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2017 EDUCATION MAGAZINE
LINCOLN DAILY NEWS MARCH 1, 2017 Page 45
the U.S. Department of Education. With
its longtime partner, Temple University,
ADI formed the Center on Innovations
in Learning. With WestED (located in
San Francisco, CA), ADI established a
Center on School Turnaround, and with
Edvance Research (owned by Westat in
Rockville, MD) it launched the Building
State Capacity and Productivity Center.
Also in 2012, ADI was awarded a grant by
the U.S. Department of Education to work
with the State of Idaho and the Nez Perce
tribe; this project was based on ADI’s
several years of work with the Bureau
of Indian Education and its schools in
23 states. This storm of focused work
continues to flourish, and ADI’s network
of collaborators and friends grows.
ADI’s emerging and ongoing work
focuses on three areas of research and
practice: (1) the school as a community,
including family engagement; (2) personal
competencies that propel student learning;
and (3) the dynamics of change. In each of
these topical realms, ADI takes a systems
approach, integrating parts to create
highly functioning wholes, and puts its
considerable ingenuity at the service of its
clients.
ADI has a small local staff of
professionals drawing from the Lincoln
area, but a larger network of hundreds
of partners and contributors in the fifty
states. The casual visitor to Lincoln might
not discover close to the Courthouse the
small doorway on Kickapoo that leads
to the ADI’s offices, but the residents of
Lincoln should know how a small team
in their community serve the needs of
students, teachers, and parents around the
nation (and run a superb gift shop, Prairie
Years, too).