Module 4: VI.) Assembling the Team and Getting Started pt. 2

I really had to start with our leadership teams in the district that included the governing board and giving them a vision of what school should be and the role of the teacher, the role of the student. I had to draw all kinds of analogies about how our personal lives have changed because of technology, how should that affect the classroom. So I probably spent about six months just creating a vision of what school and learning should be at the board level with our principals and with our teachers union. They were very early in the process and so giving people a hunger for actually dissatisfaction. The current model doesn't work for some kids, for some teachers. So how can we create, I would say, a desire to change the model of teaching and learning. We thought about the design process and it was so crucial that the principal and the teachers, essentially a school has so much of the control over the design. If it was a plan that was rolled out from my office or the district office, it wouldn't have survived reality. People would have run into the challenges and they would have said, not my plan, I'm out. When they developed the plan, the ownership of it got them through the implementation curve and so maintaining some broad parameters. So for us it was student engagement using technology and software. That's the blended learning part, certainly student outcomes and for teachers to lighten up about control of use of time and even space. And so I mean that was the extent of our design principles. And then we gave our schools parameters to design. And I think that defined autonomy is crucial because if the district plans it, we've seen how that works over decades of school leadership. It never lasts, it doesn't survive the innovation curve.

Another theme that we've heard people talk about when they're thinking about picking their teams is to start with the folks who are bought in. Sort of a coalition of the willing. Get, get them on first to be your early adopters and get some early wins. Right. Pick that low hanging fruit and then you'll have some proof. Points of success when we need to go and address the folks who maybe aren't as bought in or simply sitting back waiting to see if this initiative is going to fail.

The initial launch of it, it had to be volunteers that wanted to take the first steps. I was glad it was two schools because if it had only been one school by themselves, the challenges I think might have overwhelmed them. But they had colleagues at another school to support them. The innovation is spreading faster than I had thought. I currently have, I would say four other elementary schools that are probably 75% blended learning. After the first two months of school, it's rolling out faster than I would have dreamed. High school and middle school, some initial steps. I mean, those are different spaces. I think it's going to take a different lens to figure out blended learning there. But I'm super excited about what's going on in our schools. It's spreading quietly without us pushing it.

So one piece of advice as you embark on this redesign process. If you don't make this reinvention work a key part of someone's everyday job, you're probably not going to get the results that you're hoping for. Teachers are already overburdened enough as it is. And if you just sort of pile this on as one more thing that you do at the end of the day or something like that, you're just not going to get the results that we're hoping for.

You know, that makes me think about Summit. When they were doing their reinvention and redesign work, they did a couple really smart things. The first was that they used those intercession periods of time when they weren't teaching full time classes to have everybody in the organization envisioning what this new model could look like and prototyping, even in a theoretical way. And then the second thing they did is when they started to build out all those playlists that actually allowed for personalization. They had the teachers doing that over the summer. So it was their full time to be innovative in designing structures for a new school model.

And what's interesting is that as this redesign work took hold in these other periods, redesign at all times really became part of the core of a teacher's job actually in their model.

I think that's right. I think there's a mindset that we have to go after which we don't. Think of it as, I have a day job and then we go and do a little bit of innovation. It's that we say in our culture and our school, innovating new models and going towards personalization is what our job is about. And I think if you look at most of our protagonist schools, all their teachers would say they're sort of on a mission to figure this out. It's not the thing they do in addition to teaching their classes or being the principal of their school. So if you do everything right and you get those early adopters on board and you get some initial wins, you still have to think about what do you do with the naysayers or the people who might otherwise be obstructionists. And I think the key idea here is for folks to be really strategic about who goes first, who are your early followers, and then who do you turn your attention to to make sure they come along as well.

One of the principles that I've learned about communication and moving an initiative that's this broad forward is to think about some of the groups that I normally wouldn't have thought about communicating with. And so, for example, we started this work in our elementary schools, but it was really important for our middle school and high school teachers to know what we were doing. Otherwise they would have heard a different story about it and could have complained and caused enough noise to shut the whole thing down. Now, normally, I wouldn't have focused on those other groups, but I've had some people coach me on how. How do you communicate well, so that everybody is at least informed, so that they can either be neutral or even be supportive of it.

This is new. And so there's a lot of people who think that it's not going to work. And for a variety of reasons, they say, oh, I don't believe in it, or I don't buy into it, or it can't make sense. And so our approach to naysayers is, first of all, to make sure they understand the vision that we're aiming for. And I'll be honest with you, when you can share and articulate the vision that we're aiming for, most people actually buy into that vision. So then once you get them bought in the vision, it's really about, what about the implementation? Okay, I get where we want to go, but what's it look like? And there it's getting people over their fear of doing something different. So it's really back to about change. People are afraid of schools not looking the way that they know them to look, which is very uncomfortable. And so you really have to. To work through fears with people. What are you afraid of? What will happen if we do that? Okay, well, if you're afraid of that, what can we do to mitigate that fear? And so it really becomes an exercise in getting people to overcome their fears, which are very normal, very natural, and then see it start to work, and then begin to buy into a vision that they really do care about.

If we're talking about converting an existing school, there is this really interesting question. How do you even get started? And one local district I know did a very interesting process where they essentially put out a request for proposal RFP to all the schools in their district, and they were very clear about the outcomes. They had in mind very different school models that used personalization for Each student, but they weren't dictatorial about the how. And they let every school that was interested voluntarily go after it design their own school models. And then they picked the ones that they thought were most compelling and provided them some early seed funding and then eventually some implementation money. But it was essentially a competition to see the best ideas come up as the first starting point, what was important.

The first cycle of design, and I call that design 1.0, that was my first year in this district, was inviting teams of principals and teachers to a design conversation. And we used a blend of outside consultants and our own staff to lead with questions. The best question was, if you could design a school of the future now, what would it look like? And that was a question that I posed to our principals that first year. And they went off and designed for a couple months, came back, then we just massaged them and then we launched, amazingly, two blended learning schools with four months advanced planning. It's really, I've actually never done work this fast in my career. A little scary and tremendously rewarding.

There's a second approach as well, which is, if you want, we've talked about how conversions are really tricky. So make your conversion like a startup. What I mean by that is find the areas in your school that are greenfield, if you will, where there's total opportunity to invent from scratch what you're doing. Every school has plenty of these opportunities where you can literally invent your model from scratch and then start thinking about all those tricky areas to convert.

So this in your theory would be the non consumption areas?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And we see them in every school. Right, Brent?

Right. So if you think about, you know, after school time, like we've talked about earlier, or summer school, or even an area where you're just doing a really bad job, we offer one foreign language, but what if a student actually wants to learn German? That might be a really interesting place to pilot an online class or a blended class where students are working on very different languages all at the same time, because you're not competing with that superstar German teacher who's already going to be doing a great job on that subject.

And we've seen this work really well. There's a school called the School of One out of New York City that started to do blended learning. And the place that they started was in summer school. And the reason was that they really needed to think and have a space for how to radically personalize learning for every single student. Try that approach, figure out what worked and what didn't iterate and correct course and then really put it into action in schools across the district once they really started to figure it out.

If you're in the startup world, you know this concept of a lean startup or rapid prototyping, we've talked about it, and our final week of this course, week six, is going to all be about rapid prototyping, getting you ready to go launch your blended learning experiment in whatever setting you have. So we'll be coming back to dive to this concept much more deeply in week six. Now to pause at the end of this session. This week, we've covered a lot. We've really looked at what this looks like if we tackle a whole school to do innovation, look at the assumptions we make and ways we can break it down. Before we close out, we're going to have you go back and think about the last piece of this, the budget, and we're going to have Rob come on and talk about your assignment this week, because we think the budget actually makes this real. And we think it's a place where a lot of educators often don't get to spend the time.