Approach

 Our Values

These values drive our work — in how we design our services,
how we partner, and how we define success.

Pursue Educational Justice

Educational justice will be achieved when all students are successful – including students of color, students from low-income communities, English learners, and students with disabilities. Our work addresses gaps in educator understanding and practice, pairing collaborative support with high expectations and excellent first instruction so all students have every opportunity to learn. This is our foremost value.

Focus on Improvement

Our work must have a measurable impact, improving adult learning and outcomes for the students we serve – especially for students of color, students from low-income communities, English learners, and students with disabilities.

Take a Long View

Our work is most meaningful if it is sustainable. For lasting impact, we work in collaboration with our partners to help build capacity to carry the work forward.

Scale What Works

We root our work in evidence-based practices, learning from our partners and their communities to co-design scalable strategies for addressing the fundamentals of teaching and learning.

Our Values in Action

Explore our services to learn about how we pursue these values in our work.

How We Partner

How We Work

We partner with educators to co-design strategies for great teaching and learning that are rooted in evidence and tailored to your learner community, building your capacity as we work together. 

We support implementation of these strategies through high-quality, evidence-based, and experienced professional services and project management – classroom to boardroom.

We design scalable solutions, elevating leaders and working with you to develop sustainable practices for continuous improvement and effective, ongoing management.

How We Support Improvement

We engage in a collaborative user-centered design process, informed by the National Equity Project and Stanford d.school’s “Liberatory Design Process” and influenced by the Carnegie Foundation’s Improvement Science:

Notice
Identify your users, situation, values, and equity challenges.
Discover
Listen deeply to stakeholders’ experiences to understand their assets and struggles.
Interpret
Synthesize these conversations and share them with your team to uncover themes and start asking the important “How might we...?” question.
Ideate
Collaboratively brainstorm potential solutions and decide on a prototype.
Prototype
Translate ideas into the real world. Collaborate to test your solutions and gather feedback.
Feedback
Examine how the design process is unfolding and gather data and feedback to reflect on actions, insights gained, and the impact of the solutions.
Reflect
Review reactions to the prototype to develop a greater understanding of user needs.

Our Mission

We partner with educators to design and implement solutions to their greatest challenges in achieving educational justice. 

We envision a future where our public schools provide our most underserved students with an outstanding education.

Our Roots

1995

Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC) Founded

2005

BASRC becomes Springboard

2009

Springboard becomes Pivot Learning

2017

Pivot Learning acquires CORE Learning

Pivot Learning, founded as BASRC in 1995, has a 25+ year history of partnering with educators to design solutions to their greatest challenges. In our first five years, we outpaced our peers in demonstrating that our services lead to greater educational success for students (Stanford University), and we have continued to demonstrate excellence every year since as we have evolved to meet each critical moment. 

The acquisition of CORE Learning in 2017 brought together two evidence-driven education service providers for schools in California and the nation. We continue to expand our services to support districts and schools as they strive to serve the changing needs of their communities.

Our Approach in Action

Like many districts, at the start of the 2020-21 school year, Aspire Public Schools in....
Addressing equity challenges has been the consistent thread that runs through major California education policies....
What can we learn from California school districts’ early response to COVID-19?  Find out....
Given Everything Has Changed, What Values Guide Our Work Now? Far too many schools....
During the 2017–18 school year, CORE provided professional development and technical assistance to elementary....
Pivot Learning and CORE are collaborating with two researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst....
btn
btn