It’s time for a collective time out.
I’ve thrown a lot at you these last few
months, and with the 25th
annual Model Schools Conference fast approaching, let’s take a step back
and ask, “What have we learned so far?”
Lesson #1: Culture Trumps Strategy
What are your core values? What are your
goals? How will you achieve them? What do you believe about student learning
and achievement?
High-performing schools have developed a crystal-clear
vision of what they want to accomplish. They foster a culture that supports and
encourages positive change. Until you can articulate a vision, you will too often
just be spinning your wheels. Until you develop a positive culture, any
strategy you employ ultimately will fail.
Our organizational structure, our entire
culture, is grounded in our traditional vision of public education. We exist to
prepare students for the middle class. There’s just one small problem: the
middle class is disappearing.
This is a phenomenon I call “the missing
middle,” and it is being dramatically accelerated by the emergence of the Fourth
Industrial Revolution. Simply put, this revolution is the combination of biotech,
nanotech, and information technology. It is creating cyber-physical systems,
the Internet of Things and the Internet of Systems.
That’s a problem. To believe it’s OK to
prepare students for middle-class jobs is to believe in a future which will
exits for few of them. Unless we change, many students face a life of low-skill
labor and no real chance for self-sufficiency.
Lesson #2: Change Must Be Evolutionary
You know what happens to revolutionaries,
don’t you? They get pushed back, if not killed! So, change must be
evolutionary.
How do you get started? Step one is to adopt
the practice of zero-based
budgeting. This form of budgeting forces you to justify your expenses for
each new period. More importantly, it encourages continual goal- and
innovation-driven thinking.
What if you began building your budget by
asking, “What do we need to do right now to prepare every student in our school
for successful careers and lives?”
Lesson #3: Adopt a Growth Mindset Model
Most schools today operate with a fixed mindset philosophy. Alas, nothing
much changes in a fixed-mindset school.
Schools with a growth
mindset philosophy operate differently—much differently. They focus on
getting their students ready for the world after school. They don’t obsess
about the next test, the next grade or even the next level of education.
Instead they try to envision what the world
will look like in three to five years and then build back their instructional
programs from that point.
Lesson #4: The Learning Criteria
The Successful
Practices Network, of which I serve as chairman, developed — and the International Center for Leadership in
Education uses — the Learning
Criteria to help schools better evaluate their students, with the goal of
creating well-rounded students ready to succeed in school – and beyond.
The Learning Criteria consists of four
components: Foundation
learning, stretch learning, personal skill development and learner engagement.
Most schools focus on foundation learning—knowledge
a school requires all students to achieve. Sounds logical. But it’s wrong. Most
schools, sadly, can’t get their students beyond foundation learning, and therefore
never reach the three other levels.
Rapidly successful schools take a different
approach. They focus on personal skill development first, and then move to student
engagement and stretch learning.
Guess what? In this scenario, foundation
learning takes care of itself!
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