Our Optimal Learning Environment gives educators the tools to create supportive, research-backed conditions for teaching and learning. By articulating high-leverage instructional practice, the OLE is designed to allow every student the opportunity to flourish in school, in their communities, and life.
Based on foundational work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Center for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), and CAST, NTC collaborated with national researchers in education and youth development to develop the Optimal Learning Environment framework — a driver for our work with mentors, coaches, and school leaders.
The framework is organized into three main areas: building strong relationships and classroom communities, providing access to quality curriculum and instruction, and addressing learner diversity. While these areas are distinct, they are deeply connected and work together to promote effective teaching and learning.
- Relationships
- Self-awareness, identity, and sense of purpose
- Effort, supported risk-taking, and growth
- Safe and engaged interactions
- Developmentally appropriate and culturally relevant
- Relevant, challenging content aligned to grade-level standards
- Diversity and learner variability
- Productive struggle, perseverance, and agency
- Cultural competence and perspectives
- Reasoned, evidence-based arguments, thoughts, and ideas
- Individual strengths
- Multiple pathways
- Learner agency, feedback, and self-directed learning
- Scaffold instruction, modeling, strategic grouping, sequenced questioning, timely feedback, and practice opportunities
Download the framework to support positive, instructionally focused school climate and provide intellectually and emotionally safe, engaging classroom communities that are personalized and co-constructed by students and adults to support the success of each and every learner.
Optimal learning environment conversations with teachers are about making the classroom safe for kids, about the opportunities for learning teachers are providing so that students feel connected, interested, that learning is relevant to who they are.
