Podcast: Jason Glass on Leading for Deeper Learning

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. Dr. Jason Glass is the superintendent of Jefferson County School District. Serving 84,000 students, Jefferson County is the largest district in Colorado. It encompasses 800 square miles and the school district serves urban, suburban and rural

communities west of Denver. Before Jefferson County, Dr. Glass served as superintendent in Vail and before that he was the state chief in Iowa. Dr. Glass has promoted deeper learning across the 155 site-based, diverse school options in Jefferson County.

Glass anticipated the pandemic closure, developed a plan and shared it with his team. On March 13th, when schools closed, people knew what to do and the transition was relatively seamless for learners and for teachers. Listen in as Dr. Glass talks to Tom about Jefferson County’s transition to remote learning. Hey Jason Glass, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast.

Thanks, glad to be here, excited to be invited. Hey Jason, how’d you become a social studies teacher in Hazard, Kentucky? Well, I grew up in Kentucky and my parents were educators there. Really our whole family has been involved in education in Kentucky so it just kind of was a natural fit for me.

I grew up in Hazard. I did and I grew up in a little town near Fort Knox but my first teaching job was in Hazard which is an Appalachian coal town in the eastern part of the state. So Jason, 12 years before you started teaching there I was working in the mines in Hazard. No kidding.

Yeah, well it’s amazing how many people have crossed paths with that little town. So I was a coal mine engineer in Pennsylvania, Colorado, eastern Kentucky, Hazard, Pineville, Paintsville, long before I became a public school superintendent. I thought I was the only one but when I was back in Kentucky last year I ran into a gentleman that had been a coal miner and become a superintendent so there’s a small colleague,

small cohort of us. You got a peer that’s done that. Yeah, it’s a great, great community and beautiful part of the state and I learned a lot about the importance of traditions. Hazard is a community that really loves its schools and the schools have served the community

well and I learned a lot about that importance of community tradition. That’s a good way to put it. It is a place that values its traditions and if you’re an outsider there one is often coached on the traditions and caution and crossing those traditions. How’d you get to Vail from Kentucky?

It looks like you had to stop at the Colorado Department of Education in the early 2000s, right? I did. Yeah, well growing up in Kentucky and my parents being educators we would travel in the summers and we had this win and begot we would load up and go for basically the whole month of

June somewhere and frequently we’d come to the west and visit the mountains and so that’s where I really fell in love with mountains and with Colorado. While we were living and I was growing up in Kentucky I always had in the back of my mind that I’d love the chance to live and work in Colorado so I finished my teaching up in Hazard and I was always really interested in sort of the policy and politics side of

education so I was working on a master’s program at the University of Kentucky and as I was finishing that up I landed this job at the Colorado Department of Education which got me out to Denver a little closer to the mountains right on the edge and fell in love with the state and was out here for about seven years before getting called to relocate into Ohio and Iowa but that’s further down the story.

So you spent about four years in Vail you went away and then you were able to come back as superintendent in Vail. Vail’s an interesting beautiful place but interesting challenges serving that community right? Yeah well when I was working at the Colorado Department of Education that was right on the edge of the mountains but I always just really wanted to get back to living in that

mountain town and Hazard was kind of like that too it was a mountain town certainly a different industry that was driving it but still had that mountainous terrain so loved Eagle County and loved Vail that’s the ski resort one of the two ski resorts that’s there in Eagle County so my wife Sarah and I moved up there I was the Human Resources Director there for a few years it’s a great community it has all the things that one would expect with a really

high priced resort ski town but what a lot of people don’t also realize is that it has this working class a lot of working class folks that make the economy go like and a lot of them are Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants who are working in the hotels and working in the restaurants so the the school system was served really both ends of that spectrum we had kids from really affluent wealthy backgrounds that had relocated to that community for the ski area

and then we had a lot of the working workers families that were also served in the school so it was about half white and half Hispanic and about half of the kids were English language learners so it was it was a great place to spend a few years working great community Jason you had the chance to serve as the state chief in Iowa I think that was the last time we we talked and you did some really great work there

why was being a state chief in a feeling role and how’d you land that job well it’s kind of an interesting story I was connected with a guy that was he would had been a professor at Vanderbilt named Jim Guthrie and he was working at the George W. Bush Institute in their education policy area and Terry Branstad had been re-elected governor there you know he’d been governor for four terms in the 80s and 90s was out

for several years and then came back and won a fifth term and so Governor Branstad called Jim Guthrie and said I need some names of somebody who you’d recommend to look at for the state chief here and Jim passed my name on to the governor and I flew out to Iowa I was actually living in Ohio at that point working for a nonprofit called Battelle for Kids and interviewed with a governor and the lieutenant governor and a room full of people that I didn’t know for about three hours and you

know I got in got in my rental car and drove back to the airport in Des Moines and thought well that was an interesting experience it had no idea what was going to happen and they called me at the airport and said you’re the guy so that’s how quickly it happened and so I got a chance to work for Governor Branstad for three years as the state chief there they called that position director and we worked on an education reform bill that took us a couple of years to get across

the finish line but it really established a great teacher leader structure for the whole state and did a lot to elevate the teaching profession and to try and recruit top talent into the teaching profession and then to provide them different career paths so that they could have have additional career paths other than just entering administration so really proud of that work and but but the mountains called me and so when the superintendency opened back up in Eagle County I applied for that

got that job spent four great years back in Eagle County as the superintendent before Jeff Co opened which Jeff Co is a district in the sort of the western third of the Denver metro area that the county seat is golden and been here in Jeff Co for three years now so been been all over the country had some great roles and done some great work it’s been exciting so we should so I did my undergrad at Colorado School of Mines in golden so I know Jefferson County well we should explain

to people it’s a gigantic county it’s not just a large student population about 74,000 kids it’s a huge county that goes from really urban areas well up into the mountains and it’s a long huge distances north to south so you really serve a tremendous variety of terrain and schools with very different kinds of neighborhoods in Jeff Co right right no I can I can see School of Mines your alma mater from my office window I’m looking at it now so it’s just over the

hill in in golden and Jeff Co is a the district is about 800 square miles a little less than that and as you mentioned it extends up into the mountain areas but it also runs over right along the city and county of Denver so there are parts of it that are urban in nature and there are parts of it that are sort of 60s and 70s suburban growth areas there are parts of it that are new suburban growth areas and there are parts of it that are rule in nature so it’s it’s really got

all kinds of different communities a wide range of demographics people that live here a wide range of incomes and it’s politically a balanced community too I say that it’s purple it’s got we have about a third Republicans a third Democrats and a third independents in the community so you you work to try and find something that balances all of those different interests in the various communities that we serve so you’ve been there about three years after after getting

there we’d love to know about how you developed your agenda and what became your priorities in that big relatively complicated districts well I think my own evolution as an education leader went from being I would call I would have put myself a decade ago solidly in the education reform camp that would have been advocating for greater accountability test based accountability evaluations pay for performance models those sorts of things so I cut my teeth on doing that work and learning

how to execute those systems but when I was in Iowa I had this challenge of how the question was how do you raise the performance of an entire state system and what I what I really got interested in was looking at Mark Tucker’s work around international benchmarking when I started looking at these international systems I saw that none of the high performing ones or few of the high performing ones were using those education reform strategies as their primary drivers and improvement so

the system of sort of testing and ratings and all the stuff that we were working on with no child left behind and with the waves of teacher evaluations and those sorts of things none of the other countries were doing that they were really focused on raising up the teaching profession recruiting the brightest people in their society to become teachers and then empowering their educators working really hard on transforming learning to move it past just a content-based approach into a much

deeper richer form of learning so that got me excited and so I went to the went to Governor Brandstad at that time and I told him I think we’re on the wrong path and here’s what all these other systems are doing I think we need to pivot and kudos to him he was strong enough to make that about face and talk to the people in his own party and in the other party that controlled the Senate there in Iowa and brought folks together around an agenda that we were able to get

passed but I think that was a major shift for me just going from sort of an education reform frame into an international benchmarking frame and I took that to Eagle County with me and so their strategic plan and vision really is based on that international benchmarking thinking when I came to Jeff Coe three years ago the my predecessor had done some work around deeper learning and deeper student experiences skills focused education

before I got here and they had a strategic plan around that so I wanted to keep working on that and I was really interested in picking it up because it I was excited about it because I thought it helped us move from the sort of notion of best practice into next practice so not not just trying to replicate things that had been done but actually trying to make breakthroughs and make breakthroughs at scale especially with a district that’s 85 000 students the size of Jeff Coe

so that was a exciting professional challenge for me is to put in place a vision around what school could be and then to see if we could pull it off at a at a large scale in a place like Jeff Coe so you had a couple years to work on that agenda I guess in in January or February if you’ve been visiting a Jeff Coe elementary school and what kind of look for is did you have in mind what did you hope to see when you visited an elementary school well this community has long relied on a

very site-based approach to what a school’s pedagogical or philosophical approach is so it’s in addition to being having all the diversity that we talked about earlier Jeff Coe has very traditional sort of neighborhood schools it has expeditionary learning schools international baccalaureate schools it has core knowledge focused schools we have classical academies wall door schools Montessori you name it there it’s been implemented here so there’s a really

wonderful diversity of education options that are available in this community both within the districts the district managed schools and the charter schools so there’s a huge range of options that are available for people here so what we needed was some kind of instructional approach that would transcend all of those different educational philosophies or strategies and try to get us something where everyone could work together so what we what we focused on was

this concept of student task and the work that students are doing as the the greatest opportunity to sort of shift the learning that’s happening to try and make it deeper and more meaningful so if you think about a Montessori school or an IB school or a core knowledge focus school or an EL school at some point the teacher turns the work over to the student and asks them to do something so that that’s the task and that task can be repetitive routine purely content-based or

it can require that students create communicate problem solve adapt to changing conditions so we’ve done a lot of work around supporting our teachers on how transform tasks might look a lot of problem and project-based approaches a lot of embracing the use of technology and how we can use that as a catalyst for that new kind of learning and then trying to sort of break down those those pedagogical walls between all the different kinds of schools and say look

if we get past the labels that we put on the schools from charter to neighborhood option magnet or different types of pedagogical philosophies at the core of it we all want students to be prepared for their future and that future is going to probably involve some level of content knowledge but it’s also going to involve a heck of a lot of or students are going to need a heck of a lot of skills like being able to stand and deliver a presentation or write effectively and adapt to

changing conditions and be an engaged citizen in a in what is a global economy so so that that outcome around having students that are really prepared for a future that’s only going to get faster and faster and faster really drove our work around making tasks the centerpiece for where we where we think change can occur. Hey listeners it’s your host Jessica I wanted to just take a quick break to share an important resource with you recently our team launched the Getting Through

MicroSight to support educators leaders and families on the path forward during this unprecedented and uncertain time there’s something there for everyone whether you’re just getting started with your transition to distance learning or you’ve had plans in place for a while and now have the opportunity to share your work and guidance with others we hope this gives you a place for your voice and an opportunity to learn we know we will get through this together

check it out at GettingSmart.com slash Getting Through okay now back to the show what happened when they closed schools in in Colorado tell us about your move to remote. Right so I think Jeff Coe was really well positioned to handle this shift to remote learning not that it hasn’t been disruptive to us just like it has been to everybody else but when when COVID-19 started making its way around the world I’m sort of a voracious reader of

news articles including international news so very early on I saw that that happening and started wondering if this is as bad as people are saying what if it comes here and we also going back to the international benchmarking frame I started looking at what other countries were doing and how they were reacting to it as it sort of swept through you know China and then and then Europe how schools were responding to that and so I asked our leadership team to pull

together some principles and teachers and I said we need a plan for how we will shift at scale to remote learning and so they they wrote that plan based on systems that we had in place as I mentioned earlier we’d really embraced technology and so we had a lot of tools and capacity in place before that but they wrote that plan on transitioning to remote learning shared it with our professionals and when the day came March 13th when the day came that we had to close schools in in Colorado

all across the the state but primarily here in the front range in the Denver area people knew what to do I mean we were certainly we were scrambling trying to figure out how to execute all of this but there was no panic there was no body paralyzed and didn’t know what steps to take because we’d shared that and at schools people had talked about we got to make sure every kid has a device we got to make sure that every kid

has got a way to contact the teacher what if they don’t have internet access what’s a process by which we get it to them how do we make sure that they’ve got all the passwords that they need so we we went into that weekend after March 13th after sending all the kids home with every device we could we could put in their hands making sure every kid went home with with something that could work work off of we had one day of professional learning with the staff where we stood up

Google Hangouts meetings and Zoom meetings and trained people on some tools and then the Tuesday it started and I think part of our success in this is that we haven’t and we didn’t script or tell people exactly how it had to go or outline a step by step process we put in place the tools people would need to communicate and keep working some supports around that we made sure that it all functioned and then we relied on and encouraged the creativity of our of our

practitioners our teachers and our principals and our students and parents to work together and figure it out and what I’d lay over all of that is that we also asked for a lot of grace we asked for that from our our parents and teachers said look we’re going to make mistakes and we’re going to we’re going to promise you that we’re going to keep getting better and we extended that to each other too that our educators are going to make mistakes and keep

getting better so you know it’s been it’s been a real challenge but it’s it’s also there’ve also been some things going well and then looking to the future I think that there are some transformations happening and learning that are that are going to profoundly shift what education looks like going forward yeah I’d love to talk about that Jason I I know just before this call you were doing a webinar for other system leaders what’s going to happen next year

let’s start with just the logistics of school it looks um any version of school next fall looks more complicated than uh as you explained to your community it’s likely that you’re going to be down anywhere between one and 10 percent in terms of your your budget so more complicated school with less resources sounds uh super challenging well sure it is it’s we’re trying to budget right now with fewer resources for next year for a system that we’re not entirely sure

how it’s going to operate and one that we haven’t operated before so if we think about the necessity of social distancing in a school setting to have some kind of in-person learning we’ll need to drop the student teacher ratios down to about one to ten so no more than than around 10 people in a classroom so that by itself means that we have to pull everybody we can into an instructional role of in some form to create those those kinds of ratios and we’ll have to radically redesign

the schedule of how school works to keep students out of out of buildings more where we have sort of ab or even odd or ampm sessions we haven’t worked through exactly what that structure looks like but that’s those are the kinds of things that we’re going to have to do we also have to put in place a bunch of procedural logistical changes just in terms of disease management like screening students and staff as they come into building every day thinking about how we do that when kids

get on and off buses cleaning procedures how students move and interact in a school on a day how we deliver lunch how we keep students from congregating together how we might have to move teachers into students rather than moving students to teachers so that we lower the interactions so from a logistical standpoint it’s it’s fairly complex as well I don’t know exactly how we’re going to do all that yet but I know that we’ve got we’ve got people that are really smart that are

working on it Jeffco has got a tradition of great leaders here and I benefit from from all of the those years of work that were here before I got I arrived so we’re going to keep working on this and find a way to solve this problem find a way to have some version of in-person learning that’s going to have to be connected to the continuation of remote learning going forward and I I think that it is going to profoundly shake up that industrial model of education where everything’s

driven by subjects carved up into content and and 50 minute periods and bell schedules and master schedules I think they’re going I think this is going to be very different and I think those some of those changes are going to be very positive for us in terms of thinking about asynchronous learning and student directed learning in ways that we may never have been able to achieve if we had not had this happen so well I wouldn’t make an argument that we would have wanted this I do

think that there are some transformations we’re going to see that are being driven out of necessity you it seems clear that there’s some new capabilities being developed in your your teachers but also your students some of them are experiencing high agency learning some of them more self-directed learning some parents are a lot more involved in education than they’ve been in the past and it seems like in addition to some of those new muscles that they flexed your teachers learners and

parents will even come back to school in the fall with some new expectations do you have a sense of how that might play out what kinds of new options your communities will want and form well we know that we’ll have some of our parents that will want and need and some of our students that will want to need in-person learning to the extent that we can and so we want to provide that we know that some of our parents possibly thousands of them will not want to send their kids back to

school they’ll want to continue with remote learning in some form and then we’re likely to have scenarios where we have an outbreak in a school of COVID and have to shift that school for weeks or perhaps a whole region of the district to remote learning for a period of time to let that cycle of the virus burn out before we can bring everybody back together so I think we’re gonna we’re gonna have to rely on our agility and adaptability over these next several weeks when we transition to

into this next year when we transition to remote learning we didn’t we didn’t script or tell people how to do it so what we one of the things we saw was some of our staff were sort of trying to recreate the school that they knew in a remote learning setting so they were scheduling lectures at a certain time requiring everybody to do everything at the same time and we let them do that and we had others that that shifted to these asynchronous approaches where they were

identifying resources putting out information for students to react to and then creating tasks and basically saying to the students you figure out how you want to schedule your time and and complete the work and I think we’ve what we’ve seen is shift more toward the asynchronous side but one of the things that we really want to hang on to from the system that we left on March 13th is the power of their relationships the kids are logging in they’re trying to stay connected because

they value the relationships with their teachers and their peers so I think I think there are some things about school as we knew it that are based on relationships and connection that we’ve got to hang on to and there’s a lot about the school that we’re building now around this asynchronous and student directed approach that that’s going to shift practice so I think there’ll be some combination of what we what we loved about school as we knew it and the school that we’re building

going forward that will shape what the future of education looks like far beyond just next year. Jason Glass we appreciate your leadership in in Jeffco you have taken a really thoughtful approach so we appreciate all the work that went into developing that approach the proactive leadership that you and your team exhibited if people want to learn more about what’s going on in Jeffco where can they go? They can just google us Jeffco public schools and the websites right

there it’s got all the information about the district on there if you want to read more about our strategic vision it’s called Jeffco Generations and there’s a vision document in there that lays out what we would like to see happen for our kids as we prepare them for a a lightning fast and go globally interconnected world. Yeah Jason I think I was that was the original document that I found I was so impressed with it’s a we’ll link it in the show notes but it’s a beautiful description of

what you hope your learners leave Jeffco with they can also follow you on Twitter at at cojassenglass. That’s right that’s right so I look forward to connecting with people on that and listening to thoughts or iterations critiques of our our direction and vision here we we certainly don’t have it all figured out but we’ve got we’ve got good people working on it and and you know we stand on the shoulders of giants here there are all kinds of talent and good thinking that went

into this community that we we want to honor but also push through to that next practice that transformation. Thank you Jason. Thank you Tom. Thank you to Dr. Glass for joining us for this week’s episode we appreciate his leadership in Jefferson County and the work he and his team are doing to support learners during this challenging time. For more on school districts making the successful transition to remote learning check out episode 250 with Tom Rooney from Lindsay Unified and Scott

Rowe from Huntley Community School District. I’ve got it linked in the show notes and on our blog. All right that’s all we have for you today listeners but before you go don’t forget to rate and review the podcast it helps us get better and it helps more people find us. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast this is Jessica signing off.