Preparing Students for College, Career, and Life.
NHLI BEST: Building Essential Skills Today and for the Future
Empowering New Hampshire educators to cultivate, measure, and scale essential skills for student success in learning, career, and life.
Connecting Our Vision, Framework, and Community
Grounded in Experience. Driven by Outcomes.
Since 2018, the New Hampshire Learning Initiative (NHLI) has partnered with educators and researchers through a rigorous research-practice model to make essential skills visible, teachable, and measurable across classrooms. By bridging macro-level educational research with practical classroom strategies, our work turns students into self-advocating graduates and skilled workers prepared for tomorrow’s workforce.
Our work brings together three interconnected pillars to support statewide educational transformation:
Portrait of a Learner (PoL): The Vision
Co-developed by hundreds of NH educators, students, parents, business leaders, and community members, the New Hampshire Portrait defines the core competencies every student needs to thrive: Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving, Communication, Collaboration, Adaptability, and a Learner’s Mindset.
PLACE: The Collaborative Engine
The Performance Learning and Assessment Consortium for Educators (PLACE) brings educators together to gather field evidence, share classroom practices, and deepen our understanding of how students build and demonstrate these essential skills.
NHLI BEST: Practical Resources for the Classroom
Building Essential Skills Today (BEST) translates the Portrait of a Learner vision and PLACE field research into actionable tools, developmental frameworks, curriculum supports, and performance assessments—moving schools toward a fully integrated, competency-based learning model.
Learn more about the foundational research and partnership history ➔
The Core Competencies
Collaboration
Empowering students to build collective capacity, share cross-functional responsibilities, and work interdependently within a process rooted in equity to solve complex, real-world challenges.
Communication
Training students to express complex ideas clearly, listen actively to process multi-modal information, and purposefully adapt messages across diverse media and audiences.
Self Direction
Cultivating intrapersonal agency and structural ownership through proactive goal setting, independent resource management, and continuous iterative reflection.
Creativity
Encouraging students to interpret complex problems expansively, explore diverse expressive mediums, tolerate ambiguity, and refine imaginative solutions.
A Connected Ecosystem for Deeper Learning
Teaching the Competencies
Intentional Instruction in Essential Work-Study Habits
Rather than treating collaboration, communication, self direction, and creativity as abstract, standalone concepts, classrooms integrate them directly into daily tasks. Students actively practice these core success habits within their peer groups, learning how to take true ownership of the learning process.
Empowering Our Educators
Teacher-Led Professional Development Networks
True educational transformation is not forced from the top down; it grows organically through teacher ownership and field-tested expertise. By opting into collaborative improvement networks, our educators build strong professional learning communities to co-design, refine, and optimize student-centered lesson structures.
Anchoring in our PACE Backbone
Statewide Performance Assessment System
We lean on New Hampshire’s groundbreaking, locally-managed PACE system to evaluate deeper learning without over-testing our students. Because classroom performance tasks serve double-duty for both local grading metrics and state accountability, assessments stay local, authentic, and tightly connected to daily student progress.
Grounded in Classroom Evidence
Action Research & Artifact Analysis
Through local learning communities and consortium meetings, educators gather student work samples, analyze performance task outcomes, and refine progression descriptors based on real classroom results. This ongoing reflection ensures our assessment tools remain authentic, valid, and directly attuned to student growth across all grade levels.
Voices from the Field
Real Impact from Real Classrooms & Communities
Hear directly from New Hampshire educators, school leaders, and students about how embedding essential skills into daily instruction is transforming classroom culture and boosting confidence.
FEATURED SPOTLIGHT
Building Essential Skills Today for the Future — Challenges
Creating a system that can accommodate the wide range of learning contexts across a state can be difficult. Teachers and leaders in New Hampshire share how they are tackling the integration of deeper learning into their classrooms.
“Everyone needs to learn these skills before they graduate. It doesn’t matter if the person next to you does it faster. What matters is that when you leave here you have the skills and knowledge.”
Angel Burke, Laconia School District Leader
Ready to Build the NHLI BEST Framework in Your District?
Explore our toolkits, professional learning, and leadership opportunities designed to help you implement sustainable competency-based learning.