Designing Community Partnerships to Expand Student Learning: A Toolki | Page 4

INTRODUCTION
WHY COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN EXPANDING LEARNING
Intentional Design

Take a minute to think about your school’s or
district’s current day. Now consider this: We all
design our schedules. The question is are we doing
it purposefully or by accident? Is the schedule
for your students, teachers, administrators, and
staff designed to make space for rich, engaging,
personalized learning? Or do the same external
forces that often unintentionally dictate our days
guide it out of habit and institutional history
instead of intentional design?

TIME Collaborative

Since 2012, a cohort of three districts and 12
schools has been working with The Colorado
Education Initiative (CEI), the National Center on
Time and Learning (NCTL), and the Ford Foundation
on the TIME Collaborative. Together the schools
have been creating, piloting, and implementing
new designs for the use of time, ensuring that
student learning is no longer the variable but the
most important component. Expanding learning
time, based on NCTL’s best practices, can look
completely different, depending on an individual
school’s or district’s goals. One aspect that doesn’t
change, however, is the importance of community
partnerships.

bookstore and a neighborhood elementary school;
to learn to code from parent volunteers who
work full time as developers and user experience
experts. It’s unrealistic and certainly unsustainable
to think schools and districts should operate in
isolation from the rest of the community, or that
educators are the sole “experts” about all the world
has to offer.

Expanded Learning Time

Expanded learning time is one way to provide the
space for next generation learning, and community
partnerships support that strategy.

Resources and Best Practices

This toolkit provides resources and best practices
to help educators leverage community partnerships
to build next generation learning environments.
Using the right community partners to create
learning experiences not only allows for a more
personal experience with students, but lets
educators co-create learning with students and the
school community, rethink staffing models, and
design learning environments where students are
happy, safe, and engaged.

Real-World Learning

We believe strongly that schools shouldn’t have to
do it alone. Actually, it’s impossible to do it alone.
One critical element of next generation learning
is creating the opportunities and conditions for
students to connect and learn from their world
— to take a baking class with a local pastry chef
to learn about food science, local agriculture, and
health; to build rockets with an engineering and
architectural firm; to organize a poetry jam with a

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"SCHOOLS SHOULDN'T HAVE
TO DO IT ALONE."