From Reopen to Reinvent. Michael B. Horn

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The pattern is straightforward. A threat galvanizes resources, but a leader must not stay in that framing. Creating an independent team to take on the threat enables the organization to reframe it as an opportunity. That allows the organization to escape a top-down, command-and-control response and reinvent the experience.

      Southern New Hampshire University:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxYZgmoeIuM

WHAT THIS COULD LOOK LIKE IN K–12 SCHOOLS

      When talking to K–12 education leaders, this framework can feel overwhelming and even impossible. How could administrators possibly grant the required autonomy short of forming a wholly new school? That's what the Hawken School, a prestigious private school near Cleveland, did, for example, to pioneer mastery-based learning. It created a school called the Mastery School of Hawken. And it's what another prestigious private school, Lakeside School in Seattle, did to launch a new microschool, the Downtown School, at a significantly lower price point.

      Is this strategy out of reach then for public schools?

      No.

      In K–12 schools, an autonomous team could take many forms. A superintendent could free a group of educators in a district from their day-to-day roles and task them with reimagining what they might offer. This group might function as a separate team within a school and pioneer either a new classroom model or a novel way of offering a particular subject or grade. The independent group could also exist as a school within a school, a microschool, or a learning pod. It could also create a new school entirely.

The charge might be to design a more compelling experience that focuses less on the time students are taught and more on helping each child develop character and habits of success, like agency and executive function skills; ensuring each child has a strong social, emotional, and health foundation with a reservoir of social capital; and rather than simply focusing on the teaching of academic knowledge and skills, making sure each child learns and masters those that are critical and allows them to build passions and develop their unique potential. The traditional hierarchy in a district could continue to focus on operating schools as we've known them, while this group focuses on implementing different innovations designed to give teachers and students more support.

      This model suggests a new way for districts to engage with microschools and learning pods. Many districts have viewed these emergent schools as threats to the way they have always operated or things that will create inequity. But the threat–opportunity perspective helps us see that districts could reframe microschools and learning pods as something they themselves could operate to make sure that all children have deep and healthy social relationships. They could envision them as part of a mosaic of offerings so that they are able to provide an array of options that fit the different circumstances of all students and families. And they could see them as ways to offer personalized learning experiences for children's particular needs so that children don't fall behind in learning to read or doing math or in the exploration of coherent bodies of knowledge.

      The key is to escape threat rigidity by arming a relatively independent team of educators absolved from their existing responsibilities. However it's done, the autonomy and focus is critical.

      As Jeff Wetzler, cofounder of Transcend Education, a school design consultancy, said, “[The work is] time consuming. We have yet to find a way for this to work without some protected time and space. If you just try to jam it into the existing schedule, it just doesn't happen.”

Or as Tavenner said, “School doesn't stop. Usually educators think ‘I get one week to do my master visioning’ in the summer and that's it.”¹⁴ That's not enough time to rethink the possibilities for an already-antiquated schooling model and view it as a true greenfield opportunity.

We dig deeper throughout the book on how to rethink schooling, but there's one final observation in Gilbert's findings worth highlighting.

In his research, an outside party wielded significant influence with each of the newspapers that moved successfully from seeing the Internet as a threat to viewing it as an opportunity and tasking an independent group to chase it. A board member, associate, or someone new to the organization would say that the newspaper must question its fundamental assumptions around what their online site and the supporting structure should look like rather than simply replicating what they already had—just online. As Gilbert wrote, “Involving outside influence when deciding how to respond to discontinuous change will increase the likelihood that managers will structurally differentiate a new venture from its parent organization.”¹⁵

In schools, that implies that school boards and the broader community have a critical role to play in giving permission to or pushing school and district leadership to create relatively independent entities that pioneer new ways of schooling—whether those arrangements are new schools, schools within schools, microschools, or learning pods. As Gilbert wrote, “Outside influence, structural differentiation, and opportunity framing [that] combine to relax routine rigidity in a new venture” were consistently critical in times of discontinuous change.¹⁶ Examples from real districts help show what that arrangement and sequencing can look like.

      Mastery School of Hawken:

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ2Pk6TcQCU

      Kettle Moraine

About 30 minutes outside Milwaukee sits the Kettle Moraine School District. A suburban school district with 11 schools that serve just under 4,000 students who hail mostly from middle- and upper-income families, the district was considered relatively high-performing, with over 80 percent of graduates enrolling in postsecondary education and training each year.

      Beneath the positive results, however, there were opportunities to improve. Only 45 percent of students were completing their postsecondary programs—below the national average. With a threat identified, the district marshaled resources to address the challenge.

      The district didn't maintain the threat framing. Once it had galvanized resources, it moved to create a variety of independent environments in which to personalize learning through microschools—schools within schools in this case—of no more than 180 students. Each had its own unique spin. Kettle Moraine authorized three charter schools on its high school campus and one at one of its elementary schools to help implement a mastery-based model that personalizes learning, along with seven “houses” in its middle school.

      Within each learning environment, educators implemented comprehensive, data-rich learner profiles and customized learning paths for each student in which students' progress is contingent upon their performance. Its elementary micro charter school, for example, centers around projects. Students use the projects to demonstrate mastery of the required competencies. Another microschool at the high school level allows students to earn nursing and emergency medical technician certifications.

With a high degree of accountability in place, the innovations appear to be working.¹⁷ Results on the PISA exam, the OECD's Test for Schools, would rank the district among the top countries in the world. According to Education Week, the students in the district's traditional high school performed СКАЧАТЬ