprehensive Center. He received the Excellence in Educational Leadership Award in 2005 from the University Council for Educational Administration and a lifetime achievement award from the Master Teacher in 2010.

Dr. Rickabaugh is the author of Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning: A Roadmap for School Leaders, focused on helping principals and other educational leaders to engage their staffs in designing and implementing personalized learning ecosystems. Jim is also a co-author of Five Levers To Improve Learning: How To Prioritize For Powerful Results In Your School. An engaging speaker, Jim has presented on personalized learning at several national conferences including the Annual Visible Learning Conference, ASCD Annual Conference, AESA Annual Conference and iNACOL Blended and Online Learning Symposium, among others.

Categories: Educator, Educator - Leadership, Educator - Personalized Learning

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Videos

Topics

Building Learner Capacity

There was a time when accumulating academic content might have been enough for students to be prepared for their life after formal education. If so, that era is long past. Estimates are that today’s high school graduates know only a small fraction of what they will need for success in their careers and life. Unless we develop the capacity of students to learn, we will have short-changed them. This session will offer participants a collection of research based strategies they can employ to develop the skills students will need to learn without excessive reliance on external supports and direction. Opportunities will be provided for participants to analyze and categorize strategies that prepare learners for today and their future.

Uncovering and Tapping Learner Potential

Most classrooms contain an extremely valuable, yet often overlooked, resource for learning. Tapping this resource can transform learning, accelerate achievement and deepen commitment to success. Yet, it costs nothing and many times just sits, waiting to be deployed. What is this resource? You guessed it - it is the learner. This session will feature practical strategies for changing the role students typically play while transforming them into committed, energized, active learners.

Leading Transformational Change in Education

Continuous improvement is important, but often is inadequate. We must be sure we are working on the right things, things that have the potential to make a real difference for learning and achievement. Getting better at the wrong thing - that will not deliver the results we need - is a waste of time, effort and resources. Innovation that represents transformation often must precede effective incremental improvement. This session will provide practical strategies for breakthrough thinking and operationalizing transformative approaches. The emergence of personalized learning as a transformative innovation will be used to explain and demonstrate the process of engaging in and leading transformative innovation.

5 Levers to Improve Learning

Featuring a co-author of the ASCD book Five Levers to Lift Learning, this session will share what forty years of research and experience reveal about the hidden structure that stymies so many well-intended educational reforms. Participants will be invited to analyze efforts to reform schools and improve learning using the structure as a tool. They will also learn how to design and recognize efforts and initiatives that hold the greatest promise for making a real difference in student learning.

Building an Action Network

This session will explore the power of networks to bring about transformational change. Coordinating individual efforts results in a collective impact far greater than the sum of its parts. Participants will engage via small groups in a hands-on activity that will encourage collaboration and illustrate innovation through iteration. They will examine a continuum of network engagement and participate in interactive discussions with the presenter and each other. They will leave with a deep understanding of the action network approach and strategies to form an action network focused on innovation.

Personalized Learning

This session will share an innovative educational model based on personalized learning that more than 900 educators and 14,000 students are currently experiencing. Participants will examine common assumptions we all tend to make about education and explore design principles that can be used to create a new educational ecosystem with the learner at the center. Strategies will be shared to actively involve students in the learning process and advocate for their own educational growth.

Books

Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School

Instead of piling on more work and more changes, here's a book that helps you do the right work and make changes that will truly have measurable effects on student achievement. Using a simple but powerful framework, the authors focus your attention on five key "levers": 1. How schools are organized 2. How students are grouped. 3. Standards and expectations for student learning. 4. Instructional strategies to engage students in meaningful learning. 5. The beliefs teachers and students have about their capacity to be effective. Understand how and when to use each of these levers to unlock the potential for lasting improvements in teaching and learning. Read examples of efforts associated with each lever, explore their opportunities and pitfalls, and get ideas you need to use the levers more mindfully.

You can purchase this book here

Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning: A Roadmap for School Leaders

Tapping the Power of Personalized Learning: A Roadmap for School Leaders

In this powerful new book, James Rickabaugh, former superintendent and current director of the Institute for Personalized Learning (IPL), presents the groundbreaking results of the Institute's half-decade of research, development, and practice: a simple but powerful model for personalizing students learning experiences by building their levels of commitment, ownership, and independence.

You can purchase this book here

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