BRING NHLI BEST TO YOUR DISTRICT
Tailor Research-Backed Essential Skills to Your Classrooms
True transformational learning happens at the local level. Bringing NHLI BEST to your district means customizing these tools for your specific grade levels, content areas, and school culture. Partner with the New Hampshire Learning Initiative to build on a proven foundation, empower your teachers, and shape the next evolution of competency-based education.
Teachers as Agents of Scale
Positioning Educators as Design Leads
NHLI BEST positioned teachers as design leads in developing resources. Grounded in Cynthia Coburn’s research on Rethinking Scale and further explored by Dr. Felicia Sullivan (Lead Researcher for the NHLI BEST Project at JFF) in Investing in Teachers as Agents of Scale, this framework reinforces a vital principle: lasting change grows when teachers make sense of it, adapt it to their contexts, and develop true ownership of the work.
A Human-Centered Design Process
An Iterative Cycle of Evidence and Practice
New Hampshire educators led this design cycle, bringing classroom expertise, student perspectives, and evidence from practice to each round of design and revision.
RESEARCH >
LISTEN >
DESIGN >
PILOT >
GATHER FEEDBACK >
REVISE
Core Design Pillars
Teachers as Designers
Teacher design leads conducted empathy interviews with students and colleagues, identified what educators and learners needed, and created the NHLI BEST frameworks, progressions, strategies, and tools. They tested the resources in classrooms, gathered evidence and feedback, and revised them iteratively.
Students as Partners
Students used the tools to understand, practice, and reflect on their own growth, so their lived experience directly shaped the design.
Research & Practice
Dr. Karin Hess and Wendy Surr conducted a detailed alignment review of the framework and progressions with the Essential Skills and Dispositions Framework—the research base for the Work Study Practices competencies.
Practice as the Test
Research, technical expertise, teacher knowledge, classroom evidence, and student experience continually informed one another throughout every iteration.
Let’s Connect
Start the conversation on bringing or customizing NHLI BEST for your district.
Customized Implementation & Support
Leadership & Strategic Alignment
Focus: District readiness mapping, leadership coaching, and aligning BEST learning progressions with local reporting/grading policies.
Professional Learning & Design Labs
Focus: Embedded teacher workshops, task tuning protocols, and hands-on calibration for performance assessment tasks.
Classroom-Ready Toolkits & Resources
Focus: Direct access to field-tested instruction modules, student self-assessment guides, and research-backed progression frameworks.