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.

The role of the teacher, and 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 the

vision of what's school and learning should be at the

board level with their principles and with our teachers union.

They were very early in the process.

And so giving people a hunger for, actually, dissatisfaction.

Like, the, the current model doesn;t work for some kids or some teachers.

So how can we create I would say, a

desire to change the model of teaching and learning.

We thought about the, 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 develop 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 sofware, that's the bleded learning part.

certainly student outcomes.

And, 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 plants

it we've seen how that works over decades of school leadership.

It, 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 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

themself, the challenges I think might have overwhelmed them.

That they had

colleagues at another school to support them.

the innovation is, 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, to figure out blended learning there.

but I'm super excited about what's going on in our schools.

It's just, it's, 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 re-invention and re-design works, they did a couple of really smart things.

The first was that they used those inter-session 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 into a little bit of innovation.

It's that we say in our culture, in 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, the people who might otherwise be obstructionist.

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, and maybe in 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 you know, I've had some people coach me on 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 its not going to work and for a variety

of reasons they say oh I don't believe in it or

oh 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

have to really work through fears with people.

What are you afraid of? What will happen if we do that?

What will, okay, well, if you're afraid of

that, what can we do to mitigate that fear?

And so it's 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 in to a vision that they really do care about.

>> If we're talking about converting an existing school, there's

this really interesting question of, 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 school in their district.

And they were very clear about the outcomes they had in mind.

Very different school models that use personalization for each student.

But they weren't dictitorial about the how, and they let

every school that was interested volun, voluntarily go after it.

Design their own school models, and then they picked the ones 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,

and our own staff to, to lead with questions.

And the best questions 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 and we just massaged them.

And then we launched, amazingly, two blended

learning schools with four months advanced planning.

Really, It's, I, I'd actually never done work this fast in my career.

And it's a little scary, and, 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 start-up.

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. >> 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

at 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 prototype.

And 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.

Assembling the Team and Getting Started II

Blended Learning: Personalizing Education for Students

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