Where students create their future.
Azani Education partners with K-12 schools to design challenge-based programs, curriculum, and professional learning where students turn real-world challenges into ideas, solutions, and innovations that shape what comes next.
About UsAzani Education is a consultancy working to expand access to Challenge-Based Reflective Learning for K-12 students nationwide.
Selected Clients
Azani David Pinkney, M.S.
Founder and Lead Consultant
Graduate of the USC Iovine and Young Academy
CBRL Specialist and Education Researcher
Bring the CBRL framework to life in your school.
Every partnership begins with listening. We learn about your students, goals, standards, existing initiatives, and constraints. From there, we co-design a pilot course, elective pathway, or program model, then provide the curriculum, professional learning, and implementation support needed to bring it to life. The goal is to design and develop a durable practice that grows with your students and educators.
Our Framework
The Challenge-Based Reflective Learning Framework
Disruptive education, designed for a complex future.
Reflective
Grounded in Reflective Practice
Critical
Shaped by Critical Thinking
Creative
Driven by Human Creativity
Challenge-Based Reflective Learning is a hands-on framework in which learners investigate real-world problems, define meaningful challenges, and design, test, and refine solutions that create impact.
Developed at the USC Iovine and Young Academy, Challenge-Based Reflective Learning reorients education around the complex challenges learners will encounter beyond the classroom. Rather than treating knowledge as a collection of isolated subjects, CBRL asks students to integrate design, entrepreneurship, technology, and other disciplines as they investigate problems and develop meaningful responses.
Grounded in reflective practice, the framework helps learners build both domain-specific knowledge and transferable competencies. Over time, students develop a durable disposition for inquiry that they can carry into unfamiliar situations, emerging fields, and complex future challenges in college, career, and beyond.
Learn more about the Academy here.
CBRL and USC’s Iovine and Young Academy
Designed for schools ready to build differently.
We work alongside school districts, education leaders, and teachers to build learning experiences in which students define real challenges and create meaningful solutions. Every engagement is shaped around your students, standards, existing initiatives, and implementation needs.
Our Services
Program Design & Implementation
We design challenge-based programs from vision through launch, including the learning model, course scope, sequence, assessment strategy, and implementation plan. Whether you are developing one course or a whole-school model, we work alongside your team to build a program that can take root, grow, and adapt over time.
Curriculum Writing & Instructional Design
We develop standards-aligned, challenge-based curriculum, including courses, syllabi, units, educator guides, student materials, assessments, and scopes and sequences. Each offering connects core academics with design, entrepreneurship, technology, and the communities students call home. Every engagement produces practical, implementation-ready materials.
Professional Learning & Student Workshops
We facilitate learning experiences for educators and students. For educators, we offer workshops, training, and coaching that build confidence implementing the CBRL cycle. For students, we design hands-on workshops and innovation sprints in design, entrepreneurship, technology, design thinking, and creative problem-solving.
The CBRL framework becomes real through programs that meet students where they are and grow with your school or district. We design offerings that fit your context, from a single pilot course to a full program model.
Our ImplementationPilot Course Model
Start with one challenge-based reflective course that allows your team to test the framework, gather evidence of impact, and build support among students, teachers, and administrators. We co-design the challenge space, course arc, and reflection tools, then support you through launch so the pilot becomes a foundation for future CBRL work
Elective Pathway Model
Build a sequence of CBRL-aligned electives that gives students recurring opportunities to engage with real-world challenges, interdisciplinary making, and reflective practice. The pathway can stand alongside existing courses while connecting core academics with innovation, design, entrepreneurship, and technology.
Whole School Model
Develop a school-wide model that integrates CBRL across grades, subject areas, and learning experiences. We collaborate on the vision, program structure, curriculum, professional learning, and implementation supports needed to establish a shared approach to inquiry, reflection, and challenge-based learning.
Start a CBRL conversation.
Share a bit about your students, your current programs, and the challenges you want them to tackle. We will respond with a proposed starting point, whether that is a pilot course, an elective pathway, or a long-term program model.
Designed for impact beyond the classroom.
The Four Layers of the CBRL Framework
CBRL brings together four interlocking layers of learning: the domain-specific knowledge each challenge demands, transferable competencies that connect disciplines, intersectional expertise developed through application, and reflective dispositions that shape how learners inquire and act. Together, these layers help students move continuously between learning, making, connecting, and reflecting.
Fig. 1. The Challenge-Based Reflective Learning (CBRL) Framework, adapted from Sung, S.Y., Thomas, D., & Rikakis, T. (2024), Postdigital Science and Education.
Domain-Specific Skills and Knowledge
Domain-General Competencies
While pursuing their inquiries, students identify and access the specific information, knowledge, and skills each challenge demands, always in contextualized, real-world form (ie. computer science, math).
Students build knowledge, perspectives, language, and processes that cross domains (ie. ideation, collaboration), and leverage them to interconnect the many moving parts of a real-life challenge.
Intersectional Expertise and Application Areas
The expected outcome: expertise that intersects multiple domains, shaped by learner-driven interests and in response to societal needs, where competencies and skills reinforce one another.
Dispositions of Productive Inquiry
The overarching goal: nurturing each learner's unique disposition, so students reflect, discern, ideate, and take informed action in effort to innovate and solve complex challenges of their choice.
More About CBRL
The CBRL Cycle
Challenge-Based Reflective Learning unfolds as a living cycle of inquiry, action, and reflection. Learners begin by discerning a challenge space, then identify the perspectives, knowledge, and resources needed to engage it in meaningful ways. From there, they prototype, test, and refine their ideas through feedback and iteration, building solutions that are responsive to real conditions rather than abstract exercises.
The cycle builds on design thinking, but it extends that process through a stronger emphasis on reflection, context, and the ongoing shaping of the learner’s own interests and dispositions. In this way, the CBRL cycle supports students as they move from first understanding a challenge to acting within it, developing the habits of mind and practice needed to design across design, entrepreneurship, technology, and other evolving domains.
Figure 1. Challenge-Based reflective learning cycle: A case study from the Iovine and Young Academy. Thomas, D., & Sung, S. (2026). Dispositions, discernment, and productive inquiry as reflective practice. Reflective Practice, 27(3), 275–286.
Research Behind the Framework
Credit: USC Iovine and Young AcademyCBRL is grounded in research on reflective practice, transdisciplinary learning, productive inquiry, and the development of expertise across domains.
Enacting Transdisciplinary Values for a Postdigital World: The Challenge-Based Reflective Learning (CBRL) Framework
Sung, S., Thomas, D. & Rikakis, T. (2024). Postdigital Science and Education.Dispositions, Discernment, and Productive Inquiry as Reflective Practice
Thomas, D., & Sung, S. (2026). Reflective Practice, International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives.Expertise at the Intersection: How Teams Develop Cross-Domain Expertise in Transdisciplinary Capstone Projects
Sung, S., Thomas, D. & Rikakis, T. (2026). Capstone Design Conference 2026.
Designed for the world our students are entering.
About UsAzani Education is a consultancy working to expand access to Challenge-Based Reflective Learning for K-12 students nationwide.
Selected ClientsIn the News
See how our work, partnerships, and client programs have been featured by major news outlets and education organizations.
Denver Public Schools introducing new arts curriculum created by music legend Dr. Dre
Denver ABC 7 · By: Dan Grossman · November 24, 2025 Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine to open centers at 2 Denver high schools
Yahoo! News · By: Brooke Williams · November 24, 2025 Dr. Dre will provide the next episode of entrepreneurship and design classes at 2 Denver schools
Chalkbeat Colorado · By: Melanie Asmar · November 20, 2025 Compton High School Joins Iovine and Young Center Network
Compton Unified SD · Media Release · June 25, 2026