
Hack It, Break It, Go Around It
3 Approaches to Innovation in Education
Today’s students will need to create, problem solve, lead and yes, innovate, in careers of the future. How are we preparing them?
One of the insights we found in conversations with executives at Nike and school district leaders was that schools and districts are literally not set up to innovate. At Nike, there are large teams focused solely on the future without any responsibility for today’s business. Few schools or districts have this luxury.
So, how do we innovate in the current system?
Hack the System:
Design-thinking and programs like the Stanford Design School’s School Retool program help educators try simple “hacks” — small changes that let them prototype new approaches to solving problems of practice. These hacks offer immediate, inexpensive feedback to teachers, principals, or anyone trying to change how things work in an individual school or classroom.
At a recent session hosted by Construct Foundation with middle and high school principals in Central Oregon, educators talked about piloting team-taught integrated math classes (math + social studies or math + art) to bring math to life, new CTE programs, or changes as simple as moving the principal’s desk into cafeteria for a week to connect better with the student experience.
All staff trainings at Beaverton High School facilitated by volunteer design-thinking experts at Nike using Design Thinking for Educators gave teachers the chance to identify barriers for students and create solutions through a design thinking process. Two years later, Beaverton High School Principal Anne Erwin says, “We still use design thinking in our PD, teachers are using it in classrooms, and Future You (a program to inspire and engage students developed in partnership with Nike) continues to guide our work every day. We offered three concrete actions (prototypes) this year to inform our next strategic plan and the actions are generating new ideas and positive results.”
Don’t forget the power of student innovation. Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon, where graduation rates went from a low of 53% in 2013/2014 to 73% in 2016/2017, let Leadership students identify ways to improve their freshman on track rate. Students talked to Freshman and went through a design thinking process to come up with solutions including creating a video and scheduling middle school visits from upperclassman to make students feel more welcome. Because of strong leadership, we expect the upward trend in grad rates to continue and surpass the Oregon state average of 77%.
Break the System:
In high-profile urban districts like Chicago, DC, New Orleans, and Denver where there are schools clearly failing a large percentage of their students, consortiums of funders have invested in starting new schools (charters or innovative district models) or redesigning schools to better serve students.
Like it or not, large, urban school districts are not typically high performing organizations. If there are strong principals and school leadership teams who can be supported through ambitious change programs, the best way to improve outcomes for students is to push ownership (and accountability) as far down the org chart as possible, giving control for as many decisions as possible to the leaders closest to the students. Doing so creates a portfolio model where schools have autonomy (and often don’t look the same because of that autonomy), students have choices within their district, and districts shift their role to one focused on accountability and making sure there are sufficient choices for every student.
One average-sized district of 4,200 students able to navigate a transformational change district-wide is Lindsay Unified in Central California. Profiled in Robert Marzano’s 2017 book “Beyond Reform,” Lindsay Unified’s academic indicators soared while their discipline rates dropped over the last 5 years (current graduation rate is 93%) by reimagining the entire system through the lens of student needs, clearly defining what it means to be successful (clue: it wasn’t just about meeting standards), transitioning to a performance-based system, transforming the role of teachers to learning facilitators, and investing in technology and connectivity to give all students access to learning whenever and wherever they needed it.
For those leaders ambitious enough to break the system, you’ll likely need:
- Outside financial support of private foundations and a leading “quarterback” to help coordinate funding, implementation, measurement and recalibration.
- A well-thought out plan for implementation with training and significant supports for teachers, students, parents and all leaders adapting to a new way of doing things. Change is hard and many good ideas fail in the implementation.
- A growth mindset and tolerance for failure for the adults — you will hit obstacles and some of your best ideas will fail. Learn from those failures and commit to serving every student better.
- Courage. “Expect some things to seem impossible,” is how Tom Rooney, Superintendent at Lindsay Unified, put it in a speech at LearnLaunch in Boston this year.
Go Around the System:
As the impact of poverty, homelessness, violence, mental health crises and the opioid epidemic have made it harder and harder for schools to do their job of educating our children, many school leaders have partnered with nonprofit organizations, county health departments and municipal social service agencies to provide wraparound services to students and families, leveraging schools’ status as the center of the community. Food pantries, social workers, health clinics, summer school enrichment programs, and other wrap-around services now augment traditional in-school and after-school programs.
Schools need coordinators like Communities in Schools to help students and families navigate and leverage the nonprofit and government services in their area, so that educators can focus on student learning inside and outside the school building.
This handy Community Schools Playbook (separate from the Community in Schools organization) shares model legislation and school board policies to catalyze Community Schools, as well as implementation guides and resources to start your own Community School.
Diplomas Now, a program developed out of Johns Hopkins University, brings data-informed best practices for school reform together with integrated social services from Communities in Schools and tutoring from City Year.
Hack it, break it, go around it
Educators need financial and programmatic support, time and space away from their everyday duties, and the public support to try new things that might not always work. Even programs or new approaches that are evidence-based and have been effective elsewhere can fail in a different context with different people, and especially if there is not clear leadership ensuring implementation fidelity to the model that was proven to work.
Change is hard, but our kids are worth it. We applaud the fearless leaders who are courageously putting their schools on a path to transformation.
