This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on May 8, 2018.

As more and more school systems across the country explore competency-based education (CBE), we need to be attentive to the processes that will actually allow such innovations to thrive. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on March 21, 2018.

Last week’s New York Times Fixes column highlighted the enormous promise of PowerMyLearning, a framework and tool that connects teachers, families, and students. The approach marks a departure from run-of-the-mill family engagement strategies like infrequent parent-teacher conferences or once yearly back-to-school nights. Instead, as the article outlines, PowerMyLearning deliberately integrates efforts to engage families with efforts to improve academics by regularly looping families into collaborative homework activities and opening online, data-driven communication channels between teachers and families. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on October 27, 2017.

With the last round of ESSA plans rolling in this fall, states have put a stake in the ground. Education leaders across the nation have all articulated what they hope their school systems will look like in the coming years, and spelled out the strategies that they hope will get them there.

But Disruptive Innovation Theory suggests a risk on states’ road ahead: processes that dominated the past can wreak havoc on best-laid plans.

All organizations—for-profit, nonprofit, public, and private—have a model that consists of three things: resources, processes, and priorities (RPP). Our research shows that in the formative stages of an organization, the available resources determine much of what gets done. But as an organization matures, like most decades-old state agencies and school districts, the people working in the organization gradually come to assume that the processes and priorities they’ve repeatedly used in the past are the right way to do their work. Those processes and priorities become ingrained in an organization’s culture. How an organization brings in revenue further entrenches its RPP. In the case of state agencies and districts, if existing ways of doing business keep the budget afloat, they quickly become habit.

An organization’s RPP in turn spells the fate of which innovations the organization is willing to pursue. Mature organizations naturally pursue sustaining innovations—that is, innovations that align with their time-honored processes and priorities. Meanwhile, disruptive innovations—innovations that upend or compete with existing priorities—almost always get neglected or ignored in mature organizations. That’s because they don’t make sense to the organization’s established RPP.

This phenomenon helps explain what reformers often bemoan as a “status quo bias” that frustrates new ideas in education. Although that bias is often cast as a political problem, it is also, in fact, an organizational management problem. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on October 12, 2017.

Sometimes I worry that the call to personalize learning is actually code for asking leaders and teachers to do more than they’ve ever been asked to do—but without additional resources to do it.

And by resources, I mostly mean time.

This is especially true for traditional systems that may be aiming to adopt new approaches to teaching and learning but less willing to do away with legacy structures. Innovation theory shows us that in industry after industry, existing organizations often default to hybrid innovations that combine new technologies or approaches with old ways of doing business. Put differently, rather than actually making any real tradeoffs, organizations may start doing new things without stopping doing old things.

Noble as these efforts may be, school systems risk layering on more and more responsibilities and processes in the name of personalization, without new resources or more efficient processes to support those additional duties. And although dedicated teachers and staff may be able to carry that load part of the way, the “just do more” approach hardly bodes well for scaling such efforts in the future.

Although schools may manage to add more time on the margins, personalized learning at scale will likely require a massive rethinking of how schools use time, alongside pursuing new efficiencies that can save time. I was reminded of this while reading Silicon Schools’ recent reporton its past five years supporting new and redesigned schools in the California Bay Area. In it, the fund’s leaders share actionable insights about the promise and pitfalls of personalized approaches. Among these takeaways, the word “time” appears a total of 39 times in the report’s 27 pages.

Specifically, the report highlights a vital reality on the ground: how schools use time is a balancing act. The report enumerates tradeoffs schools personalizing learning have had to weigh: how much time students should spend working on their own versus in groups; how much time students should be in front of screens versus offline; how much time students should work on content that is at versus above their current instructional level.

Looking beyond just Silicon Schools’ portfolio, thinking through such tradeoffs extends to the structures of entire school systems aiming to personalize instruction. It’s in making—or failing to make—these tradeoffs, however, that efforts to build a coherent personalized system risk getting stuck.

How can systems tackle time tradeoffs? In some cases this means looking for new instructional approaches that slice and dice time differently; in others this means seeking out automation and efficiencies; and in other this means wholly rethinking the structure of the school day. Here’s three levers schools could leverage to fundamentally rethink time: (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on July 14, 2017.

This week saw the release of the third in a series of personalized learning studies conducted by the RAND Corporation. The research analyzed implementation, survey, and efficacy data in a sample of schools that are part of the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) portfolio, and compared that data to a national sample of schools. The findings? NGLC schools yielded some positive academic results, but educators and administrators reported numerous challenges. And in some cases, such as how often teachers reported “keeping up-to-date documentation of student strengths, weaknesses, and goals,” the researchers detected little to no difference between personalized NGLC schools versus traditional schools. (NB: For those familiar with last 2015 RAND report on personalized learning by the same authors, it’s worth noting a crucial distinction: this new study analyzed a group of 32 schools only 16 of which were included in the set of over 60 schools in the 2015 sample, which helps to explain some divergent conclusions drawn between the two.)

Advocates for and critics against personalized learning will inevitably interpret these findings in wildly different ways.

Long-time advocates hoping to dismantle traditional factory-based instructional approaches can use the academic findings to cite the potential promise of personalized models. And they can defend apparent shortcomings by pointing out that the smaller sample of NGLC schools does not represent the numerous other promising personalized learning efforts afoot across the country. At the same time, those critical of the fever pitch around personalized learning can use the mere modest gains and numerous challenges that researchers surfaced to downplay its potential. Already, headlines reporting on the findings alluded to the ‘hyped’ or overblown ambitions of personalized learning.

But stepping back, what some would call promising or hyped I would call nascent. I’m skeptical of how much the particular research findings in this most recent report should extend to making broad statements about personalized learning in either direction. Put differently, I’m not sure the study would really give anyone reason to either celebrate or denounce personalized learning. The academic gains are positive, but hard to attribute back to specific practices or inputs. And the challenges implementers reported are real, but shouldn’t be conflated with efficacy of personalized practices themselves.

Instead, if we can acknowledge that schools are still extremely early in developing and implementing instructional models that personalize along a range of dimensions, then we should be wary of treating any research at this stage as an authoritative source on whether or not something so new and ill-defined actually “works” writ large.

This is not to say that RAND did a bad job trying to make sense of a new and evolving set of instructional and structural shifts afoot in schools. The researchers were handed a sample of NGLC schools attempting to personalize learning in a wide variety of ways. The researchers then tried to measure those practices along dimensions like competency-based learning that are themselves still hard to calibrate, and compare them to traditional schools. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on June 20, 2017. 

On the heels of a series of PR nightmares facing Uber’s executives, headlines and speculation about what’s next for the company abound. Some investors have continued to defend the company’s evidently toxic culture, suggesting that once successful entrepreneurs have built a successful product or service, they then can afford to worry about factors like company norms. Others, like Freada Kapor Klein have been less willing to let the company off the hook.

Both sides, however, seem to agree that Uber now needs to commit to fundamentally reshaping its culture. This, of course, may be easier said than done. Company culture is not something that can change over night, which begs the thorny question that USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava put best: Can Uber really change?

Although many school systems’ woes may pale in comparison to allegations permeating Uber, the question of whether entrenched systems can “really change” rings true through education circles today. All too often, new efforts die on the vine if a school culture isn’t lining up around those efforts. And in most reform circles, discussions about change management or school transformation inevitably circle back to nailing school culture. But we often remain short on the specifics of how to do so.

Luckily, innovation theory can help to surface insights on how schools might both measure and change culture. Here are three tips on what we’ve learned about culture, process, and change inside and outside of education:

1. Find recurring problems

More often than not, discussions of school culture can feel vague. Successful leaders can rarely pinpoint the alchemy of what’s working, and culturally fraught schools can, like Uber employees, feel that all is not well but may struggle to find their way to a solution.

The first step for changing culture is realizing that it can indeed be broken down into something cognizable and measurable. Perhaps counter-intuitively, culture rarely presents itself through well-meaning mission statements or strategy documents. Rather, it manifests itself in repeated processes that are so common that they become virtually unconscious.

This means that measuring the actual components of culture cannot be accomplished merely through school climate surveys that offer self-reported data from staff or students. Although these instruments may help to take the temperature of school culture, they rarely reveal the factors actually contributing to it.

School culture, rather, should be identified through leaders and teachers gaining clear sense of the processes guiding day-to-day practice. Culture results from students and teachers solving problems in a certain way; that solution becomes repeated over and over until it is so ingrained that no one has to think anymore. Schools have many processes and priorities that can coalesce over time into a shared culture. If these processes themselves are broken or routinely marginalize certain actors or priorities, then so too will the culture be broken. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on May 12, 2017.

In an effort to modernize school systems, communities around the country are beginning to revisit what graduating high school should really mean. Some are doing so by creating an ideal “profile of a graduate,” articulating the range of skills and habits a successful high school graduate ought to possess. The organization EdLeader21 has begun to curate a gallery of emerging profiles from around the country and provide tools to school systems hoping to create their own. A great synthesis of these initiatives lives on its new site, Profile of a Graduate. If you haven’t already, it’s worth a look.

These new visions mark a promising first step to updating our century-old school system. Innovations grow along the metrics by which we hold them to account. And the emergence of multi-dimensional graduate profiles hint that schools are evolving beyond using average test scores as the sole metric guiding K–12 school reform. But skimming through these new and expanded definitions of success had me at once excited and worried. Amidst a number of bold metrics that profiles depict, a crucial ingredient remains missing from most emerging profiles of what makes for a successful graduate: his network.

A student’s network—both his access to strong- and weak-tie relationships and his ability to mobilize those relationships—can drive his access to opportunity in postsecondary and beyond. Indeed, an estimated 50 percent of jobs come through personal connections. Not to mention, access to networks has been shown to shape everything from health outcomes to investment prospects over the course of adults’ lives. In the shorter term, access to formal and informal mentors can have real impact on students’ engagement in school and success in postsecondary pursuits.

These assets are particularly crucial for schools worried about equitable outcomes among their graduates: like the skills gaps plaguing our education system, there are likewise network gaps. Given external forces like increasing residential segregation and disparate enrichment spending, much as some students’ find themselves on the wrong side of stubborn achievement gaps, many find themselves on the wrong side of mentor gaps as well. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on April 25, 2017. 

Earlier this month, after two exhilarating and exhausting days at the Blended and Personalized Learning Conference in Providence, R.I., (which we cohosted with our partners at Highlander Institute and The Learning Accelerator), I boarded an evening flight back to D.C. Just after takeoff, a school principal from Virginia seated in the row just ahead of me poked his head through the seat to ask:

“So, what’s the difference between blended and personalized learning?”

First off, I want to say kudos to this school leader, who had also attended the conference. Over 48 hours of sharing practices, research, and challenges had me running on fumes. But he was tireless and eager to push the conversation forward.

Second, this moment felt distinctly like a healthy dose of karma given the title we had used for the conference. Not wanting to box ourselves too narrowly into one approach or model, we had taken the route of dubbing the conference theme “blended and personalized learning.” That phrase has become so common in the education lexicon that it’s almost like a single, deeply unfortunate compound noun—blendedandpersonalizedlearning. It’s a mouthful. Not to mention, it hardly lends itself to a pithy hashtag.

I particularly don’t recommend overusing the phrase because collapsing these two terms—blended and personalized—risks diluting the clarity of each and confusing the leaders and educators expected to do the hard work of educating real students in real schools.

So here’s the gist of what I discussed with that school principal, and how we at the Christensen Institute try to make a clear distinction between these related but distinct terms.

Blended learning is a modality of instruction. As we at the Christensen Institute define it, blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns: (more…)

This post first appeared at the Christensen Institute on April 12, 2017. 

“Racism and inequity are products of design. They can be redesigned.”

These words echoed from the keynote speakers at the annual Blended and Personalized Learning Conference (BPLC) in Providence, R.I., last weekend.

On April 1st, in partnership with Highlander Institute and The Learning Accelerator, the Christensen Institute co-hosted the BPLC for the second year in a row. To build the agenda we used our Blended Learning Universe to recruit innovative school leaders and educators to share their tactics and practices at the cutting edge of school innovation. We also looked for presenters who were wrestling down the challenging gaps in racial and socioeconomic equity that have for too long dominated our education system.

To that end, our keynote address, presented by Caroline Hill, who leads school creation and transformation at CityBridge Education and is founder of the DC Equity Lab, and Michelle Molitor, founder and CEO of Fellowship for Race & Equity in Education (FREE), focused on how we might reframe the conversation about personalized learning to bring equity to the forefront of school and classroom redesign.

As much as we hear “equity” talked about as a value in our education system, it can be a difficult to tackle head on. Since our own inception, the Christensen Institute has been committed to researching and supporting approaches to instruction that break open the factory model of school. We believe that, particularly in light of the growth of online and blended learning, we are living in an era in which we can feasibly redesign school around students’ needs and strengths and free up teachers to teach individual and small groups of students more often. But we don’t just research these trends because they are innovative—but because they are imperative. (more…)

This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute on January 24, 2017. 

Julia Freeland Fisher

Good management is hard. Typically, employees grow into manager roles over time. In most industries, employees must first prove themselves effective at their own job; then, they may take on some administrative duties; and only much later do leaders oversee large groups of employees and become responsible for motivating, training, and retaining them.

But two major institutions buck this trend: our schools and our military. In both, newly minted young professionals are asked to take on management roles from the very start. And surpassing even the number of direct reports young military officers oversee, teachers must manage upwards of 30 people the moment they set foot in school: their students.

For any manager, numbers like these are daunting—and having the right systems in place to manage effectively can make all the difference. Good managers motivate and inspire; they move their charges forward toward individual and shared goals; they create structures that provide predictability; and they provide feedback that helps their employees improve over time. And amidst all of this, workplaces are changing and management practices have to adapt alongside them.

As theories of effective management have continued to evolve in the 21st century, teachers—some of our most unsung and overworked mangers—stand to benefit from developments in management science. This begs the question: how might teachers borrow from promising management practices in our country’s top companies?

In a new playbook out this week, our Adjunct Fellow Heather Staker tackles this question. “How to Create Higher Performing, Happier Classrooms in 7 Moves: A Playbook for Teachers” looks at vanguard management practices that are making their way into exciting new classroom models. The playbook summarizes findings from a yearlong pilot project in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project, led by Mallory Dwinal, David Richards, and Jennifer Wu, looked systematically at the structures and processes that high-performing managers at cutting-edge companies like Google, Zappos, and Geico have put into place to create their dynamic cultures. The researchers chose their target companies by consulting Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” list, case studies from Harvard Business School, and analyst reports.

What are managers at these firms doing right? (more…)