How the Getting Smart Learning Innovation Framework Drives Lasting Systems Change

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen and Rebecca Midles discuss the Getting Smart Learning Innovation Framework, designed to catalyze systems change in education. They explore how personalized, competency-based learning models integrated with AI can meet the diverse needs of students and overcome the systemic challenges currently facing education. The conversation highlights the framework’s focus on community-driven visions, adaptive learning models, and innovative signaling methods to ensure meaningful credentialing and assessment. Join us as we uncover the potential of this framework to lead educational systems toward new horizons, addressing pressing issues such as equity and access while empowering learners and leaders alike.

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction to the Framework
• (03:00) The Role of Leadership in Education
• (09:59) The Importance of R&D in Schools
• (19:39) Overview of the Framework
• (26:16) Learning from Implementation
• (29:50) Debates and Discussions
• (34:39) Next Steps and Conclusion

Introduction to the Framework

Nate McClennen: Rebecca and I are super excited for our listeners because we are jumping into this framework that we’ve been developing along with the rest of the Getting Smart team. We’ve been putting together a bunch of ideas that have been percolating and forming over the last probably three or four years, and we now have put it into a format that we think is super usable and helpful for systems, districts, and schools that are thinking about new horizons of learning. So, I’m excited.

Rebecca Midles: The last couple of years, but let’s be honest, we’ve probably been percolating on this for a long time.

Nate McClennen: It’s possible it’s been since birth, but I, we.

Rebecca Midles: Maybe my parents are educators, your parents. I mean, you never know. Who knows?

Nate McClennen: We’ve been thinking about systems change work since we were young children. Okay. So hey, I think it might be helpful, Rebecca, if we start off with just a sort of big picture of what is the problem we’re trying to solve? I think sometimes in education, we create solutions, but we don’t really know the problem. So, the challenge here for me, and I’d love for you to add on and riff together as we talk about this, but this idea of like, we know fundamentally the big picture is that the way we do teaching and learning right now does not reach every student, and we need a new horizon of learning. It’s more personalized and competency-based and meets all student needs. We have this giant thing out there called AI that’s also influencing education. So we have this big picture idea that learning needs to change. Would you agree with that? Is that like, that’s the big picture idea?

Rebecca Midles: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would say even that the pandemic exposed a lot of this. But I can share a little bit more about how I feel like that’s accelerated. But yeah, I think those inequities have always been there. And I think that’s not new to those of us in the system. Many of us, and many of us listening right now, are doing great work within the system where we can, but the system does make it pretty challenging for us to meet kids where they’re at. And we know that. So what can we do to make thoughtful change?

Nate McClennen: And it’s super, the systems are really resistant to change or resilient to change. I don’t know how you describe it, but.

Rebecca Midles: Adult-centric.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, they’re big and they’re complicated and it’s not for lack of effort. There are so many great educators and leaders out there that have done really incredible work. I mean, we at Getting Smart, we work with a ton of really innovative schools that are doing new horizon work all over the place. But as a large landscape, it is a resistant landscape to moving and changing. So number one, we both agree learning needs to change. That was one giant challenge we’re always trying to solve for. The second one I was thinking about is just this idea of systems themselves, which we just alluded to. There’s great research on that. You have changes in leadership. You have priorities that change. You have different people that are making decisions. You have different teaching staff. You have different students that come through. Change management itself is hard, but there are a lot going on that systems themselves are hard to change. But I think we’ve seen some of this in the folks that we work with, right, Rebecca?

The Role of Leadership in Education

Rebecca Midles: Yeah, we have, and I think also, we are unique in a sense of an organization where everyone feels like they know what we do because everyone went through some sort of schooling system, right? And so I think there’s a lot of that. But in addition to that, there’s also a pretty dated view of what is a leader in this work to talk about change management. So we often still celebrate leaders who seem to have all the answers and know the way and are visionary, but have all the pieces put together. But that’s often not the case. It really needs to be a collective effort, which requires a different type of leader, which also adds to change management within a system, making it equally hard.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes total sense that leadership is a different type of leader than what was previously valued and still unfortunately is sometimes valued. And I think the other thing that we saw is that we, at Getting Smart, you and I have worked with, and the rest of the team, we’ve worked with many, many different schools and systems and districts at the state level, at the local level, at the regional level. And often we see that these organizations, learning organizations, will have one piece of the puzzle in place, but not the whole system. So an example might be they might have a portrait of a graduate, but not a clear path to figure out a learning model to build on that portrait of a graduate. They might be thinking about facilities for the future, but then are not combining the learning model into those facilities. Is that what you’re seeing with the folks that you’re working with?

Rebecca Midles: Yeah, I mean, I guess I would add another layer to that. It’s great that you surfaced that too. I think there’s another example that is commonly heard is that they grabbed competencies or standards or proficiency scales, but perhaps didn’t have a really strong idea about how that might change instruction, or maybe only had an idea about how that would change reporting. And that’s not to blame the folks that are grabbing that stuff sometimes. That’s the way it’s presented too. So I think there’s just a hard challenge between consultants using different languages and lexicons, myself as one of them, and working with different resources, maybe grabbing different texts or different supports. And it’s just really having an idea about how you match all of that work in a coherent way for a system. And sometimes the lexicon can be a barrier. Sometimes people are using words interchangeably and sometimes they’re using the same word for different things. So really helping sort that I think required us to raise it up to a larger grain size, which we’ll get into when we talk about how we formatted that system, but really allowing people to kind of plug in where they have strengths already in the way that they do them, and then making it really clear and transparent about where there might be areas for growth that would help the system run better in a coherent way.

Nate McClennen: I love that idea. I think that you and I have talked about this a lot, about how do we make sure that it is locally driven, so it’s ground up rather than top down. And I think a lot of, there are a lot of great frameworks out there, and I’m not saying that they’re bad, but a lot of them are more top down and saying, this is the way you need to do things. They have parts of the puzzle, but not the whole puzzle. And so I think what we’re trying to do is create an open and inclusive larger framework that people can plug into and figure out the gaps and figure out their strengths like you were saying.

Rebecca Midles: Honor the language that’s become legacy for their area. I don’t want to change the language they use. I think we just want to be more mindful of why those words are chosen and how we can work with that.

Nate McClennen: Totally, totally. And we as educators are notorious at creating really cryptic and awesome language so we have big picture changes needed in learning.

Challenges of changing systems. And I think the last one I just wanted to add on was the tide of AI that is coming at us and the billions and billions of dollars that are being spent on the technology side of things, often for profit in the tech sector. And how schools are desperately trying to catch up. And you know, you and I have seen schools that we work with, some are just at the, I don’t actually know what to do. Some are at the policy level, we need to create policies to prevent students from using it. Some have adopted a platform for their whole school. I was really excited to see Ethan Malik’s post in his blog on One Useful Thing about businesses and how businesses need to think about what’s the future with AI because it’s happening so fast. And so translating that to school, he talked about leadership, how can leaders recognize the urgency and paint this picture of what the future looks like in co-design with their community?

Rebecca Midles: Matches to our portrait work. I think people used to call that shared vision, so that was a nice kind of affirmation.

Nate McClennen: I mean, it definitely sits in that community vision part of the framework. And then the idea of the crowd and the crowd in this case is the educators and the students who are out there trying and using this stuff on a daily basis, even if it’s a hundred percent banned from the district, which most districts are not doing it. They’re using it. And so how do we tap into the crowd of folks that are actually using this day to day to make learning better for the organization? And the third one was around how do we make sure there’s labs in every school, which is, for us, we talk about sharing and scaling in our framework, but the lab is about how do we make sure if there’s a good idea that shows up in a classroom or shows up from a student that’s helping the outcomes of that classroom or for that student that it goes into a lab and it’s packaged and able to be propagated and shared throughout the district or even externally in the broader landscape. So I kind of appreciated that. This third wave that was really why we are creating this framework is gonna be an AI-first framework because we want to help schools make sure that they see what is that vision and how they lead into it.

Rebecca Midles: And to use it as a tool. I mean, I think you captured it so well, but I also add that, you know, there was lots of affirmation towards competency-based personalized learning efforts and design principles that, you know, I think a lot of us are familiar with what he shared. But I like the way it was reframing it. I think we still have a lot of work to do about that offloading of work that comes with AI and then what that makes room for. And I think what that makes room for is the critical piece we need to be talking about, and that’s performance and application, and that’s that context of authentic learning. That’s great for our learners, and I think people are talking about that, but what does that mean for people in the system as well? So if some of those pieces can be offloaded or what I would say directed with a co-design of AI, what does that make more space for? So I think a lot of people are worried about layoffs or becoming lean, but really what does that mean? What does that free up and how can those hours of the personnel that are so invested in the system be reallocated in new ways that can push that system to the next level that we often don’t think we have space for? Because we don’t have people already there. We do. So what does that look like? Maybe to reallocate those free up hours and have time to talk about that shift. So we look for deeper exploration as we move forward. We’re learning something new every day, and I do recommend people look at that.

Nate McClennen: I like that. It’s like unleashing talent in ways that are really relevant and helpful for learner outcomes. And that could be talent of the student, it could be talent of the educator, talent of the leader, and part of the work is making an AI, like creating this framework and then building AI tools around it is how do we unleash talent to do more in schools than we’ve been able to do before that have better impact on learner outcomes. Right.

The Importance of R&D in Schools

Rebecca Midles: Would you say that the lab piece of that, that research and development kind of testing and scaling idea. Would you see that as a way for systems to start thinking about kind of that, I don’t want to say fail forward, but that idea of just like get started lean into, lean into work. How can you test this in small ways and co-design the outcomes of that? I appreciated that being surfaced. I think that’s an approach that systems should be thinking about. So much change happening. I think the R&D part, that development is the part that we don’t give time for because the research has always taken so long and you can get, and that’s what I think AI is gonna help free up too. We’re gonna test some of the research that comes our way, but it gives more space to act on what we learned from the research. Great for adults. That is revolutionary for the classroom. So as students are working on that, you know, we often get so focused on just doing the research. We don’t give space for the the now. So what kind of piece of that. So if we know this to be true, what can we do about it? And really position learners to be active participants performing the work that they’re learning, and also then taking it out to their authentic community settings and really doing the work. And so I look forward to what that can look like as we rethink it.

Nate McClennen: No, no doubt. And we both know that these kind of things like a plan, do, study, act, or action research in schools like this stuff. It’s just often not institutionalized in a way that says, we have an R&D and it’s labeled as R&D. And whether it’s about AI or anything else in the pedagogy, we, for us, we think R&D should happen across the entire framework, and it’s just an institution in the school that needs to be established. That implementation part is so important and it’s, it’s how do you implement at a really small scale to test the idea based on the research. Then how do you scale it to a larger system? Super important. You and I were talking about that yesterday. We were talking about looking at our competency set around the framework and saying, what does it mean across any of these competencies to go from just learning about it, to practicing it and in a small scale, and then to implementing it and eventually testing long-term efficacy.

Rebecca Midles: Think about it this way as you’re listening, like a lot of, you know, the rubrics and progressions work, some of those early stages will be really fast. Now with AI tools,

Nate McClennen: Mm. Yeah.

Rebecca Midles: we would still want the thinking, so that’s gonna give more space to dig into the when, what was maybe. If you believe in fours, what was maybe fours is now more of a reality, and maybe that should be the expectation. So it’s interesting to think about. I look forward to this conversation this next year.

Nate McClennen: Alright, so there’s the why. It’s a challenge we’re trying to solve. So let’s actually talk about the framework and maybe Rebecca, maybe you can start with just giving your backstory and then I’ll give my backstory and you and I met. We were in Colorado. I was at Teton Science Schools up here in Wyoming. And then we met in, at Reimagined meeting at Lynn’s Unified. Right, right where you were prior. And that was our first meeting. And at that point you hadn’t yet gone to Getting Smart, but you soon thereafter moved over to Getting Smart, and I came a little bit a couple of years later. And since then, we’ve been working with a lot of schools and districts, and you and I have been riffing on this a lot to try to create a collaborative vision around this framework with help from our team at Getting Smart. But what’s your origin story?

Rebecca Midles: I would say origin story, I don’t know, to be fair, in the very beginning when I was teaching in competency-based personalized learning in the late nineties, I don’t know that I was dreaming of how to fix the system, but I certainly kept hitting my head against things in the system that was stopping the work. And so I tend to think like, boy, if I was doing this, I would change it. Boy, if I was a principal, I’d do it differently. If I was at the district office, I’d do it differently. And consequently, I’ve learned to stop saying that because then what happens is I have to go get in those roles and figure out if I could actually do it because it’s good perspective taking. So that gives you a little bit of color. But like I have worked in rural, remote, I mean really remote places. I’ve worked in certainly big city places in suburbia. And I think in all those size systems in different roles has really helped inform what you think works in one system and can transfer across the board, you know, at a larger grain size. Yes, we agree with that, but at a smaller grain size in action, it looks different. And I think that’s really what has been resonating with me all this time. And then when I was fortunate enough to work in Alaska,

I was fortunate to be in a place where we were really trying to do personalized learning for lots of reasons, small systems, really remote. You need to, so those of you that have been listening to this and like, I do this already, you need to, if you’re really gonna meet the needs of learners, but what does that look like at scale? And so having worked in different site systems, even Alaska as a teacher, I was having to change all the time. So that was really formative. I happened to get attached to Chuga School District. Many of you will know, and that was a part of the Reinventing Schools Coalition, which was just amazing work to work across the state. I

eventually led us to working across the country in other places. So staying in my job part-time, and then part-time consulting from Alaska to Maine and to California and to other places across the country and Colorado. This eventually led to work in California with Lindsay as mentioned. I’ve done some podcasts on that before. I was lucky enough to be the performance-based learning specialist and help set up the tours and do some of the adult learning continuum that led to the mindsets work that you may see with other organizations and then that eventually led to work in Colorado, which I feel like was another huge learning time for me because I had to really dig into what scale was.

Up until that time, the largest system, I think, was really sharing that work. Was Denver Great Westminster? I think at the time it was 10,000 learners. I could be wrong, but give or take. And so that was the largest system we had at that time, and I just felt like I needed to experience a larger system. So I was lucky and fortunate enough to work in a district in the west side of the of Colorado and Grand Junction that had lots of communities and spaces, but also had a lot of comprehensive high schools as well as choice schools. And you could not get one level of teachers into one room. And so there was the recipe I needed to really learn about scale. And there was just some incredible people there, incredible leaders, and we just really dung into what became instructional frameworks because when you can get everybody in the room, you can call it learning model, and you can have shared agreements, which I, I’ve later learned would be design principles. We’ll talk about that. Having it at scale with an instructional framework for a whole system takes a little bit more work. It may not be as sexy, but it does take a lot of people at the table digging into what are those best practices. And much of what I learned from that in terms of scaling, I think shows up in our framework. And I’m just really thankful for all those different experiences at different stages as a district person, as a school leader, as a teacher, really helpful.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, I’ve really appreciated your variety of experiences and perspectives have been super influential on this framework, so really excited about that. And you know, my journey was different. I got involved in the startup school and spent a long time building and sort of scaling the school over a period of 15 years. And it was a personalized competency-based school focused on local places. So getting out in the community and doing that work. It was small, it was rural, and after 15 years, so that was my intro to understanding this. I had taught prior, but I was a math science teacher and wasn’t really thinking about the scale at school or learning models. But in the startup, we had to really determine what the learning model was. And so, so, and the idea was, look, well if we have a learning model, where are we headed? And that had sort of hit on portrait of a graduate, et cetera. And then when I left that school, the same org gave me permission to figure out how to scale. And so spent seven years scaling the model, codifying and scaling the model in rural public schools around the country. And that gave me a sense of how do you scale something and the challenges of I was working in really small districts, often single building districts in rural spaces. Probably like your Alaska experience. And in some ways it was easy to work within those systems because there was less bureaucracy. Everybody knew everybody. And in some ways it was harder because, especially in redesign work rather than startups. So some of the work I did was in startup, typically public charter schools. And the other half was in redesign. In redesign, you had to unlearn first. And so part of systems change is a lot of this unlearning, which ties into the growth mindset. So those experiences inform me about, okay, it’s important to have a frame in order to have a school all moving in the same direction to improve learner outcomes. And the second thing is, when you scale, you need to be really specific about what is it you’re trying to scale and how are you articulating who you are to others, whether that’s new teachers or families or whatever the case may be. So, convergence of my experience and your experience. And then our time together at Getting Smart where we worked with a lot of partners. Let us over the last couple of years and I was looking at slide decks the other day and we have slides over the last three years where we’re starting to iterate this framework. So it’s pretty fun to see the early, and Tom was involved in some of those. He had his version. You had your version. I had my version and they’ve all now converged. It’s pretty awesome.

Rebecca Midles: I would be remiss not to circle back to like the late nineties is when I met Tom. And so we were at a Par Reinventing Schools Coalition was a coalition across the state of Alaska to meant to scale and do models. And so we came up what we called the organizational Self-Assessment Tool. But with that, it had progressions for implementation that I would say is, you know, a lot of the origins, I guess for my journey that I was constantly testing and evolving and many people had a play in that work. And so I would say in many people listening to this and known in competency-based learning, I have learned from so many people along the way to help in the terms of scaling. And so yes, bringing those all together and then getting to work with Nate and Getting Smart as well as other great people on our team, pushing on the thinking about what does make a good system really led to, like you said, our slide decks and reimagining and reworking those visuals and having tough but delightful soul-filling conversations.

Nate McClennen: Hey, we had some good hotel lobby conversations in Michigan over the last year or.

Yeah. Yeah, it was good. We’ll talk about those in a bit.

Shorts Content

Overview of the Framework

Nate McClennen: I’m gonna give a quick overview of the framework and, and of course we have a blog post on it, on our site. And coming out in August, we’re gonna have a, we’ll have a playbook that comes out as well and a bunch of other resources associated with it. So more to come, but in a nutshell, we have five key elements, which starts with the community vision, and that’s about mission and vision and getting community buy-in and co-designing and all those important pieces, eventually leading to a profile of a learner or a portrait of a graduate, and then taking that portrait of a graduate and building out progressions and competencies and associated standards and whatever requisite outcomes you need. You take your community vision, you establish a set of outcomes, and then you build a learning model, which is the third element. And the learning model is all the things that Rebecca, you were talking about, right? It’s the, we actually start it with the values and norms conversation and establishing a strong culture and climate, like that’s the foundation. And then from that, we say, you gotta have a set of design principles. This is what you believe about teaching and learning. And then from that you build your instructional frame and the output of the instructional frame, which is around learning, experience, design and instruction and authentic assessment. Then you have portraits of educators, portraits of leaders, which lead to really coherent professional learning. So the learning model, that third element, it’s really, really big and there’s a lot of intermediaries out there doing this work and we’re doing this work. And it’s great. We love all these different iterations of, of really think being thoughtful about that learning model.

The fourth one for us is something that we’ve, we’ve been thinking about a lot is this idea of better signals for young people, and we call it the for whom area, which is this idea of when you’re creating transcripts and credentials and or badges and whatever you’re creating the output and the documentation of learning, we need to be really thoughtful about that for higher ed entrance, for workplace entrance, for communicating what a student knows and is able to do. And right now we’re stuck in fairly archaic systems in that area. So we’re really advocating in the fourth area, the signaling areas, how do we do better signals? And then finally the fifth is around the learning ecosystem. And we talk a lot about expanded learning ecosystems. Real world learning, place-based education. How do we make more things count rather than the thin sliver that currently is counted in a school system? And so those five pieces, community vision, outcomes, learning model signals, and then learning ecosystem are the core of the framework. At the center of those are the different users. So we have learners. Educators, leaders, which could be learners and educators as well. And then community members. And that could be board, it could be parents, it could be other community members within the region. And so, so all those users have a role in those five elements. Community vision, outcomes, learning model signals, and learning ecosystem. We believe strategy has to happen in all of those five elements. So strategically moving them forward in whatever decision a system decides to make. And then the last thing that we have in our framework, and it wraps around the outside, is this idea of you always need to be observing and reflecting. We call it noticing. So always you need to be collecting and understanding how is the system working to advance all learners and help them move forward. And the second piece that you need to be thinking about is how are you scaling and sharing this work? And that could be in a school, in a classroom, in a district, in a region, nationally. But we need, when good ideas work, we need to know how to scale. We need to think about how to scale and share it. So five elements, strategy for each one of those core users of learner, educator, leaders, and communities, and wrapped with noticing and scaling and sharing. So that in a nutshell is our framework.

Rebecca Midles: Yeah, and I would just say that we often will use slightly even bigger grain size than this when we’re organizing it to help people feel where they can fit in and where they have worked on previously. So we will refer to that community vision often as the why. What is the why of what you’re doing? And some of you guys have read some of our blogs before on that, why and how and what. We definitely think that that’s where a lot of us sit when we talk about competency-based learning. We have that why sometimes that we call a shared vision. Sometimes people call it a community portrait. That’s that community vision piece that needs highlighting and then that’s often followed with what we call the what. And that could be outcomes like Nate was saying, but also progressions, standards, competencies. What is it you hope to gain outta that piece? So that why, what, and then we refer to the learning model as. How, how’s it gonna happen? What’s it gonna look like? How are you gonna unfold it? And oftentimes that’s where a lot of people will just stay. And that’s really worth the time. It is, it is the biggest lift of the work. Wouldn’t you say Nate? Like that is the biggest focus and lift. But we, we categorize that as kind of that why, what, how, and then as Nate’s already said, was signaling, what’s the reporting for? Is it for the student? Is it for the family? Is it for the colleges? Those may look different and that really gets to assessment literacy. The, where is that happening in the system? Is it happening in different places within the school building the classroom? Is it happening in another campus? What is that learning ecosystem? With all of those pieces combined and con, considering pathways, micro schools, all the pieces that you hear us talk about. So it just, we keep all of those. As the big pillars of where we kind of organize that work to help systems know where they’re good at already and what they need help on. And then we also look at the win, as he talked about with strategy and really just constantly digging into those pieces to get to where we can scale and share that. So I, I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to put together, but it has been largely informed by the people we work with and the people we work alongside and, and really helping find ways to plug in what they’re doing well and where they want focused help.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think like you and I have talked about is that the, the, the innovation here is about how do you create a as simple as possible. Model framework that people can plug into that they can say, here’s the work we’re already doing and here’s a path potentially for moving forward. And that power of ground up work is really, really important. And we know there are plenty of other folks that are out there doing learning model work or doing strategy work or, or creating progressions. And that’s great. We want a lot of people doing this because there are many, many schools and systems out there that are not doing a lot of this. Most schools have an instructional frame, even if they haven’t articulated it. They talk about instruction and they talk about curriculum. They talk about assessment. In fact, that’s what we see as the most present when any organization that we work with, and then we have to fill in the rest of the framework around it.

Rebecca Midles: Or they have shared agreements around learning, which you have helped me understand. We can call design principles. I would argue that that’s what Aurora’s definition of competency-based learning is a set of design principles, shared agreements around what we believe to be true. And oftentimes those are in place, but just not formalized.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so, so, okay.

Learning from Implementation

Nate McClennen: We built this, it was informed by this year our, our prior experience and then years of work at getting Smart along with all of our, our partners and other, other team members at getting smart. What, what’s, what have you learned? Like what have, what’s been your big learning so far as we’ve, as we’ve, as we’ve sort of started to formalize this.

Rebecca Midles: Well, I think that the why and how piece we’ve always playing with is how do you lead? I, I wanna go a little long on that ’cause some of you’ll get that piece. As far as leading transformation is knowing the. Adults that were also leading. And when we’re in that position, what are their drivers? Are they wanting to learn? How are they wanting to know how to do it? Are they wanting to know how they’ll show up and what that looks like? And just really helping people talk about that nuanced way of talking about leadership. We’ve been testing this, all of this thinking, all of this experience, and we’ve been fortunate enough to do so with with FLC Group, the Future Learning Council in Michigan, and it’s been wonderful for us to learn alongside these organizations as they committed to really doing this work as a systems approach across the state of Michigan, taking what they knew. Around competency-based learning and personalized learning, and really wanting to dig into a deeper level of implementation. And so meeting that those teams at the different places they were at with lots of different strengths really helped test this. Idea. And I would love to give credit to Dave Richards for being just such a great thought partner in that piece for us and helping us put this all together. And the FLC leadership team, they also have what they call ISDs. Some people might call asds, but those really regional, strong networks and, and that group stepping forward. Just learning that collective wisdom in the room and the process that different systems and different sizes and different drivers are under right now in the current state. And to be able to sit with them this last year and work through that has really driven a lot of the refinements. And so it’s been wonderful to, to have that opportunity.

what I think I love most about this framework that’s been helpful for me is what we believe to be true about teach and learning for students. Building transparency and building what we believe to be true agency. We want the same for the people that are leading these systems. And so what that framework does is it allows people to see what they’re doing that’s strong, and then also allows to see areas that are for ask for improvement. And I think. What I remember being a district leader is just not really sometimes knowing where to start with bringing consultants and supports in, or even gathering teachers to lead the work internally. Knowing what your strengths are and knowing what you need provides that transparency to actually lead in a way that feels genic and also feels really supportive. So what we believe to be true about learning for students, we believe to be true about learning for teachers is certainly true for the leaders and systems that we serve.

Nate McClennen: I would agree with that learning. I think the other thing that I’ve noticed, and this even before we converged on a, a single framework at getting smart and all of us were using slightly different versions is the, the power of a, a simple framework to help move a system forward is that schools and districts and systems are super complicated and they are constantly leaders are, and, and educators are constantly putting out fires time’s a huge commodity. And, and the access to something that, that is easy to find your place in and easy to see a roadmap forward. HA has, I think, been really transformational for a lot of the orgs we’ve worked with. And, and now with FLC where it’s 60 or 70 districts is the reaction on their end where they said, oh, I see myself in this. It doesn’t feel like I, I, I like this is totally separate from what I’m doing. Look, I’m, I’m doing some work on instruction and authentic assessment, and I’m dabbling with competencies. But, but the ability to see a larger puzzle and the, and, and where the pieces might fall has really, really been important for me in terms of my learning about how useful this might be.

Debates and Discussions

Nate McClennen: Let’s talk a, like Rebecca, you and I have spent a lot of hours talking about this and they’re fun conversations. Some of the, the, the bigger debates we’ve had I, you know, you’ve alluded to this already about design principles versus instructional frameworks versus core beliefs. And we kind of got tangled up, I guess in the, this idea that there’s values and norms, which are how we behave. There’s something about what do we believe about teaching and learning, and then there’s something about implementation. And we got caught up in the, the very mixed vocabulary in the education ecosystem around that.

Rebecca Midles: Yeah, we had to work out our own our own lexicon on that piece. I mean, I think it was really helpful for us internally to, to kind of like beat those up a little bit and think about what they, what they really mean. I think that led to a couple of our blogs together about competencies, progressions, and grain size. That was definitely a piece that I feel like we got to pretty quickly. You and I, we were able to sort out. But I think other pieces about design principles and instructional frameworks. What does that look like? Because sometimes we’ll hear people use the term learning model and it means both of those things or it means none of those things. And so like sometimes it might mean I, we we’re an IB school. That’s our learning model. And so like some of those things, when you dig into it, that program has a lot of pieces in place that are unpacked but may not come to mind when they first reference it because of the program piece. Nothing wrong with that, but I, it’s harder to make adjustments if you’re not aware of all of those pieces, I think involved. So I think that’s been really helpful for us in that in many cases I think I. What I have learned is that sometimes design principles can be a decent proxy for a while until an instructional framework is unpacked, particularly for smaller agile systems, but even for larger ones.

What are our set of shared agreements around learning about what we believe to be true about assessment? What we believe to be true about learning experiences where students are in agency? What does that really look like? Those design principles can really set the stage in those first steps into divine design, an instructional framework.

Nate McClennen: I totally agree. That’s an interesting observation, is this idea that there are lightweight entry points around this framework in all the different elements. Right. And, and we have to be. Willing to do lightweight entry points if we’re gonna move the needle or allow, or, or, or help schools see themselves moving the needle. ’cause it can be complicated and it can be overwhelming when you show a giant framework and you know all the different parts. So we need to show them the lighter version of that. And I do agree is that. Just deciding on a set of design principles that everyone’s using as a North Star is actually a huge step, and that can be really powerful for an organization, even if you don’t have a defined instructional frame to surround it.

Rebecca Midles: And I would say that we would both agree. Please do so. There, there, because sometimes if you build an instructional framework without that, you’re not really changing the system. You’re just codifying the one you’re already in. So what are the design principles that get you closer to that vision of change will help you guide your work and instructional framework.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And how is

Rebecca Midles: pieces. I, I learned that when I was in Colorado, but I didn’t have a name for it that I just called out. But it was just, it was really helpful for me to see that at scale in operation.

Nate McClennen: Totally. And, and how is it the other, the other piece that’s important that I think is less permeated, has less permeated into schools is this idea of where learning sciences plays a role. Is that, is that, how are your design principles informed by learning sciences? We know a lot about cognition and neuroscience to help inform. The idea that say, personalized learning or mastery based learning is a strong lever for, for stronger, reaching, stronger outcomes. So, okay. So that’s, that’s one. Another one we talked about was around sort of location of things. And so learner profile we put into the community vision because we felt like that’s part, understanding what the graduates should look like, should be part of that community vision. But some people said, yeah, maybe it should go into outcomes. And then I. Leadership. We’ve been bouncing back and forth and where leadership sits. Wanna riff on either one of those.

Rebecca Midles: Well, yeah, I think it I tend to fall in, in, in favor of the word portraits, just calling it out. These are, these are the nuances that if you know, Nate and I, you’ll understand, it’s great. But I just would say that we wanted to put the learner portraits or portraits of a learner. Piece because I felt like it was being operationalized and used in a way that many had done shared vision before. Because you know, previously shared vision was, what do we want students lead with? Well, that’s very similar to what you would want a portrait of a graduate or portraits of a graduate look like as well. So once that’s defined, I think you have to acknowledge. Is it truly a vision to really accelerate change in that system? And I think that’s what I’ve been able to recognize that putting a portrait there has helped with that piece for a lot of, a lot of systems.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And then putting the, the, we added the portrait of a leader after you and I wrote about that in our portrait model work which is great. And so, the, the idea of rolling the portrait of a leader, into the learning model at the, the, the bottom end once you create an instructional frame. I thought it was really important because it, it allows for in instruc leaders to be primarily focused on learning, which I think is really, really important.

Next Steps and Conclusion

Nate McClennen: Let, let’s talk about what’s next Rebecca. So we have a couple different things. We talked about. We’re gonna release a playbook at the end of the summer. We are gonna continue to write about this in blogs. We are, we are partnering and, and, and continuing to test with partners all of our partners all different types. Bringing others into the framework. We, we, we are in the ecosystem and we have all sorts of friends and that are out there doing. Work that are helping schools and districts and systems advance. We want them to see themselves in this framework. It should be an open marketplace, and that’s really important so that, that we can move the whole system forward. What else other things that we’re thinking about, about what next? Rebecca.

Rebecca Midles: Well, yeah, like you said, this is meant to be iteration and it’s only as good as the people that are involved in it, and so we would love to have more people be a part of that collective action moving forward. I think you’ll hear more about the individual pieces as we move into, into this next year, and we look forward to unpacking some of those. Hopefully we’ve enticed your interest a little bit and you’ll wanna hear more about what that looks like as we unpack to the lower levels of that.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, absolutely. And then the, the final thing I would say is that on our website right now, we have thousands and thousands of resources on the Getting Smartt website. We’ve curated a number of those to link up to the framework. So it’s really easy to say, Hey, I’m interested in this particular aspect. Here’s a bunch of real world stories of people doing this in interesting ways. And so I think that curation of the whole set of resources that getting Smartt has associated with a framework’s gonna be really helpful. So, Rebecca, awesome. I always enjoy talking to you. So, we’ll see you next time.

Rebecca Midles: Same. Same. Thank you.

Links

• Watch full video here
• The Getting Smart Learning Innovation Framework
• Building Systems That Serve: The Power of the Getting Smart Innovation Framework
• What is the Evolving Role of Future Educators? 
• How can we reimagine where learning happens? Designing schools as community hubs within a personalized ecosystem
• The Transcript Trap: Why Our Students Need Credentials, Not Just Grades