Michael Horn on Recreating School for Every Child

Michael White is T Stanford Teams in Education in 2022. So I think it always should have, but often we have thought historically of teachers as these solitary individuals that close the classroom door and teach on their own. And I think the reality that the pandemic exposed was that we need social connectivity, we need each other.

And that doesn’t just mean students with other students, which is clear, but teachers need support from their colleagues. And this can’t be a planning period or a time to have a professional network, you know, where they get to collaborate on a question or professional development. I argue, Tom, that they ought to be in teams as they’re teaching every minute really of

the day so that they have a supportive cast around them that they can bounce off of, specialize where they’re good and passionate and can contribute most to student well-being and growth. And their colleagues can do others and they can grow together in real time. And frankly, at a time where we know, Tom, that a lot of teachers need time out of school at the moment.

For whatever number of reasons, if you have a group of three teachers, say, with a larger group of students, that creates so much flexibility that is not dependent on our very fragile substitute teacher system right now, that creates continuity of learning and support for the adults and students in the building. You’re listening to Getting Smart Podcast.

I’m Tom Van Der Rook. And today I am joined by a good friend of the show, Michael Horn. Welcome, Michael. Thanks for having me, as always. Michael, you joined the rarefied list of three-pea guests.

We’re thrilled to have you back on. It was so good to see you a couple of weeks ago. We sat right next to each other in Fenway Park. Yeah, it was awesome to be there with a bunch of educators with you at a historic place talking education, which I suspected the history of Fenway Park has not been a big recurring

theme, but it was nice to break some new ground on that front. Our friend Jean Eddie from ASA gave the keynote speech at a JAPS for the future JFF conference at Fenway. She did it standing on the dugout, the home dugout at Fenway. That’s probably the first education speech at Fenway, certainly the first on the dugout.

Yeah, I think that’s right. But let’s keep it going because the Red Sox have their baseball play is a little paltry right now, so we might as well focus on improving lives. Let’s do more conferences there. Yeah.

Michael, congrats on your new book. You were busy during the pandemic in addition to watching the twins. How old are the twins now? Like seven? They will tell you that they are seven and three quarters in some number of days that

I can’t keep track of. Precision is that is, you know, you probably experienced this on the grandkids side. Precision is at the utmost right now. I my granddaughter, who is just playing here outside the office is six and three quarters and they’re very precise about that.

So in addition to hanging out with the twins during the pandemic, you were thinking about a new book. It’s a new book from Josie Vash from Reopen to Reinvent Recreating School for Every Child. Michael, I really appreciated how when the pandemic started, you jumped into a podcast with our friend Diane Tabner from Summit Public Schools and it felt like learning out loud.

For the two of you, you know, two of the most important education experts on the planet, we’re learning together with a great group of guests and that was just a great list of shows sort of learning in real time about what we were going through and what sets of opportunities existed along with the challenges. So thank you for that series.

No, thank you, Tom. I mean, it led obviously to this book, right? The questions we were asking there that parents were asking, that educators were asking about why our schools work the way they do. Questions you’ve been asking for a long time.

But now a lot of the public right was asking and ready for a dialogue on. So it was a thrill to be able to do and then to develop it into something that hopefully reaches educators and parents and communities in different format, you know, through having a book that further develops the ideas. I really appreciate the introduction is fantastic.

I want everybody to get the book. Again, it’s from reopen to reinvent recreating school for every child. The introduction is really great. I appreciate how you and how you and Diane on the show acknowledged the sort of pain and loss that everyone experienced in the pandemic.

And yet in the introduction, you say, right now, it’s about what we choose to create about what we choose to do going forward. And the way that introduction creates that pivot, I think is is really nice and a beautiful way to kick kick off this book. Is that what you’re trying to do here?

Yeah, well, first, thank you. And second, yeah, I mean, look, we want to give people agency and feel like it’s not just enough to talk about all the problems or challenges, but that they get the ability to do something about it to be actors. And what does this education system look like?

And you know better than anyone, Tom, the school system we have today, it was never built to serve the majority of students. And the reality is that that’s not the fault of anyone teaching in that system today. And so they have the ability to wake up and take control and be part of a movement to rethink what schools and schooling looks like to better serve every student.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw in at some point, you know, you have read, I think all of my books before they’ve come out, certainly disrupting class and offered a lot of edits on it. And then you did this here with from Reopen to Reinvent. And I appreciate that because I just think making sure that I’m hearing all voices as you

put something like this out in the wild is important because this book, even more than anything else I’ve written, while I’m the only author on it, it’s really reflecting a lot of voices and perspectives to try to empower educators. And obviously, I have a few ideas that I’m really passionate about and much more prescriptive, I think, in this book that I think they ought to put in place.

But ultimately, it’s about them figuring out what’s right for their circumstances to unlock progress for the students that they serve. It feels like there’s three big themes here. One is that we do have this opportunity to create what Tony Wagner would say, no shame, no blame.

But let’s be honest that our system doesn’t work for most kids, right? And you do a nice job of describing that. Number two, this book is a surprisingly strong, consistently strong throughout call for mastery or competency-based learning, in part because it’s a thoughtful response to what we just went through in the pandemic.

But because it’s a logical way to create a system committed to helping all kids succeed. So that feels like the second big theme. The third theme that I kept seeing come up over and over again is this idea of moving away from a zero-sum mindset to a positive sum. Talk about that one for a minute.

What does that mean to you of moving away, maybe in school, but maybe even in society as well, away from a zero-sum mentality to more of a positive sum? What’s the thread behind that and why did it surface so strongly in this book? Yeah, so I’ll tell you the origin of it in terms of the book was from Todd Rose. Our friend Todd has made this point many times that the reason we’ve been able to create so

much prosperity in the world over the last three centuries has been because we moved away from a zero-sum idea of economic activity to a positive someone. The more you create and are able to support me and trade with me and so forth, and the more I’m able to do, and we actually build more for each other, and that’s the underpinnings of a system that yes has its flaws, of course, but has created incredible prosperity across the world and lifted

literally billions of people into new opportunities that they otherwise wouldn’t have. You turn around, you look at the education system, and it’s not built that way at all. It’s built as a zero-sum system where there are scarce numbers of seats to quote-unquote be one at the end of the game that’s often in college, and we basically then treat the rest of the exercise as a labeling and sorting one to figure out who gets those rarefied seats.

I think there’s sort of two aspects of the argument and why it became more and more important from my perspective as I wrote the book. One, because of the mastery-based learning ability to structure a system around that, we don’t actually have to have this zero-sum mentality or system that’s an artificial, if you will, construct of how we’ve historically done school, but if the goal is to get everyone to be able to master core concepts, core competencies,

knowledge skills, and then be able to start to figure out who they are, how they can contribute. I took that directly from your wording, by the way, in your past work. How can they contribute to the world? Then you start to realize this is a positive sum system in which we want all people to attain that mastery and start to make those decisions for themselves of who they’re going to be in the world and their purpose. That’s the first part of the zero-sum, the positive sum.

I think the second part is that a lot of the reasons that, as I’ve observed at Reform, moved two steps forward and one and a half steps backward over the years, is that we get caught up in saying, oh, this is going to be a good idea for these people at the exclusion of these other people. Sometimes that’s at the haves who have a lot of the power perceive that if you do something, it’ll somehow undermine the opportunities for their kids. They have the power to stop a lot

of these reforms. My belief, at least in the book, as I write it and it’s deeply felt, is that I actually think we need to pitch ideas that everyone can see progress for them and their kids through it. The example, for better or worse, Tom, that I use in the book is I throw my mom under the bus a couple times. No, that was great. Her reaction to sort of mastery-based grading of dumbing down school is like, hey, mom, this is kind of what I do for

outliving. Yeah, that’s the exact quote, right? I mean, she literally at an airport, probably from someplace where you and I were coming together, speaking, she literally reamed me out for 10 minutes about, couldn’t believe that this was happening. Then at the very end, I sort of meekly said exactly the line you said, this is sort of what I do for outliving. But it occurred to me that the way it was framed in Montgomery County was probably all about grading. It was probably all about these

kids at the expense of people like me, who went to Walt Whitman High School and had a lot of privileges and opportunities. And she didn’t see how it would be beneficial, right, for her. And so that’s the other piece of this is, I actually think we don’t have to get into those games that as we pitch these ideas and shape them with the communities, like, everyone has a lot to gain from moving to a mastery-based system. It would be better for

everyone. And so I think that’s the other piece of this is getting smarter about how we develop and then sell these transformations and reforms so that people can actually make progress for their own kids, regardless of where they’re sitting in this complex mosaic of America. I love how the first third of the book really unpacks the fresh question of what’s the purpose of school. You really go back to sort of first principles and say, all the conflict that’s

happening is because it’s really important right now to get really clear about what it is we’re trying to accomplish. In Chapter Two, you suggest that a state or a school district or a community can start that process by reconsidering student learning goals and creating a graduate profile or a learner profile or a portrait of a graduate. You mentioned the Utah one that I hadn’t looked at recently, the Utah talent map, which is a beautiful expression of

what kids should know and be able to do. But why does having that conversation so important and how does it connect to refreshing the sense of purpose and education? Yeah, I mean, it comes from a pretty fundamental principle right around innovation and design, which is that if you don’t know what you’re going to design for, it’s awfully hard to figure out what to include, what to exclude, how to shape it, and so forth. And my sense is that we have these

unstated assumptions in our communities about what school is for. And a lot of the fights that break out are around what we think they are. And we never step back and have these very honest conversations at sort of brass tax level. What do we want students to know and be able to do in the world when they leave us? And I think if we did, I mean, frankly, my own suspicion, Tom, is that we’d agree on more than we disagree. But at least we’d be clear about where the

disagreements are and put that out there. And it’s awfully hard to design if you don’t have that first principles conversation. And so it’s really, you know, Stephen Covey or, you know, Jay MacKay, right? It’s like this, you know, you begin with the end, and then you plan backwards from there. And so I just, I think these conversations, however they are done, and there’s a lot of different ways to do them. You pointed me toward the Portrait of a Graduate

website, which I then cited to show a lot of different models for doing it. And then I, in the book, I lifted up even one level higher of just like, let’s just talk about, in plain English, what do we want students to be prepared for and build, you know, understand the areas of commonality and disagreement. And there will be nuance in a pluralistic country like ours. And that’s not a bad thing. As long as we start with the premise that I would argue, every single student

ought to be part of that picture and that equation at the end. It really does force you to get past these high level disagreements that some communities would say, oh, SEL, oh, that’s connected to CRT. But if you go down a level and say, by social emotional learning, what I mean is we want students to understand who they are and what they’re good at. We want them to be able to manage themselves and their time. We want them to be able to manage

relationships constructively. When we get to that level and have a dialogue with people, I find that you can almost always come to a thoughtful agreement about the knowledge and skills that are important. And we’ve seen that in the hoods of communities around the country, right? Yeah, I totally agree because it makes it tangible and not buzz phrase, right, worthy of headline grabbing that causes disagreement, right? I totally agree. And you see that even in the CRT

stuff that has roiled the country, that if you go a level deeper of do you want us to understand how American history has progressed and the mistakes we’ve made along the way and the good things that we’ve done, 80% of society says yes. There’s someone on the fringe right and left that both say all bad, all good about America, right? But for the most part, we want an honest accounting and understanding of how things have changed. The same is true of what you just talked about,

about habits of success or social emotional learning or whatever we want to call it. These things have actually been a part of the notion of schooling for a long time. They used to be called character education, right? But now we can actually, if we can get down at that level of saying, do you want your child to be able to plan out their day and figure out how they’re going to tackle tasks? I don’t know anyone who’s going to say no to that, right? And yet, let’s

make it explicit, I think, in these communities. And then we can ask the question, okay, what do we design in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year of schooling, not just in school, by the way, also the out of school time, to start to make sure every student is prepared to do those things. I mean, sorry, one more example on this, by the way, really quick. I think, frankly, a lot of the fights around grading that have broken out also around mastery based grading, like my mom and

others have gotten upset about. I think they’re over the same thing. Like we focus on this high level artifact. And then there’s a bunch of people that are like, but you’re not going to penalize Tom if he doesn’t turn things in on time. And you’re like, well, if turning things in on time and making deadlines is an important habit or skill, well, let’s talk about that. Right. Let’s make it a goal. Yeah. And figure out how we show progress on it. So you mentioned,

you mentioned Todd Rose, I’d love to have you square these two ideas. So communities go through this process, they name knowledge skills, habits of success that are really important. And then we have a master’s system that honors, you know, high level of competence in each one of those. How do you square that with Todd’s? In the end of average, you really advance this idea of a jagged profile. So how do you put those two together? Portrait of a graduate and a master’s

system with this idea of some people are better than others and some things and that we’re all jagged in different ways. So love the question. And I’m super curious your take on this as well. Where I come out on it in the book is sort of a hybrid, I guess. One, I think we should just honestly say, Hey, is this something Michael has mastered or not? Because it will be an honest reflection of my strengths for myself, right? For me to learn and for others to learn about me.

And mastery based learning, the way I phrase it in the book is that there’s certain concepts that you don’t get to quote unquote leave fully because you haven’t mastered. You may make the decision as a learner that that’s not where I’m going to invest my time, right? That’s not who I’m going to be. As we get, I would argue older students and outside of the core skills, habits, etc. That’s a decision in a conversation we can make and think about more and more, right?

And then the hybrid part of it, I guess, is that to me that there’s a set of basic things that yeah, I think everyone ought to be able to do and can do, right? And that’s around reading. That’s around some level of math. As you know, in the book, I question the idea of whether algebra two is part of that core. It’s not clear to me that it is. The algebraic thinking and computational skills, probably yes, but not the actual mechanistic items. And you did a good job of pushing me on

how I described that in the draft. But I think we need to have these conversations to be clear about what is the core, which I would argue should be fewer sets of standards. And then where do we start giving optionality around what people master? And I think the big shift there is to say, it’s not like Michael got a C in X concept. It’s like, he’s not yet mastered. He’s awfully close. And we can figure out a way to show that. But he hasn’t quite mastered it yet and start to represent that

progress and those decisions I make. How do you think about it, by the way? I think that’s a great hybrid answer. And I think this is a good part of the dialogue in a community as we reconsider graduation requirements, right? We’ve historically thought about graduation requirements as a list of classes that you took in a very low bar in terms of what passing those courses mean. And as we move towards a mastery system, I think we can talk about what’s good enough

when it comes to basic skills that are often table stakes for citizenship and for careers. Remember, 25 years ago, Mark Tucker talked about a certificate of initial mastery achieved in about 10th grade. I think that was a good description of a broad set of skills that everyone should have to succeed in careers in citizenship. And also honoring a jagged profile that some people are going to be better in some things than others. So I do think there’s an

and both answer. I think you did a nice job of describing that in the book. Chapter four, I love the fact that you dove into student experience. I have found that in the community conversations that we have about what should kids know and be able to do, I learned this from Tony Wagner, by the way, 20 years ago, having these community conversations about what should young people know and be able to do. And then the next question can be what kinds of experiences

might help develop those knowledge skills and dispositions and inviting community dialogue around student experience. So chapter four is a beautiful discussion of student experience. It goes back to the introduction saying, let’s be honest, that most kids are not having a good motivating, engaging experience at school today. A lot of us, parents included, saw that during the pandemic. And let’s, as a result, not punish kids, just focus solely on learning loss

and put kids into sort of mindless tutoring, but really think about in re-engaging kids in meaningful experiences. So this is a beautiful chapter. I think anybody associated with education would appreciate how you brought to life the importance of engaging student experience. Yeah, no, I appreciate that, Tom. And I think the hope is to your point, right? We fundamentally think about student motivation and what they’re trying to do

on a daily basis and how, to your point of if we know what the goals are, we’ve had a conversation around that. We’ve agreed on the non-negotiables and maybe the optional, right? And then we start to think about how do we enable students to actually learn and demonstrate mastery of those goals. All of a sudden, we’ve created a process, by the way, that I think will start to address a lot of these yeah, buts and fights in these communities. Because we’re at a different level now of designing

with our community how we want to help students make progress and do so in line with what motivates them as well. And by the way, recently, one of these other food fights has erupted where I think there was recently a study of saying engagement was at odds with learning or something like that. And if you step back from that for a moment, you know those two things cannot be held diametrically opposed because good luck getting someone to learn if you don’t also think about

engagement. And so we’ve got to do a better, we’ve got to do a bigger reframe. And my sense of that is because all these studies are done in the traditional time-based as opposed to mastery-based system. Lose the learning loss. I love that you said that a number of different times, like get over it. I loved how you said that at the earliest stages of a crisis, framing things as a threat can be useful in terms of mobilization. But now that we’re three years into this sort of global learning

disaster, it’s really time to move fast threat-based framing. And this is where thinking about a mastery system and guaranteeing mastery is really, really helpful. That if we engage kids and we build systems that guarantee mastery, we can create positive approaches to really addressing the needs that all kids have. Lovely framing there. No, thank you. And again, it’s the notion that, and by the way, I didn’t expect this. I came in

very much with a disposition of we’ve got to get rid of the learning loss and that it has no value as a phrase. In the course of writing and looking at the literature on innovation and what sparks people to focus on a problem and innovate, I realized actually it was served a very useful purpose up front, as you said. But if you continue in that threat framing, it creates a top-down command control response that solidifies what you’ve always done. And it doesn’t allow you to reframe

as an opportunity to figure out how you’ll actually go put something in place that takes advantage of the opportunity and does better than what’s currently there. And we’re well past the time where we need to make that pivot. It is so exhausting on educators and students themselves. And this isn’t to hide or run away from the loss. It isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist. It does. But now there’s the question of what do we do about it? And that’s where the reframe is so

important. And as you just elegantly said, if we can make it in a positive cycle where failures recast as part of the learning process, we change the dynamics and how students see themselves in the system. And they become agents in their learning, which right now we’re treating them as not agents. And good luck trying to make them learn if they don’t want it. I think both of us, the experience of the last few years has helped us both understand that

student agency, learner agency, is really critical. And so a response that damages learner agency is doubly crippling, I would argue, in that if we can build a response that is more a genetic that invites learners to own their experience and their growth, that it can be much more positive. Yeah, let me let me jump to parents. Chapter seven is this beautiful dialogue of the parent experience. Michael, you on a number of occasions have used

the old Christensen Institute, Clay Christensen jobs to be done framework. This chapter is a beautiful example of the, what job does school do for parents? And it’s super useful. Well, while I’m on that job to be done, I want to plug your last book, Choosing College, that in choosing college, you said, what, what is the job to be done of post secondary? And you really dig into both for learners and for families, the job to be done. And I think it’s a super

useful way to think about post secondary options here. You use that framework to look at the job to be done for parents. What are the highlights that arose for you in applying that sort of framework to where parents are today? Yeah, so, you know, our data show, we asked the question specifically around why do they switch and join a school community, right? And in the sense that it’s not going to answer everything that it does for them, right? So the custodial job of school

that we know is so important, isn’t a job to be done, if you will, in that framework, but it’s a really important piece for a lot of parents that that a really important experience of nailing a job to be done. And the jobs that we found for parents were around, you know, my kids in trouble help me get them back on the right track or help me be part of a values aligned community. We know that’s motivating a lot of discontent and switching right now or help me develop my whole child.

This is me right now with my kids, right? We’re like, my wife and I are very clear, we’re not about the academic knowledge at the moment, our kids are fine, they’re good enough on that they’re getting plenty of it at home. We think of school as like, how does it do what maybe we’re not as good at doing and how to develop them as as whole human beings around their social, emotional skills and dispositions. And then the fourth one is people who, for better

or worse, you know, they say, I want to develop my kid to follow my plan for them. It’s not how I would parent, but this is where they are, right? And jobs to be done aren’t normative in that way. We’re just understanding what causes parents to say, today’s the day I’m going to send my kids to that school instead of this one. I think the reason it’s so salient right now, Tom, is that in my memory, we’ve never seen parents in this country make so many choices or frankly have

policies that are empowering them to make choices in ways that they historically haven’t necessarily had. And, you know, New York City, we know is going to be down another, I think, 30,000 students or something like that in the fall. Districts you work with, I know we’re down seven, eight percent in an enrollment since the pandemic. Parents are making choices that we didn’t understand. And I think it’s really important to understand those choices and create a set of options that allow

them to find progress as a result. And by the way, that means considering school calendar, time of, you know, hours open and experiences like that as part of that equation. But also pathway choices, student reporting choices, right? 100 percent, right? It’s got to be around the progress that I see for my child on a, I think, frankly, it’s a daily basis for some parents, right? And some parents who know will say said it,

there’s some parents who are said it and forget it people, right? That’s fine. But we just want to understand that and be able to design these pathways accordingly. So I think about the last third of your book as the how to innovate without getting fired book. And this chapter is really important because if you only by being in dialogue with the parents in your community as a school or system leader and understanding the jobs to be done frame, what do they expect of us

as an education system? Can you thoughtfully create an innovation agenda? So this chapter super important for teachers and teacher leaders. Beautiful chapters on climate and culture and technology that follow it. But I want to jump to chapter 10 is a sort of a master’s degree in innovation management. It’s really a super thoughtful. It felt like an update to what I learned at 4.0 schools about starting small, moving fast, learning quickly from trials. And in

chapter 10, you talked about MVTs. I hadn’t heard that phrase before, not just a minimum viable product, but a minimum viable test of your assumptions. Where did that phrase come from? And why do you think it’s important for school and system leaders to try these MVTs? Yeah, well, so briefly that the overall framework comes from Rita McGrath at the Columbia School of Business. One of the best thinkers on strategy and management and innovation that’s out there

period. She’s like her newsletter is terrific. She’s just great. And Lean startup and all those methodologies were actually built on her original framework. So she’s the origin of them. And one of her big things was like, sometimes I’ll use a higher ad example to not throw any of our K-12 friends under the bus. But Jerry Brown and Sebastian Thrun came out and said, we’re going to transform San Jose State University or something like that with this MOOC experiment, where we’re going to

give it to military families and they’re going to be able to complete their Gen Ed courses in half the time for like a tenth of the cost or something and put $2 billion in it. And then two years later, they came back and like, you know, 40% had never even gotten started. And because they didn’t have connect, they didn’t have computers or connectivity, right? And the basic idea is you didn’t even have to do a minimum viable prototype or product. You could have just asked people, do you have a computer?

Right? Simple test. And said, no. Oh, wow. Okay, this plan is not going to work the way we’ve scripted it. And that’s the big idea. And then our friend Gaggen, Biana, who started one of the founders of Udemy and then I’m blanking on his current startup, but around, you know, a cohort based online learning, Maverick, it’s called. He had this great post about how when you start with the minimum viable product, you’re actually assuming a bunch of things about what kids or people need,

where you should just test it first. And so I really liked that as a way to illustrate of like, hey, you can just do a basic set of questions or like ask other districts that have done these things first and just get some leading indicators on your assumptions to figure out, is this a productive path to go down? Or maybe you got to rethink some fundamental assumptions up front. Michael, I like your chapter listed like 25 assumptions, sort of a sample of

here’s what it would look like if you listed your assumptions. And we really in education, we’re bad at this. We don’t name the assumptions that we operate with. We just we take as a set of givens, the systems and structures and schedules that that we have inherited. And I think this idea of a minimum viable test and naming assumptions is just super helpful. I love in the sort of spirit of 4.0 schools, the idea of testing small and quick, that could be after school today,

could be a three day summer school experience. And then it could be with with two teachers in the fall. So it’s the idea of starting very small, learning quickly, learning iteratively. Yeah, I love saying Tom, fast failures. So you don’t have spectacular ones, right? Because spectacular ones are the ones that not only waste dollars, but their career changing, right? They blow your political capital and they often end up in a not good place. Whereas fast failure that

no one notices starts to build learning, which is by the way, what we want to be modeling in schools period for students. And then you take that learning to build something that is more likely to work with a group of people who are excited about it and you start to build on the success. All right, one of the things that we had a dialogue about over your draft was this question of equity. So how if you hold these these these pillars of innovating and equity,

both in in high regard, how do you do this fast iteration, but do it with equity in mind? Because typically these these fast iterations are going to start with your highest capacity teachers, they might be in your highest functioning schools. And so how if you value equity, do you foster innovation in this way? How does it end up yielding a better system over time? Love the question. My take is that one of the big assumptions we make when we start to design

things, right, is that they will then work at these far reaches, let’s call it of the district, right, in these places that are underperforming or with people that have different capacities or talents, right, from the teachers we start with. And that’s an assumption that we ought to test. And so that’s that’s sort of how I think about it is that upfront, if if scale of an initiative is a critical component of it, then let’s test that upfront, get the learning and and make the changes.

So we don’t stumble into a trap that could have been foreseen at the end of a process. And that might mean that we start doing a lot of this test and learn in the most challenging, the most extreme parts of our district on all fronts, right, earlier, or it might be to say, hey, what we’ve realized through this process is that this system works really well for students in this circumstance, but it’s actually not getting what we need done

for these students who are in this totally different circumstance. And I’ll just say from a jobs to be done perspective, one of the gratifying things in the research was that these jobs don’t accord with demographics or, you know, race or income or things like that. And so why I think that’s good is that I think it will create a mosaic of opportunities and options to address different circumstances that won’t be spread across lines that we’re trying to frankly

eliminate in society. One thing that we’ve been talking about for the last few years is that the new job of school leaders and system leaders is to be conversation host and temporary agreement crafters. And chapter 11 is sort of a master’s degree on the tools that you need to be an agreement crafter today. Where did you get that beautiful chart on tools of cooperation? Yeah, I’ll credit Howard Stevenson and Clay Christensen for it. It was something very early on.

We learned it when I was a student in Clay’s class. And as you know, I came from the David Gergen School of Leadership. I was at the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School. And there are all sorts of food fights and leadership studies. This is going somewhere, I promise. But some of them are, you know, muscular, you know, masculine leadership is the thing of the past. Or some people say, no, see, it still works because they pull out their favorite whatever,

you know, Steve Jobs or whomever. And then you have like Jim Collins arguing, no, it’s not charismatic, it’s humble and blah, blah, blah. And then you have other people arguing on, you know, different dimensions. And what I liked about their framework, and to your point, you know, in your comments in the draft, is it oversimplifies the world somewhat. But I thought it was helpful in saying, actually, some of these tools work some of the time, depending on the circumstance

you’re in and the level of agreement of your followers, in essence, that’s how they would talk about in leadership studies. And the really important thing to know is that most of the tools don’t work most of the time. And so the art of leadership and management is figuring out which ones are available to you at any point in time to move the ball down the field in effect. And what I like about it, and I’ve been teaching it this course for the Public Education Foundation

in Clark County in Nevada for several years. And I sort of threw it in, Tom, as an afterthought at the very end of my set of days with them. And every time they were like, I wish you had led with this. Because they just feel so stuck, right, between all the different constituencies that are coming to them with different opinions and things. And so what I want to say is, I agree with your comment, this isn’t like the foolproof answer for what tool to use when. But I hope it gives people a bit of

north star of guiding them to say, I’m more in this situation than this one. And therefore, measurement systems and teacher eval is really not going to get me to where I need to go. But maybe actually it would be useful over here with this teachers who all have this level of agreement about what we’re trying to do right now. It felt like the toolkits, the toolkit for adaptive leadership. Yeah, that’s a good way to say it. It’s anyway, chapter 11 is super useful for school

and system leaders. We’ve been talking with Michael Horn. His new book is called From Reopen to Reinvent, Recreating School for Every Child. Michael, the book is really great. It’s super practical. I think teachers and parents and school leaders, policymakers will enjoy it. How did you get Josie Vast to let you do those key takeaways at the end of every chapter? They took them out of my book that I did. And I thought it was, they’re so well done.

That’s a good quote. I didn’t know that they did that for yours. I think it was a combination of them saying this would be useful to me, actually, ironically enough. And me having found that it worked, I thought well, in blended where we were able to say, here’s a couple key points. And if you don’t read the whole chapter, just remember these three things. Yeah, no, they’re super useful. All right, last question on the book, fat footnotes. You have the most extensive footnotes of any

book that I’ve read in recent memory. They’re super useful. What’s the backstory on fat footnotes? I love it. So the honest answer is that Clay Christensen loved fat footnotes. And he always said, I kind of feel like I’m writing a second book within the book. And it’s sort of scratched his itch of like every good idea that someone else had, right? He could put it to be like, yep, that’s a good idea. So you should pay attention to that. And so I took the same strategy here.

Although I will tell you, I won’t tell you which footnote, but it backfired a little bit because my wife was reading the book the other day. And she came up to me and said, this is a really bad typo you have here. This is a huge mistake. And I looked at it and I was kind of ashamed. I’ll tell you offline what it was. I love them. It’s super, super useful. Because I often go to the footnotes to find out what they’re sorting. And anyway, really good background discussion in many of those

notes. I just let’s conclude with a moment of gratitude. Is there I know Diane Davener was a really important thought partner in developing this. Anybody else you want to credit that helped you move this book along so quickly? I appreciate it, Tom. I mean, Diane is the biggest one on this one, right? Like the ideas and getting to learn from her real time over the last three years and these conversations that we’ve had every two weeks has been tremendous

and informed a lot. Frankly, the next three would be you, Susan Patrick and Tom Arnett. You all dove into the manuscript and gave me, at times, some brutal feedback. But you know me at this point. That’s what I want. I want to be pushed and prodded so that I’ve got to make some difficult decisions. And so I’m deeply thankful for that level of attention as well. And then just last up, my daughters and wife were putting up with me while I sprinted through a book.

Yes, I’m sure you’re cooped up at home and it’s like, why is daddy still working on his computer? Yeah, exactly. Why is he a the attic and not talking to us and teaching us piano. But you learn a lot, by the way, about teaching and learning through trying to teach your own kids and it’s not generally good things. Michael Horne’s new book from Reopen to Re-Invent, Recreating School for Every Child. Thank you, Michael. It’s really great to have you on for

the third time. Look forward to the next. It’s an honor. Thanks, Tom. And thank you to our producer, Mason Pasha and the whole Getting Smart team for making this possible. Until next time, keep learning, keep leading, keep, as Michael explained in this book, how to innovate for equity. And don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or subscribe wherever you listen. Feel free to share the podcast on social media using the hashtag GS Podcasts.