Darren’s team developed, managed, and marketed this voice chatbot and book subscription product for Mia Learning. It used conversational AI and machine learning to offer personalized book recommendations and coaching to help elementary-school students become intrinsically motivated to read. Children using Secret Agent Mia achieved 32% annualized gains in reading motivation, and the product saw 196% year-over-year revenue growth.

Agile Administrators is a digital professional learning product developed for the American Council on Education to help senior leaders of college and universities learn to use user-centered design, lean startup business model validation, and agile mindsets and ways of working to accelerate innovation and institutional transformation in the service of equity. It includes a self-paced multimedia curriculum of 61 multimedia microcourses, a microcredential portfolio assessment, and learning circles, peer-facilitated social learning groups similar to communities of practice.

This series of motion graphics videos, along with an aligned set of microcourses, were produced for the American Council on Education in collaboration with KnowledgeWorks to support learning and spark conversation among senior leaders of colleges and universities. Each video introduces a driver of change in higher education to guide futures thinking and strategic planning. 

Darren Cambridge led development of a personalized professional development system for district leaders, synthesizing research to develop a Future Ready Leadership framework, and writing and producing a collection of 50 high-production-value Web videos shot on location.

For the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology, Darren Cambridge's team developed a personalized profession learning toolkit to support district leaders in integrating informal online and district-supported professional development.

Why Mia, Why Now: A Research-Based Path to Self-Motivated and Purposeful Reading synthesizes cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed research on motivation to read to explain the design of Mia Learning’s AI voice chatbot and book subscription service.

The Cambridge Learning Group synthesized a large body of research from multiple fields for Book Trust, a national literacy non-profit. We used the results to refine and validate their logic model, developing new strategy for communications and partnerships, as well as generating actionable insights for increasing the coherence and efficacy of their program design. 

As one of the leaders of the National Center for Literacy Education, Darren Cambridge directed research on school-wide capacity building for literacy learning. Drawing on both a national survey and in-depth interviews with approximately 100 teachers and school leaders, we demonstrated that educators believe standards implementation leads to better results for students when the organizational conditions that support collective capacity building are in place. 

I conducted empirical and theoretical research on eportfolios and learning, with a particular emphasis on higher education and lifelong learning contexts, for over a decade. This work is synthesized in Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment (Jossey-Bass, 2010), which won the Digital Media and Learning Faculty Writing Prize from the MacArthur Foundation in 2012.

Darren Cambridge's team worked with the Department of Education to promote the use of networks to support professional learning and the transformative use of technology in the classroom. We led Connected Educators and Future Ready campaigns that took advantage of the Department's bully pulpit and ability to convene the education community, face-to-face and online.

The National Council of Teachers of English Washington office team, under Darren Cambridge's leadership, worked closely with teachers around the country and other organizations that represent them in Washington to advocate for policies that improve conditions for literacy learning. Our work help win authorization of dedicated funding for the comprehensive literacy program we worked with Senator Murray's staff to design in the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 and secure $190 million of funding for it in FY2016.

Grounded in the expertise of teachers in the classroom, our Kent D. Williamson Policy and Advocacy Center team synthesized and disseminated promising policy ideas for improving the conditions for literacy learning. Structural Kindness: Essays in Literacy Education in Honor of Kent D. Williamson features contributions by many of the leading voices in literacy today.