Future of Learning
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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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Steward Stories: How Big Thought Turned Compelling Questions Into a Citywide Learning System
What does it look like when a city becomes a learning system? Big Thought's story spans 35 years, 480,000 young people, and a foundational insight that changed everything: dosage matters, but it doesn't have to happen inside a single organization. This Steward Story traces how Erin Offord, Greg MacPherson, and the leaders who came before them built Dallas City of Learning into one of the country's most sophisticated learning-ecosystem intermediaries. For education leaders thinking about scale, community partnership, and what real systems change requires, this one is essential reading.
One Map, Every Framework: The Shared Architecture Behind School Transformation
If your teams have ever spent valuable meeting time translating between frameworks instead of moving learning forward, this piece is for you. Nate McClennen and Rebecca Midles analyzed 16 leading school-design frameworks and 7 change models and found something remarkable: beneath every different vocabulary, the same seven questions keep emerging. Their Learning Innovation Wayfinder offers a common map, not to replace the frameworks your system trusts, but to help every partner finally see they have been working toward the same destination all along.
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.