One of the questions in my job interview for my current role as Executive Director of School Renewal was about how I keep up on innovative work happening around the country.  At the time, I was a charter high school principal, working in a Charter Management Organization that was part of a network of schools and districts at the forefront of the Deeper Learning movement.  The trendy acronyms weren’t just part of my vocabulary – PBL, RTI, Personalization, Performance Assessment – they were part of my experience.  Just a few years prior I had spent a year at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I felt like the constant flow of guest speakers – the Secretary of Education, the President of the NEA, the producers of Waiting for Superman, the director of education initiatives for the Gates Foundation, to name a few – exposed me to the broad movements happening in education in our country and around the world, to say nothing of the content of my coursework.  I started to list the sources to the interview panel.

“Yeah, that’s nice, but how do you plan to stay connected to innovation in the sector?”  I guess Santa Ana wasn’t going to be a place where I could rest on my laurels.

Which all leads to the question, How can I be deliberate in designing a workflow that is heavy in its diet of new ideas, impactful application of concepts, and exploration of what inspires and motivates the people around me?  Here’s three sources that I turn to on a weekly, if not daily, basis to keep myself connected and inspired.

Listen to Podcasts

There’s a reason this is first on my list, and I’ll readily admit my addiction.  When I’m biking in to work or travelling from school to school, I’m always listening to podcasts.  Some of the podcasts I choose are obvious in their connection to innovation in the education sector.  I’m religious about listening to Getting Smart, produced by Tom VanderArk and his team that captures the breadth of innovation in education in a way I simply haven’t seen anywhere else.  I’m equally passionate about Design Matters. Debbie Millman has been producing this podcast for 10 years, and I’m consistently inspired and intrigued by her lineup of artists and designers.  I similarly enjoyed the Creative Mornings podcasts, although that seems to have been a single season phenomenon.  I also appreciate broader conversations about policy and political movements in the country – from Slate’s Political Gabfest to Vox’s In the Weeds.  I’ve tried a few different apps to manage my podcasts, including Apple’s built-in app for the iPhone.  Right now, my top choice is Overcast.

There are two reasons why I gravitate towards podcasts.  First, I’m on the move a lot, and listening is often the only (relatively) safe mode of input.  Second, I don’t have a lot of additional time in my daily schedule.  Part of my productivity and workflow crusade is to find ways to deepen my knowledge base and gain access to new ideas in ways that don’t necessarily extend my work day.

I also don’t want to give the impression that I’m always trying to maximize productivity when I’m on the move.  I’m a human being and definitely need to decompress at times as well.  Sometimes I do that with music, but more often then not I’m listening to a range of podcasts that are nothing more than fun and interesting.

Curate Your Reading

In the past, we relied on magazine editors to curate ideas and concepts on our behalf.  I think there is still an important role for expert curation within any given field of study or subculture, and I haven’t lost my love for the packaged imagery and writing of a good magazine.

But the days of turning to Edweek as our sole or even primary source of insight are long gone.  Our digital environment has liberated content in ways that can vastly expand our exposure to new ideas.  The blogosphere often gives us access to a more informal and honest discussion threads.  I’m an even bigger fan of apps and sites that build in curation functionality to make it easier to find and manage interesting writing.  Just like Pandora or Spotify allow you to curate your music playlists, an app like Flipbook or a site like Medium allow you to curate sources for your reading.  I glean a lot of insight from other sectors – from business and health to leadership and psychology – by explicitly adding these topics to my reading list.  And the technology keeps getting better and more intelligent.  I can find content using increasingly precise search language.

And if you, like me, really do have a love for beautiful print, you can join a subscription service like Stack, that delivers a different high-quality independent magazine to your door each month.  This approach adds the element of surprise, as you never know what magazine is going to show up.  Just like the advent of clothes box subscriptions or farmers market baskets, this type of magazine subscription can really open up new possibilities we didn’t expect or that might be out of our comfort zone.

Get Out of Your Space 

It’s almost a leadership cliche – get your people out to see innovative work happening in other places.  We know how powerful it can be to see real human beings pushing the boundaries in real organizations.  Yet it’s still really hard to do.  A lot of the difficulty comes from the basic demands of schooling – our students come to us every day to learn.  Leaving for even just a day has its consequences.  We find ourselves painstakingly weighing the tradeoffs of leaving our classrooms and schools and the potential professional learning and insight that awaits.

And it’s no easier on the receiving side.  It’s hard to host visitors.  Substitutes and classroom coverage have to be arranged.  If you want to talk to teachers and administrators about their transformational practices, they have to step outside of the system.  It takes a real commitment to professional learning to commit the necessary resources – and even when we do, it’s hard to create the mental space to focus exclusively on our learning, and not the daily exigencies of the classroom or front office.

But it’s absolutely necessary.

Perhaps no strategy better informs a broad perspective on what is possible in our schools and organizations.  While these visits may necessarily be more limited than the daily access to listening or reading, they should still form a purposeful and planned part of our professional workflow.  We need visitation goals on an annual, if not monthly basis.  Some of those learning moments can certainly be on the receiving end, when we welcome visitors into our own schools and classrooms and encourage an honest discussion about what is working and what needs working.

What is equity and how is it different from equality?  If you’ve been to an education conference or been through a graduate school course in school leadership recently, you’ve probably had at least one conversation framed around this image.  It certainly can inspire some good conversations.

I’m at the iNACOL blended and online learning symposium this week in San Antonio.  The symposium brings together over 3000 idealists, futurists, digital learning advocates, edtech firms and educators, and this year the theme of the conference is “Innovation for Equity + Redefining Success.”  We’re only a few sessions in, and I’ve already seen this equity image three different times.  The underlying assumption is that moving towards competency-based education is inherently equity focused.  Certainly the five core elements, including an insistence on meaningful assessment and timely, differentiated support hint at an equity-focused theory of action for our classrooms and schools.

So, before I go too far, let me reinforce my belief that concepts of competency-based and personalized learning are ideals that I aspire to for my own children and for the education systems I work to transform.  It’s hard to argue that strong, positive relationships with adults and authentic, transparent systems of assessment and feedback aren’t important ingredients of any quality education system.

Yet I think the conversation has to push deeper.

Saying things like “all students will get what they need to succeed” is not, in my opinion, a definitive statement about equity.  Yes, pushing for our most marginalized or impoverished students to have access to competency-based, personalized learning environments is important work.  But isn’t trying to provide the same level of access and opportunity more closely associated with a push for equality?  Isn’t equity about bringing outcomes into closer alignment?

In many ways, privileged, mostly White, students already have access to a competency-based education system.  Perhaps it’s not defined as a user-adaptive content delivery system at the school, but in terms of skills-based, personalized learning, it’s already deeply ingrained.  Need to learn collaboration and teamwork skills?  Afternoon soccer leagues or dance classes probably fit the bill.  Need to build global and historical awareness?  Travel opportunities can’t hurt.  From packed skill-based summer opportunities to ongoing access to enrichment experiences tailored to kids’ interests, personalization is a way of life for kids and families with the means to make it happen.  Resources are often mobilized when gaps in learning present themselves.

Of course this isn’t to say that students of color living in poverty don’t have access to amazing experiences and opportunities for learning or that incredible sacrifices aren’t being made to ensure a quality education for kids.  Whether it’s access to multiple languages spoken in the home or access to role models who personify tenacity, poor and marginalized students bring powerful assets to the table.

I think to foster a real conversation about equity, the entire field of competency-based and personalized learning needs to ask more questions and not assume it already knows what will ameliorate decades and centuries of inequitable practices in schools and society.  We need more sessions about racial identity and the effects of marginalization.  We need more awareness about how poverty and power dynamics influence and drive resource allocation and accountability policy.  Just going back to the conference theme – what do we think “innovation for equity” means?  I want more of that conversation.

“Focus your attention on shaping the work as close to the classroom as you can, not on shaping the decisions above you.”

Whether or not I want the title, I’m sometimes seen as the “charter school guy.”  Of course I loved being the principal at City Arts & Tech High School, an arts & digital media focused charter in San Francisco.  I’m biased, of course, but it’s genuinely a fantastic school.  So having spent time in an innovative, fast-paced charter environment is certainly an important part of my professional narrative, and there are definitely elements of my charter experience that I would like to see more broadly adopted in my new district home. That creates a natural tension, since I’m now working in a large school district that is having it’s own structural challenges from would-be charter operators in the city.  I see myself as part of the solution to creating an organizational culture that is more nimble, flexible, and responsive to adjust to the shifting wants of the community and the more fundamental sea-change in how people are thinking about education in general.

And yet my charter experience often trips me up in terms of doing the work that I really want to do.  I often fixate on the differences in structures and policies that shape a large bureaucracy like the one I work in, attributing those structural differences as the primary drivers of professional culture and improved learning outcomes for kids.  And yet charters experience the same variability in quality as district schools.  And the financial volatility can be even more extreme.  So yes, sometimes I get caught in the trap of assuming that systems level work is about board policies, association contracts, and superintendent fiat, when I should know better.

We all tend to look above us when we want a scapegoat.  An excuse.  A reason something can’t be done.  Whether it’s Ed Code, board policy, contract language, or a person in a position of authority.  Certainly our context and many actions are shaped and governed by these foundational documents and key stakeholders.  But this is where creative leadership is so powerful.  Regardless of where we sit in the system, we can exercise the leadership necessary to navigate the context in ways that improve outcomes and experiences for learners.  If we don’t get creative – then we often get disillusioned or paralyzed – abdicating both our agency and our responsibility.  Perhaps even more humbling is when we remember that to someone else, we’re the potential obstacle in high places.

So sometimes when I get overly anxious in attempting to negotiate the big pieces – I have to be reminded (often by our Deputy Superintendent) that there is already more good work staring me right in the face than I can possibly do.  It’s right there, waiting for me to take it up.  Of course I can focus my energy and righteous indignation at the inertia of the bureaucracy, or I can do the leadership work necessary to transform the practices I can – and allow the collective impact of those changes to shape the bigger forces around me.

As Heifetz & Linsky remind us – “The toughest problems that groups and communities face are hard precisely because the group or community will not authorize anyone to push them to address those problems.”  Leadership is not about clamoring for permission.  It’s about pushing in the right places.

When you’re a kid, the world around you is about tangible reality.  Concrete-operational stage (hat’s off to you Jean Piaget).  When you look at a shampoo bottle or a chair, you just see the thing.  You don’t really wonder where it came from, why it’s shaped the way it is.  It just is.

As your cognitive world expands, you start to realize that behind a physical product there is a vast world of human decision-making.  Design.  Countless invisible choices have already been made.  Choices about the shape, size, color, texture, and functionality.  There are choices about materials and sources and manufacturing processes.  Questions of liability and ethics and safety hide behind every decision.  You stumble upon a vast web of human messiness.

Too often in our classrooms, we present a world that is neat and orderly.  We hide the complexity.

That’s why I love the movement to bring design thinking into the classroom.  It is an invitation to students to consider themselves not as passive recipients of the world as it already is, but as agents who can and should have a say in what the world around us looks like.  Design is deeply empathetic to the human experience, and isn’t afraid (or at least shouldn’t be) to challenge convention in order to better anticipate and facilitate the needs of human users.  The tools of the designer are, in essence, a bridge into more complex and critical thinking.

I loved seeing students, during the first week of school at Advanced Learning Academy, engaged in design thinking.  In this case, their team of teachers presented a problem to the class – how to conveniently transport their transactional tools like money or credit cards.  In essence, the redesign of a wallet.  Now, most students could quickly sketch out a new wallet design if they were asked.  The key to upping the rigor and complexity is engaging a design process that meaningfully connects the practical features of the product to human needs.

In this case, students interviewed classmates, pushing to understand the user perspective around desired functionality.  After interviewing a pair of classmates, students had to distill what they heard into key findings.

“What is your partner trying to achieve?”

“What new learnings do you have about your partner’s feelings and motivations?”

With a clear statement of purpose, students set about to ideate and prototype possible solutions.  The idea is to capture a broader range of possibilities, pushing past convention in order to really imagine how a product could better attend to user needs and preferences.  Teams then built their most promising ideas into prototype designs, and shared them with their student colleagues to get further feedback and insight about their design choices.  The entire process assumes ongoing reflection and revision – students are not trying to discover THE right design.  Rather, they are iterating their way towards a highly responsive design outcome.

Part of the cognitive push of design thinking is helping students develop an awareness and vocabulary around the collaborative process itself.  In this case, the teachers asked teams to establish criteria for earning team points.  Each team displayed their team-generated criteria on a nearby poster, and the teachers referred to the team posters when engaging students in conversations about the quality of their collaboration.

We often talk in broad terms about collaboration as a key 21st Century Learning skill, without fleshing out the accompanying vocabulary and analytical skills necessary to talk about collaboration in any meaningful or measurable way.  Design thinking helps students recognize that the quality of outcomes is often dependent on the quality of process – and equips them with the vocabulary to reflect and analyze their own contributions to the team.

And let’s not forget that the project was fun.

I’ve been on a lot of school visits.  Personalized learning, blended learning, standards-based grading, competency-based learning, portfolio assessment, project-based learning.  The buzz terms and hyphenated words roll off the tongue.  Anybody can claim them.  “We do personalized learning!”  “We’re a PBL school!”

It’s a worthy aspiration.  In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated.  These terms, sometimes lumped together and described as Deeper Learning, or 21st Century Learning, represent sophisticated instructional practice.  No doubt when done well they can be transformative, for both teachers and students.  But it’s hard, complex work.

Which is why I’m spending my morning here at Advanced Learning Academy, or ALA for short.  ALA just opened it’s second year, and it’s our flagship competency-based learning experiment in Santa Ana Unified. And I deliberately refer to it as an experiment. Not because it’s temporary or done on a whim. Quite to the contrary, ALA is an experiment in the very best sense.  It’s a school designed as a learning laboratory for adults as well as students.  It’s a space for quick iterations and trial and error.  It’s a terribly ambitious place.

So I’m here too, and hope to be here each week.  To observe and learn and reflect and document and share.  I want to dig into the complexities of the work being done by our ALA teachers and staff, and try to make sense of the emerging pedagogy and instructional strategies being employed in their herculean effort to significantly accelerate student learning.  What does it mean to be a competency-based learning school?  What are the promising practices that can and should be shared?  What are the professional and emotional challenges for staff in a school that turns conventional practices on their head?

As one of the incredibly talented teachers at ALA said this morning, “I’ve been teaching for 31 years and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Perhaps a statement like that sounds alarming to some.  I interpret it in a very different way.  It’s a beautiful thing to hear such a clear intention from a teacher to be a learner.  It’s what happens when a confident, skilled educator willingly steps out of her comfort zone to embark on a journey of professional learning.

It’s a bold experiment, in the very best sense.

Like most potential homebuyers, my wife and I looked at a bunch of houses when we moved to Santa Ana.  One of the houses we looked at was in the perfect neighborhood.  It had the right number of bedrooms, and a great little backyard.  The only problem was that the house was a monstrosity.  The floorplan made no sense.  It was like each owner over the years had added a special little room and the result was a house with no flow, rooms with disparate design principles, and a lot of square footage with little appealing living space.  There was just too much going on and we couldn’t make sense of it.

Schools can sometimes suffer the same fate.

Now, this post isn’t primarily directed at school architecture or design – although those are topics I find immensely fascinating. I’m more interested in the architecture of the technical core of the school.  What are the strategies and pedagogies that make up the expected, or at least observable, teaching practices in any given school?

Generally speaking, schools have a predictable rhythm.  Teachers have grown accustomed to coming back to school after the summer and encountering the new school improvement focus.  Sometimes the new focus is marginalized as just the next flavor of the month.  Now, I have written previously about the benefits of embracing new learning and new initiatives as a vehicle for professional renewal.  But there is still a problem.  We layer on initiatives without giving much thought about how this year’s focus will influence and change the technical core of the school in the long term.  To return to our house metaphor, sometimes in the rush build the new addition, we lose site of the broader flow and identity of the house.  To a newcomer, the house no longer makes sense.

So my primary problem of practice begs two questions: 1) how do we build meaningful systems to document our new learning and make sense of new strategies in light of the overall technical core of the school and 2) how will we develop new staff in the future who didn’t participate in the collective learning experiences of the school in years prior? I’ll consider these questions one at a time.

How do we build a meaningful system for documentation and archiving?

In order to make sense of the improvement work you are doing, you need people to talk and write about it.  The process of making shared meaning is the endeavor of human communication, and you cannot take shortcuts.  You need to find ways to systematically capture evidence of the learning – pictures, videos, learning artifacts – but also combine that with the commentary and annotation of your learners.  The internet is littered with thousands of videos of teacher practice or student work, but absent the insight and commentary of the learner, it’s hard to understand what we are seeing, hearing, or reading.

You also have the challenge of making this material accessible and appealing to future learners.  In our own district, we’re having conversations around blogs, gamified digital platforms, and other mediums for helping past learning experiences stay alive and relevant.  Whatever the platform or process, we need to find ways to make our materials and learning engaging and inspiring to future users.

This call for meaningful documentation and archiving takes thoughtfulness and time.  That’s why we often skip it altogether.  Yet if we want something to really have staying power in the professional culture and technical core of the school, we need to invest in the long term viability of new ideas and practices.

How do we develop new staff who weren’t here when we first learned about the new practices?

We need to be purposeful about how we socialize new staff.  I could write an entire dissertation on this topic (okay, I’ll admit, that’s what I’m currently doing in my evenings).  In all seriousness, we aren’t nearly as strategic about how we socialize and onboard our new staff to our schools.  We allow the prevailing professional culture of the school to do that for us.  Unfortunately, the prevailing professional culture of most schools is “figure it out on your own.”

When we design the professional development focus for the year, we should simultaneously be asking ourselves – “ how will teachers next year have access to what we are doing this year?”  Of course we can’t recreate for new teachers multiple years of professional development in just a few days before school starts, or even over the course of one year.  Indeed, many new teachers are struggling to simply figure out classroom management, to say nothing of formative assessment, project-based learning, or differentiated instruction.

Over time, however, those new teachers will be ready to adopt and strengthen new practices.  The degree of readiness will certainly vary by individual teacher, and so we need to think about how we are going to provide a differentiated socialization and professional development experience for our new staff.

In the future, we envision new teacher development apps and video series that introduce new staff to both the tools and the implementation reflections of staff from past experiences.  Since we were thoughtful about how we documented and stored these materials, we can be equally thoughtful about how teachers can unlock access as they learn and develop.

Schools are complex organizations.  While we may never completely resolve the challenge of making sense of years of layered improvement efforts, we can and should be more deliberate and strategic about finding ways to make the core elements of our technical core and instructional framework more accessible, usable, and appealing.

“It’s okay if you cry.”

That was my wife’s best attempt to console me as I read the email from the XQ, informing us late last week that our Círculos school concept wasn’t one of the competition winners.

To be honest, I was devastated.  Our team had given this project nearly a year of our focus.  We talked to thousands of students, connecting deeper with some of them to the extent that they joined our development team.  We led design sessions with parents, teachers, administrators, & community partners.  We had too many moments of magic to count – those moments where it feels like there are bigger purposes at play.  Those moments when it all comes together.  While in my head I recognized that the probability of winning the 10 million dollar prize was slim, in my bones I was convinced it was going to happen.

And then it didn’t.

As I started to reflect and try to make sense of it, I found myself sifting through a complex set of feelings and thoughts.  I really did want to cry.  I wondered if other teams had simply produced stronger ideas, or engaged in a more thoughtful design process.  I considered a few conspiracy theories – how would the XQ geographically space the winners?  Was there simply too much competition in California?  I wondered how team identity might have influenced decisions.  Did we lack diversity as a founding team?  Had our status as a district-sponsored team hurt us?  XQ wouldn’t be the first funder who thought a district team might not have the capacity to pull off a school like this.

And then there was the personal disappointment.  I wouldn’t be entirely honest if I pretended all of my disappointment was wrapped up solely in the potential loss to the community.  I felt some embarrassment.  I didn’t want to have to explain over and over again that we hadn’t won.  I didn’t want to have to argue, in my own mind or to others, that our investment of time and resources hadn’t been wasted.  Selfishly, I was sad that we might have missed a rare chance to have a national stage to share some of the design features that I think could dramatically transform education.

Of course, none of this is to say that not winning meant our school wasn’t going to happen.  Frankly, the ideas are too good, the community commitment too deep, and the potential for transformation too high for any of us to walk away.  Círculos is going to happen.

No, it’s the immensity of the leadership challenge of doing this type of work that washes over you.  It’s the realization that in the context of scarce resources or prevailing organizational cultures, the lift is going to be heavy.  It’s the recognition that you’ll have to scratch out every dollar.  It’s that feeling when your idealism and enthusiasm has to be transformed into grizzled determination.

It’s clear XQ never thought five schools and fifty million would be enough.  It’s not.  I don’t envy any organization whose mission is to get public education into the national consciousness.  I can’t stay upset long that they didn’t choose us.  We’re all on the same side pushing together.

Suffice it to say, the condolence email was humbling.  Yet it was a powerful and timely reminder, that for the students, families, and communities we serve, there’s no privileged road to success.   No angel investors.  No lottery moment.

Success is born out of blood, sweat, and yes, tears.

For most urban school districts, a change in superintendent is a common practice.  While we celebrate the achievements of outgoing leadership and express hope and confidence in the future, under the surface, a thousand conversations are happening.  Old stories of former superintendents are retold.  Speculation on the future is rampant.

Personally, I try not to assume too much power, for ill or good, on the part of a superintendent.  Though we might project our hopes and fears on the leader, really the quality and impact of the work is much more wrapped up in how we each show up and carry out our work on a daily basis.  Yes, a superintendent can animate action and build positive momentum, or alternatively fracture coherency and impede progress.  In the end, however, we answer to professional and moral authority more than a hierarchical one.

With that said, we’re in the midst of a leadership transition in Santa Ana.  Our board appointed Dr. Stefanie Phillips as our new superintendent, starting August 1st, this coming Monday.

Anecdotally, the general reaction has been both positive and hopeful.  I was relieved, frankly, that our Board of Education opted for an internal candidate who is committed to building on and accelerating the good work already happening.  I too am rooting for Dr. Phillips.  Her success is very much tied up with our organizational capacity to provide a transformational education for our kids.

Of course no superintendent is flawless.  Each brings a unique set of strengths and areas of weakness.  Anyone expecting a superintendent to solve every problem or improve a district in linear fashion doesn’t understand how leadership works.  We are not waiting for superman (or in our case, superwoman).  My optimism for Dr. Phillips is tempered by the complexity and enormity of the work of such a large organization.  I’m anticipating setbacks just as I am expecting real tangible wins.

The same can be said for our outgoing superintendent.  We’ll have years ahead to pick over the legacy of Dr. Rick Miller, who now transitions out and into his retirement.  His name will come up in countless lunch conversations.  As the privilege and burden of the superintendency now passes to Dr. Phillips, I wanted to share a few reflections on some of Dr. Miller’s strengths that I hope find voice in the transition.

Amplify Connections

I’ve heard many people outside of Santa Ana Unified who have commented on how the district has adopted a more open stance towards partnerships within the community and across organizations during Dr. Miller’s tenure.  Some of these efforts to connect are formalized and highly public – Principal for a Day, LCAP parent input sessions at every district school, Superintendents’ Breakfast, and the appointment of a Director of Community Relations.

Just as important has been the encouragement and celebration of informal coalition-building.  Dr. Miller has pushed for a culture of connection.  I know employees up and down the system are building relationships in the community – whether it be with the City of Santa Ana, non-profit organizations, businesses, or students and families themselves.  Some of my most fruitful work has been the result of exchanging ideas with people who are similarly committed to the success of Santa Ana youth who are not necessarily employed by the district.  These relationships take time, and they don’t always yield an immediate product.  They have to percolate.

Focus on Formative Measures of Student Growth

There’s a lot of talk in the education reform world about using student performance for evaluation purposes.  Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants (SIG) have required the integration of student growth data into their proposal process.  Most districts have nervously waited for the state to tell them what successful student performance should look like.  We’re still waiting.

Dr. Miller didn’t wait to be told what to do.  Rather than rely on one-time annual state assessments of student performance – what Dr. Miller has referred to as the “autopsy” – we’ve pivoted our focus to growth measures that have the benefit of years of statistical vetting.  Unlike SBAC, assessment instruments like DIBELS and MAP create formative data points that can be used by teachers during the year to make adaptations to practice in ways that the SBAC hasn’t and probably never really ever can.  Dr. Miller has shifted the dialogue to one that asks whether students have made a year or more of academic growth.

The impact of this shift cannot be underestimated.  It has the potential to strengthen teachers’ sense of efficacy in the classroom.  It creates opportunities for rich, data-driven conversations amongst teachers who are pursuing insight into why students in different classrooms might be experiencing different levels of academic success.  It creates more accountability for classrooms and schools that serve gifted students or students from higher socio-economic backgrounds – every student needs at least a year’s growth, regardless of where they started.

Foster Enrichment and Personalization

It’s tempting in a large system to focus entirely on collective outcomes.  Certainly the quantitative data is important to indicate the degree of success across the system.  But most numbers are averages, and don’t come close to narrating the lived experience of our students.  Yes, a graduate is a graduate is a graduate.  But you can graduate from high school having had entirely different experiences.  He cares about what that experience looks and feels like to individual students.

Dr. Miller has put a premium on enrichment and personalization.  Summer school has transformed from a primary focus on remediation to one of STEAM projects, personal exploration, and artistic expression.  After school programs give students a taste of a variety of fun, engaging learning opportunities.  He likes to say ‘yes’ when it comes to direct services and experiences for students, and he’s worked in partnership with our certificated and classified associations to find ways to make sure that staff who want to work and earn more have the opportunity to participate. These have been good years for Santa Ana students to be exposed to new technologies and learning opportunities.

At his core, I believe Dr. Miller has wanted and advocated for what each of us want for our own children – a high quality, enriching, and engaging education.  No, perhaps a school district cannot be expected to provide all of the learning experiences and opportunities a child needs to grow and develop, but he’s pushed to make the system more attentive to the interests and needs of individual students and families.

Like parents, I’m not sure educators can ever really say they are finished.  Even on his last day, today, I found Dr. Miller going about the halls of the district office, engaging in conversations about moving the work forward.  I think he did.

I’m a child of the 80’s.  I grew up on a diet of movies like The Goonies, Indiana Jones, The Princess Bride, and The NeverEnding Story.  Spoiler alert – the good guys find the treasure and live to tell about it.

What makes these movies great – and enduring – is not the climax.  The joy is in the quest.  It’s the journey that’s compelling.  It’s the ups and downs, the booby traps, the near-misses and the hard-fought triumphs.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was driving with the Deputy Superintendent back to the District Office from a meeting.  We were discussing the XQ Super School competition that we’ve been engaged in over the past year.  At some point, I declared how intently I wanted to win – to bring the attention and resources to the kids of Santa Ana.  His response was to encourage my pursuit of the goal – but then he cautioned me.  He warned me not to allow my focus on the final goal to cloud my vision around the possibilities that arise while en route.

The vision is always out there.  It keeps us animated and full of purpose.  It draws us in to the struggle where the real learning happens.  If we reach the goal too easily, then it is almost certain that we didn’t set our expectations high enough.  Sometimes we shoot low just to ensure success.

I spent most of my day engaged in a fascinating discussion about how to use principles of gamification to enrich and deepen engagement for professional learning in our district.  It was one of those conversations where just about every five minutes someone on the team had a brilliant “aha” moment.  We needed about four dozen of those to get to where we had something concrete and actionable that we could test.  The ideas were flying, some of them rather silly but most of them rather profound.  Each time we thought we’d settled for a solution, someone else seemed to ratchet up the level of complexity, or discover a hole in our program logic.  We pushed for greater clarity and the outcome kept getting better.

In a true learning organization, there is a healthy recognition that we don’t currently have all of the answers. What we do have is a shared passion for the work and a hunger to learn and make a difference in the lives of students.  While we think it’s the end goal that we’re after, what’s really feeding us is the opportunity to authentically collaborate and learn together.

I finally gave up around 10:30 last night, waiting for the email that might (or might not) come announcing finalists for the XQ super school project .  I went to bed, and of course the email came 20 minutes later.

But before I share what the email said when I opened it early this morning, I should step back and explain.

There are lots of education-focused grants out there.  While they aren’t all billed to the tune of 10 million dollars, some of them are quite big.  Even bigger than 10 million.  We have a full-time grant writer on staff constantly developing and submitting grant proposals.  XQ isn’t the only game in town.

Yet the secret of the XQ is in the ambition of their design process.  From the beginning, we could tell that the XQ was looking to foster a designer-centered movement.  It’s not enough that they’re offering an insane amount of money.  They pay attention to the design of materials, they’re creative about cultivating engagement and community building, they’ve provided tools and resources to enhance the quality of the proposals that are submitted. They don’t just say they are student-centered. They’ve modeled what it can look like, highlighting and celebrating progress along the way. As humans, we are animated by beautiful design and thoughtful interaction, and the XQ gave us a process that acknowledges both.

In short, we’ve been engaged in a year-long, project-based-learning experience that has pushed our skills as designers of learning. The experience has facilitated the building of local coalitions into a common cause, and has immersed us in the puzzle of public schooling in our country.  They’ve deepened our empathy for young learners.

The XQ never took us for granted.  They partnered with us, invested in us, and pushed us – and we responded. For that learning opportunity, I am genuinely grateful.

Let’s hope we can do the same for our kids.

And yes, I’m glad to report that our Círculos school proposal has moved on to the finalist stage.  It was a happy bike ride in to work this morning.