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This podcast highlights developing trends in K-12 education, postsecondary and lifelong learning. Each week, Getting Smart team members interview students, leading authors, experts and practitioners in research, tech, entrepreneurship and leadership to bring listeners innovative and actionable strategies in education leadership.
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When to Innovate, When to Implement, and When to Improve: A Framework for Strategic Schools
Not every school challenge calls for the same solution, but most systems are only fluent in one approach. In this new piece, Nate McClennen and Rebecca Midles unpack the critical differences between implementation science, innovation, and improvement science, and show leaders how to build the organizational fluency to use all three. If your system defaults to implementation for every problem, or chases innovation without the structures to scale it, this framework offers a clearer, more strategic path forward.
Digital Fluency Is the Missing Foundation in K-12 Career Pathways
What separates a student who can use a digital tool from one who can build something new with it? Kimberly Smith of Digital Promise argues that digital fluency, not just digital literacy, is the foundational skill K-12 career pathways have been missing. Drawing on credentialed cybersecurity programs in rural Alabama and a six-part fluency framework, this piece offers a clear, actionable case for why every career pathway, in every industry, must embed digital fluency now.
Districts Don’t Need Another New Model. They Need Systems That Build Them.
What if the next breakthrough in school design did not require a new building, a charter, or a pilot program imported from somewhere else? At Hidden Valley Middle School in Escondido, a public microschool operating inside a traditional campus has cut suspensions by 60 percent and reduced chronic absenteeism by 12 percentage points, schoolwide. This piece by Dr. Katie Martin and Dr. Devin Vodicka explores how California districts are building the internal capacity to generate and spread learner-centered models, and why that shift from showcase schools to generative systems may be the most important move in education reform right now.
Student Voice, All Grown Up
Keaton Wadzinski has been on both sides of the student voice equation — as a young person who was sometimes tokenized, sometimes genuinely empowered, and as an adult now designing the conditions for youth agency to flourish. In this deeply personal and strategically rich essay, he challenges education leaders to move beyond advisory committees and symbolic inclusion toward something far more honest and far more powerful. This is essential reading for any leader who believes young people deserve a real role in shaping the future of learning.