Rebecca Wolfe on the “When” of Transformation

Why do so many promising ideas in education stay stuck in individual classrooms? In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Nate McClennen talks with Rebecca Wolfe about what it takes to turn innovation into lasting system change. From teacher agency and school leadership to accountability and knowledge-sharing, they explore how schools can create the conditions for ideas to spread, scale, and ultimately support learner thriving.

Outline

• (00:00) Intro & The Problem
• (12:46) Learning From AVID
• (24:42) School Leadership & Culture
• (34:15) The Macro Challenge
• (41:40) Hope & A Bias Toward Action

Intro & The Problem

Nate McClennen: Welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. I am Nate McClennen, and today we’re talking about the when of transformation, the strategic engine that actually moves a vision for a community into the reality in the classroom. At Getting Smart and across the country, a lot of organizations and schools are thinking about the great ideas in education that are everywhere.

They’re all over the place, but they often get stuck. And that’s why, in our framework, the strategy layer is so critical. It moves us away from the traditional models where change is top-down and compliance-driven, and toward this transformational bottom-up model, which is the topic of discussion today, where the system itself is designed to learn, to adapt and to innovate.

And so when we think about strategy, we think about leadership, so leading change through distributed catalytic leadership that empowers everyone in the ecosystem. We think about traditional implementation science. Once something happens, how do you move it beyond a simple replication toward a strategic process that moves it to scale?

We think about how we measure success, we think about research and development specifically, and today we’re going to dive into this R&D concept. What does innovation look like in a system that’s decentralized like the United States, but has heavy, heavy mandates for accountability? And so the reality is that our education architecture isn’t really set up for this.

And so we need some system, and we need to think about some way to amplify innovation so that not only does it emerge at the classroom level, but then it spreads within a system and then spreads beyond the system. So joining us today to discuss how we navigate this transition and embed innovation models that work, and why our current systems make it so difficult, is Rebecca Wolfe.

Rebecca is the founder of Threadwell Solutions and has served in leadership roles at KnowledgeWorks and Jobs for the Future, and she’s here today to help us think through how we turn these strategic sparks that happen in classrooms all over the country into lasting systemic change that impacts student engagement and student outcomes.

So welcome, Rebecca, to the podcast. Excited to have you here today.

Rebecca Wolfe: Hey, Nate, it’s great to be here talking about some of my favorite things.

Nate McClennen: Well, and I have to tell you, as I told you as we were just starting out, I love this paper, Can’t Get There From Here … for those of us who are from Maine.

I went to college in Maine, and I think … there you go. You got the

Rebecca Wolfe: accent … I love

Nate McClennen: it. Yeah. So I have some vestige of that, and maybe that’s why the paper’s been so sticky for me. But we’re going to walk through all parts of this paper and think about it specifically for our listeners who are school leaders and educators, who are innovators and system leaders, to really think deeply about how we move a system to a bottom-up innovation that actually works.

And your paper dove into this research significantly, and there’s some decent research over the past … you know, 50 or so years that you articulated.

But I want to start with just a basic question about education, because I love starting with this question. In your K-12 experience … what was your best experience in terms of learning? So high engagement, high learning … that you remember, that’s sticky in your brain.

Rebecca Wolfe: Yeah. Love this question. So the one that always immediately comes to mind when I get asked things like this is …

my senior year honors English class, our final project.

We were given the assignment to pick from a pretty broad range of literature. So a little bit of guardrails, but not a ton. Pick your book, pick your team, and you could present that book in any way that you wanted to, as long as you hit a certain set of criteria.

Mm-hmm. So you had to talk about the themes. You had to use music. You had to use some kind of presentation. I forget what exactly, but there were these wonderful creative things. And so it was this combination of … and my friends and I chose Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is just … love it … gorgeous, meaningful, particularly at that time of your life. I mean, there’s just so much that you’re exploring and learning at that time. And so it was this glorious, beautiful, hard, challenging book that we then created a performance around, and it was probably absolutely ridiculous. But the process of

being able to work with peers to make that many choices along the way and to really dig really deep, because you had to think so differently when you said, “Well, how would I present this book through music?” Or, “What are themes of color?” You know, things that you don’t necessarily bring. So it always sticks with me as just this wonderful, engaged, super-creative way of thinking about literature.

Nate McClennen: And what I love about that is that the teacher had the latitude to assign that particular assignment … right? And then it had voice and choice, it had personalization, it had some guardrails, which I think are important, but not significant guardrails. Exactly … and here you are remembering something from high school.

And when I ask this question of all the people that I do pods with, the same thing happens. It’s something about control. It’s something about agency. It’s something about challenge and authenticity. And it’s just this deep learning. So it sounds like that’s what happened there.

Rebecca Wolfe: Absolutely. And I’ve always wondered, you know, I always want to go back to Mr. Aldridge and say, “Did you know, like, this was before the resurgence of literature on student-centered learning and voice and choice. Did you know that’s what you were setting up?”

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s fascinating. All right.

Research Origins: Can’t Get There From Here

Nate McClennen: Well, let’s jump into the paper. So you wrote this paper for Hoover Institution, Can’t Get There From Here. And so what’s the big premise here? A little bit of the origin story. What’s the dead end in the current U.S. system infrastructure that prevents all these sparks, like the one you just described,

from turning into something much, much larger? And I know it’s not universal, because you do provide some examples of things that work. But often they die in a classroom, even after they’ve been implemented well in the classroom. So talk to me about the premise and the big picture here.

Rebecca Wolfe: Yeah. Well, the big, big picture is that Hoover had brought together this very bipartisan, really diverse thinker group called the Education Futures Council, and they put out this big report with really future-focused, very, very bold assertions of where we needed to go in education.

And there was some sense of, well, why aren’t we getting there? So in a way, this paper was kind of looking at things from the opposite end. So here’s this big pronouncement of where we need to head in education, but why haven’t we seen it? So that was part of the impetus.

But to take the metaphor to the extreme, since you’re talking about dead ends, Can’t Get There From Here, it’s about getting there. So when you really think about that metaphor, it’s not so much that innovation is a dead-end street, but that we’re missing those on-ramps, and we’re missing the connections of the routes. And that’s part of what the framework that I found, as I started looking at all this research on innovation, was pointing to. Again, we’ve got lots and lots of some good, some medium, some fantastic ideas coming out of classrooms all the time.

But when they do emerge at that kind of grassroots level, they have nowhere to go. Yeah. Because we don’t prioritize networks that connect teachers outside of their classroom, outside of their schools. Educators themselves don’t get any kind of training on, you know, they’re not expected to develop resources or toolkits or professional development.

So when they have a great idea, that skill set and those networks just aren’t there for them to start to think about, “How might I spread this great idea that I’m seeing is having an impact on students?” And then at the macro level, we’re missing those on-ramps and off-ramps because, as so many of us talk about, the system over the years has become such a heavy bureaucracy that is so built for compliance and control and checking boxes.

So we simply don’t have policy, funding and knowledge structures, the kinds of things that you would need to see those great ideas happening in the classroom and to be able to support them in a more natural ecosystem way of growing and spreading naturally throughout the system, because there are just so many dead ends.

So not just one dead end, but many dead ends, where we’re not connecting all of those different pathways.

Nate McClennen: So from the educator perspective, we don’t give them practice in doing this, right? It doesn’t show up in schools of ed. Very few would have a specific mandatory class on innovation. What does that look like? Exactly. How do you do design sprints or …

And then they come into a system that doesn’t have the structures to almost nurture that, even if they had it. Because there are some, I think … it’s interesting, and especially in the spaces that you and I exist in, that there are these innovative teachers all over the place. And so they check the box on the first one, meaning that naturally they are interested

in doing something different. And I feel like you could walk into any school and ask who the most innovative teacher is, and the principal will know who that is, right?

Rebecca Wolfe: And there’s at least one in every school. Absolutely.

Nate McClennen: At least, right? At least one. And so then what you’ve said is you layer on, okay, then there are no networks, and then there are no expectations. And then you layer on this third piece, which is this giant macro piece of

the policy itself is so compliance-driven, so bureaucratic. It gives the pseudo-control at the local level, but really there are so many mandates that it’s not really control. So did I capture those three levels there? Is that what you’re thinking about?

Rebecca Wolfe: Really, really well. And what I would just add to that, picking up on your introduction around the science of improvement and continuous improvement, so that’s a really key piece, I would say, at kind of the meso level. So if we’re talking micro as the classrooms and the teachers, and macro as the policy and the systems, we don’t have, in education, which is one of the greatest ironies … I mean, we are in the business of learning … we don’t have

good mechanisms to learn from ourselves. And so, again, at the teacher level, it’s not encouraged. I shouldn’t even say it’s not encouraged. There’s no time. We layer teachers with so much, there is no space for teachers to say, “Here’s my goal for the thing I want to change in my classroom. Here’s how I’m going to change it.

Here’s how I’m going to know whether it changed or not. Now I’m going to do the thing and reflect on whether or not it worked.” So that basic PDSA cycle … plan, study, do, act … there’s no space for it. There’s no training for it. There’s no expectation for it. And without that mindset, those connective tissues just never quite meet.

Nate McClennen: Right. Yeah, it is interesting because where we see PDSA, or we do a lot of work with design sprints, so a version of that with the human element, and what we see is that when there is money and time given to it, people will dive in. But it’s not normalized in systems, right?

Yeah. And I think that’s what you’re saying, is that in any given school or system in the United States, very few have … if you said, “What’s your R&D program?” very few would say, “Oh, yeah, our R&D program is this. Teachers do this.” It is a grant comes in to do something, and they implement PDSA as part of that grant or whatever the case may be.

We’re doing that in Michigan and Virginia with some of the networks we’re working with. So, okay, I appreciate that. So we have this established idea of we have micro level, we have meso level and we have macro level. So let’s …

Because you do like to talk about some things that work, you use AVID as a great example, which has been so successful across the United States. Why did that work? Just a quick overview of AVID, but then why did that work based on these micro, meso and macro levels, do you think? Your thoughts on that.

Learning From AVID

Rebecca Wolfe: Yeah. So AVID … the brief story of AVID is there was this one regular teacher, Mary Catherine Swanson, in a school in San Diego in the early 1980s.

They had recently had desegregation in the schools, and she was watching the students who were low-income, Black and brown students not achieving at the same level that the other students were, and she knew they could. And she was frustrated because she knew the problems of tracking. She didn’t want them to be in tracks.

So she proposed a pretty simple intervention of just let me teach them at an honors level some study skills. The students had to volunteer in the very first class that they did. She just got a little bit of dispensation, and lo and behold, it worked. High expectations, high support and deeper, more interesting curriculum.

And so that was where it began. It wasn’t, you know, some crazy new tech

experiment. It wasn’t restructuring the day. It was just, “Hey, let me try something a little different.” And it happened to be that there were other teachers in the building who wanted to teach higher-level courses, and their courses were unsubscribed.

So they said, “Well, great. If you can provide the support, I would welcome these students in my classes.” And the students started doing better, and they started graduating at higher levels, and they started outperforming the district. And what happened was, as the teachers naturally started to move to other schools, they took these ideas with them.

So you start to see pieces of the framework. She didn’t radically change what Tyack and Cuban called the grammar of schooling. It still looked like school. It fit really well with what the teachers wanted to do. It showed strong results really quickly. You knew that these students were learning.

They were graduating at higher levels. They were going on to postsecondary at higher rates than the rest of the district. And the teachers themselves wanted to do it and brought it with them as they moved to other schools in the county, as they moved to other positions even in that district.

Then what happened was really possibly the different piece that was key: the county created a fund to support the codification of AVID and to support, as we were just talking about earlier, the creation of the tools, the materials, the professional development, so that they could broaden it to more schools. So again, this wasn’t something one teacher could have done on her own at that point, no matter how much she loved the program.

But when that happened, we see what often impedes growth at this point, which is the county wanted everything locked down. They thought, “Well, if it’s good, we’re going to replicate it. We’re going to write the course book. We’re going to program the different lessons.” And that created a lot of conflict at that moment, because teachers are very creative, agentic professionals …

or at least we should be treating them that way. Every school is different, every context is different. So there was a bit of a moment of struggle where they said, “No, actually, we need to step back and think about core principles and think about what’s truly effective in the pieces of this. And those are the things that we can spread, but the rest of this kind of codebook replication, that’s going to kill it.”

And so they did back off that. And I think that was a critical piece in that meso level. And again, it started to snowball as the county invested in it going countywide. That took seven years, though. So I really think that’s an important part of the story, because we always think innovation is this kind of great flash in the pan, and it’s going to spread really quickly, and it took seven years just to spread throughout San Diego, 20 years to go national, 40 years to hit What Works Clearinghouse.

So … lots of lessons in there for how we think about it. I think the other part of your question was also, you know, have we seen examples since then?

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And Rebecca on my team … we’ve been interested in the function of counties and ESAs to do … these educational service agencies that are local, you know, every state, they’re funded. They have perpetual funding from the state

Rebecca Wolfe: Yep.

Nate McClennen: to be propagators of innovation, right? But what we find is that they’re not often given that mandate. They’re often given an implementation mandate of 3rd grade reading or whatever the case may be, or MTSS or something like that. And those things aren’t bad, but they don’t see themselves as innovation agents at this meso level.

Would you agree with that? This seems like an important thing, and the AVID story is that the county said, “Hey, we can help support this.” So do these county or regional-type education agencies play a role?

Rebecca Wolfe: So I think it’s yes, but unfortunately.

Same observation that you and Rebecca Mittels were just discussing, that they are so well-situated to be that kind of pivotal innovation intermediary building the ecosystem, supporting both because they have that kind of bridge … up to the top and down to the grassroots.

And yes, most of the time, most of them are either just there for compliance, they’re there occasionally for school accreditation and improvement. There are bright spots. I mean, for many years, several of the education service centers in Connecticut have really done a lot

in that state to push innovative leadership ideas, to think about their equity work. So there are certainly examples of that. Again, not the norm, and I think one of the reasons is some of what I talk about in the paper is that, as a whole, the educators that we have across the system are a highly risk-averse population.

And that is not to denigrate them, but that is what we have built after decades, really since No Child Left Behind, where it was very well-intentioned, really about trying to create equity and a higher level of learning. But the implementation of it meant we created all of these structures where teachers were just supposed to do as they were told.

They were just supposed to perform so that their students would perform on the test. And when you do that for decades, well, who are the principals now? Well, they’re the teachers that did that for 10 years really well and checked the box really well, so they got promoted to principal. Well, who’s running the education resource centers?

It’s the principal who decided to leave the school but still wanted to be involved in education. So we now have decades throughout the profession of folks who were rewarded if they were risk-averse, and who were essentially punished, moved to another school, got poor evaluations or were just disillusioned and left the profession.

So I think that’s unfortunately a big part of the reason that we’re not seeing folks like the education resource centers being more of an innovation hub.

Nate McClennen: Right. Super interesting. Okay. I think you’re seeing what we’re seeing, which is that there’s potential there.

The architecture’s right, but the population in the architecture, for no one’s particular … it’s not a fault of anybody. It’s just the system itself has created a compliance-based, follow-the-directions system rather than a place for R&D. So, work to do, for sure.

Okay. So you used AVID as an example. What else? What are other examples that you found in your research, areas where this was really successful?

Rebecca Wolfe: Well, there was one that actually came to me after I did the research. I was speaking with Eric Bryon for his Educator Innovators podcast, and we started chatting about flipped classroom.

And I really thought that was such a good example of both an innovation that has scaled, and one that to some degree we’ve missed. Because with flipped classroom, the idea is the teacher assigns the new content as homework. So the students will watch a video, do the reading, look at the slides at home so that the class time is used for deeper analysis and learning, for one-on-one supports if they need them, or small-group supports if they are in an understanding classroom.

So it’s both kind of a part of blended learning, so using computers more smartly, and again, just a slight, slight change to how we think about teaching in the classroom. And the research on it has actually been really positive, particularly in K-12. It’s quite strong that it does show more engagement, it does show deeper learning, and it’s so common right now that my kids don’t even think it’s weird. Like, when they’re

watching a video … that’s just what we have to do. We have to read these slides and listen to a video so that tomorrow in class we’ll do something with it. So the reason I say we’ve missed it is it’s a little like blackboards in the 1800s.

It’s almost so commonplace, like we wouldn’t think of that as innovative. We don’t promote it in education particularly. I can’t remember the last time I saw somebody writing about it. We certainly don’t hold conference sessions, right? Like, you don’t go

to a conference session and be like, “Hey, let’s talk about that,” anymore. But millions of teachers are doing it.

It shows good results. So I think that’s an important … it’s sort of an outlier to me when we think about innovation, because usually we think about something that is either bigger or more complex. But sometimes the story of innovation is that it’s become the norm to some degree, and that’s one of the best stories I think we can tell of sustainability and scale.

Nate McClennen: Right. And you articulate these three phases of sort of the catalyst, and then you have the spread, and then you have the global scale … scaling is the next, that third phase. Right. And I keep thinking about that. I think you also gave an example, in addition to chalkboards. I think you cited plumbing

thinking about indoor plumbing. Right, right. We wouldn’t think about it like, “Wow, look at that indoor plumbing. That’s amazing.” Right. But it was an innovation, right?

Rebecca Wolfe: Think about what that … I mean, the class time that you could save alone from not having to, you know, bundle

the kids up in

the

winter. Right? We’re New Englanders. Immediately I’m thinking like, “Oh my God, 20 kindergartners

Nate McClennen: who have to go outside.

Rebecca Wolfe: Let’s put on their big

Nate McClennen: five layers, tromp, you know, a quarter mile out to the privy and things like that.

Rebecca Wolfe: Exactly.

Nate McClennen: So maybe what we’re seeing is that a lot of the examples are so embedded. Many examples started as innovative ideas and went through the cycles that you talk about with the catalyst solving a challenge, and then spreading locally, and then scaling. And then once they’ve scaled, they embed and we forget, right?

We forget that they were actually innovations at one point. Super interesting. So let’s go back to the meso level here, and I’m super curious about school leadership. And so we talked a little bit about how school leaders are rewarded for being teachers who are following a compliance-based system, etc.

But we do know that there are innovative school leaders all over the place. What are the things that they do to foster this work in classrooms, to at least allow these sparks to happen, knowing that all the sparks might not be successful? What are the conditions that they build, in your experience and in the research and, of course, your broader experience?

School Leadership & Culture

Rebecca Wolfe: Yep. So this is such an important question, Nate, because part of what I found heartening in doing the research and looking at how we can incent more innovation at a time when new ideas are just desperately needed, and good ideas are desperately needed, is there is an awful lot school leaders can do that does not take big macro-level changes, does not take huge budgets and grant infusions.

So for instance, one of the most important things that not only creates the catalyst, that first stage of innovation, but helps spread it is networks. And we have both informal and formal networks. Teachers tend to have more limited networks than other professionals, because of the nature of how teaching is structured. It’s one teacher, you know, in her classroom, go in, shut the door.

You have a couple of mandatory department meetings that are mostly, again, compliance-driven and the rest. And when is … you know, “Did you get your attendance sheets in?” And you go home. And occasionally teachers who are self-motivated will find things like what used to be Teacher Twitter, or BetterLesson was trying to create lots of more of an infrastructure of lessons that teachers could share.

But what a school leader can do is more intentionally build those networks for teachers. So it doesn’t take a ton of time and resources to think differently about how you do use those professional development sessions. I like to talk about, rather than in-service days across the district, could we have out-service days?

So the teachers create their own kind of learning agenda, and they are asked to go out in their community or find another professional or do something that gets them just outside that very tiny network that they usually are hanging out with in the lunchroom, in the teachers’ lounge, because that’s where those sparks happen.

I loved your term of sparks. Sometimes I talk about them as gold nuggets. So … very shiny, whichever metaphor you want. But that’s how that happens, when you get just outside of your normal network, and that’s something that school leaders can build, and communities are hungry for it.

Another Hoover paper that actually just recently came out looked at how they started to try to quantify the amount of resources in a community and whether a district is taking advantage of them, and there’s a real disconnect. And some of that … I won’t lead us down … I mean, some of that is absolutely not the superintendent’s fault, because that is an impossible job.

But what that says to me is there are resources right in your backyard that you could help start to connect teachers to broader networks. The other thing that leaders can do is set up that culture that starts to break apart that risk-averse nature. So if the leader is willing and able, there are really simple ways, we were talking about them earlier, you can start to build a continuous improvement mindset.

So instead of looking at student work, which is a great way to start, they should also be talking about what did that teacher try in their classroom that produced that work? How did it work? Were the students more engaged? Did they get a better learning experience? And if they didn’t, what are they going to do differently?

And normalizing that kind of inquiry so that it’s just part of your practice rather than, “Oh my gosh, my peers are judging me, I’m not a good teacher.” So that, again, is something a leader can do with some intentional mindset shifts that don’t take a ton of time, don’t take a ton of funding, but continuing to set up those structures so that teachers are interrogating their own practice collectively and learning as a group rather than just, “Oh, I’m just responsible for my students in my classroom.”

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Okay. So you had a bunch of gold nuggets in there, using your terminology. So just to recap, you have this idea of networks. I too believe that because of time constraints, because of busyness and the one-teacher, one-classroom model, we need to build broader networks so that people are exposed to more things.

And I love this idea of out-service days. We just did a podcast with a couple of students from high school in Massachusetts, Wellesley High School, and they are part of a specific program, but their project was design the future of learning.

That was their project in their school, in their program, which was great. But one of their assignments was they had to go and visit three or four innovative schools. And their observations

were amazing, because their observations were like, “I didn’t know this.” They went to a CTE center. They had never been to a CTE center. Or they went to NuVu in Boston, which was a

Rebecca Wolfe: I love that.

Nate McClennen: sort of an innovative program there, right? And so teachers … it’s the same way when they see things that are different, then it kind of opens blinders, right? And so I think we have networks, and then I love this idea of the culture. And my only addition there, of embedding a continuous improvement mindset or what does this look like, is how do you have leaders model that, right? Because leaders often think

that they have to be infallible and they can’t make mistakes. But what would it be if a leader was testing out a new classroom observation protocol? What would it mean if … etc., etc. So then they’re modeling what they expect to see in their teaching staff. I think that would be helpful as well.

Rebecca Wolfe: It’s hugely, hugely. And I think, too, what you’re pointing to, Nate, is that when they model that, they are bringing the teachers in, again, truly as professionals who have agency over their own learning, their own classroom. And so it’s this unfortunate irony that I feel like in education we have embraced student agency and student voice.

Not to the extent that some of us would like, but much more. It is much more the norm than it was 10 years ago when we all started talking about it. We have not yet really embraced teacher agency.

Nate McClennen: I know.

Rebecca Wolfe: Seems like a basic disconnect. So yes, when you have a leader who is willing to model that, not only are they showing that critical kind of vulnerability and ability to learn, but they are saying to the teachers, “I care about you as a professional, and I value you as a professional,” and they feel more agentic.

And so it creates this really wonderful virtuous circle where eventually you will have a culture that is less risk-averse and more willing to take those great leaps of trying new things.

Nate McClennen: It is. There is a widespread irony that I think we talk about all the time that you just brought up, this idea that we want personalized learning for all students, and we want agency for students

to increase outcomes and engagement. And yet the educators who are working with those students, who are actually trying to implement those things, do not have those. They don’t have personalized professional learning. They don’t have agency. When they do, it’s rare or it’s beaten down by compliance or whatever the case may be.

So taking a meta view of it and taking an outside look could be super helpful for listeners who are out there saying, “Hey, I’m in a system. We’re trying to implement agency and personalized, competency-based work inside our schools,” and what is it like at the educator level?

And we often push, as I know you’ve thought about as well, this idea of what is the portrait of an educator that is in parallel to the portrait or profile of a graduate, so that we could say, “What are the attributes?” And things like growth mindset and agency or whatever those things should show up there. So okay.

Rebecca Wolfe: Yeah. And we did work on something like that, particularly for the personalized, competency-based experts. So we have a set of educator competencies. But what’s interesting … and so we put that out in partnership, KnowledgeWorks and CCSSO, in 2022.

That was a refresh of the 2017 version. I don’t know how much we emphasized innovation in that. So it would be interesting to kind of look back at those tools and that framework and see, now that we’re in, again, a slightly different era, is that something that we should have highlighted more in the competencies as well as for the leadership competencies?

Nate McClennen: Right. And there is some sense that because in 2022 … well, 2017, 2022 … with so much emphasis on the continuous improvement as sort of the religious adherence to a PDSA concept, that continuous improvement became a compliance-based system, right?

And I sort of wonder, did we need to actually present it as a broader concept of what does it mean to have agency in your classroom? What does it mean to have an innovator’s mindset, rather than, here’s the structure that you use? And I’m not saying PDSA is bad. It’s not. But it …

Rebecca Wolfe: But …

Nate McClennen: it became the gospel, right, of continuous

Rebecca Wolfe: Interesting.

Nate McClennen: improvement.

Rebecca Wolfe: Interesting. Yeah. Okay.

Nate McClennen: So let’s pivot. Our last section here. So we’ve talked about micro, we’ve talked about meso. Let’s go to macro, the biggest beast of them all.

And so we’re in the United States. It has a unique education system and architecture. What are the challenges, and then where do you see any levers that we can pull there, or maybe not you and I, but the system at large can pull at the state level, leadership level, that would help empower the meso and empower the micro and innovation?

The Macro Challenge

Rebecca Wolfe: Yeah. So I think there are two really critical ones. And yeah, certainly not ones that you and I can pull alone, but hopefully the more we keep talking about them.

So one is we are long overdue to truly overhaul our accountability system.

We have tinkered at the margins with it. Some states have taken some really interesting moves, Virginia, Kentucky.

I mean, there’s Indiana. There are certainly some great models. But again, it’s not the majority. And without really not just rethinking what we want for accountability, but a whole different mindset of accountability itself, there’s some great work by Heather Hough that builds off earlier work from Dick Elmore around reciprocal accountability, in which every person, every adult throughout the entire micro-to-macro level of the system is responsible, and that means everyone from bus drivers to district superintendents, they are responsible for learner thriving and learning.

And in a reciprocal system, every single person is understanding the role that they play in that, and the other parts of the system are supporting them to play that role, as well as holding them accountable. And it’s a really important mindset shift in how we think about accountability, which is usually this top-down, checkbox approach.

You know, either you hit the score or you don’t. And a reciprocal system in which there’s much more shared accountability really provides, again, a clearer sense of what is it we’re actually going for anyway, which should be learner success and learner thriving, and says that all the adults in the system are responsible for it.

And it comes with, I think more … in Heather’s viewpoint, it comes with a whole lot more supports, but there’s also clear repercussions so that we’re not just passing the buck. We’re not just, again, prioritizing the wrong things in the system. So that’s one huge one that many folks have been working on.

I would say the other one that at the macro level really needs some more care and feeding is the idea of a real knowledge ecosystem, a real means of sharing and communicating knowledge.

We do both fast and long really poorly in education. So we don’t do quick-turnaround … whether we want to … let’s not overly demonize PDSA, but we’re not good at that kind of rapid-cycle learning in education. Nor do we actually give enough time to see the truly big changes in education, and that has a lot to do with, frankly, policymakers, election cycles and turnover of districts and superintendents.

And so the folks at the top levels who are creating the budgets, who are writing the legislation, they are forced to take a very impatient look. So if you’re asking educators to fail forward, to try new things, to learn from their mistakes and then to spread it, that takes time, and that takes patience and a willingness not to punish them while they are still learning.

And so if we don’t have that kind of learning structure in place, we’re never going to know whether or not that innovation worked. Most innovations show an implementation dip in the first year or two. What happens is we say, “Oh, it doesn’t work,” and we move on to the next thing, rather than giving ourselves the time to learn, to change, to try, and then study it after five, 10 years.

So accountability, knowledge … if we could put those two together, we would have a whole lot of the pieces of the puzzle.

Nate McClennen: I love that. Accountability, of course, is the holy grail that’s out there. We’re all talking about it.

Rebecca Wolfe: I know. I know.

Nate McClennen: We have to be able to figure out how to …

Rebecca Wolfe: It’s hard, you know, it’s hard to talk about it, but also not to talk about it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And I love the words you used there. And as we come toward the end of the pod here, this idea of where are we headed? We’re headed toward learner thriving and learner success, right? And if that’s the driving force, that helps agentic teachers supported by leaders who create the conditions for that. If we’re always headed that way, and then we build in the system of there’s a network so that sharing is more easily disseminated …

This idea of the knowledge ecosystem … I had a great pod a couple weeks ago about knowledge management, and I’ve always defined this as how do you codify the innovative work in your school? And I’m a big fan of playbooks. Like, every great school that has a specific learning model with good design principles should have a playbook that they’re constantly updating, right?

Because when the teachers leave or when the principal leaves or the board changes over, alluding to the politics, you need to have some codification of it. And I am convinced this knowledge ecosystem is that if you compiled all the educators in the United States, we actually have

what we need to know. Because I really believe that all across the United States. But what we don’t have is an effective set of conduits to connect them together, despite all the efforts at communities and things like that. They tend to still be isolated.

So it’s something that we think about a lot at Getting Smart.

Rebecca Wolfe: And I would just add to that, that’s so right, but not only do we know most of what we need to know, we don’t know how to communicate with each other about it. And therefore we forget, or we relearn, or we have to start all over again.

So the amount of duplication and reinventing that goes on in education is heartbreaking because we do know an awful lot, but we just don’t seem to know how to get that knowledge into the hands of the people who can really make use of it.

Nate McClennen: Which is so unusual. I mean, if you look at any other industry …

the cars today are the result of early innovations in cars that then iterated, iterated, iterated. I did a presentation the other day, and I was using project-based learning as an example, and I put up the Columbia University quote from the professor who said, “Oh, there’s this new thing in education that’s called problem- or project-based learning,” and it was from 1922 or something like that.

And here we are saying, “There’s this new thing in education,” right? And so we don’t behave … collectively, the education system doesn’t behave like other sectors. And I think, as we wrap this up, your paper’s hitting at a bunch of the ideas we need to think about to allow innovation to permeate the system, to allow for increased thriving and increased success for learners.

Absolutely. So, all right. It’s a dense paper. I want everybody to read it who’s listening to this, and if you have to feed it into ChatGPT or Google or Classroom LLM or something …

Rebecca Wolfe: You can just look at the pictures. The framework is pretty self-explanatory.

Nate McClennen: The framework is great. And I know we’ll see you in Michigan in a couple weeks, and you’re going to speak to us there with the Future of Learning Council, which is great. But what’s the biggest takeaway message, before I summarize? What did you learn? What’s your biggest aha moment from this work?

Hope & A Bias Toward Action

Rebecca Wolfe: I always think of 10 different things, and I know we need to wrap. So

I would say my biggest takeaway was a sense of hope that despite all the things we were just talking about with the big macro massive changes, I have a real sense of hope because at that ground level, at that bottom-up level, there is an awful lot that we could do tomorrow, today, this week, that would help to start to build a richer, more generative … I keep using the word ecosystem, but an ecosystem for new ideas, for creative ideas, to support teachers.

There’s a lot that could be done that doesn’t take funding, just takes some mindset shifts. And I don’t want to discount how important mindset shifts are, but there are so many small levers that leaders can pull, that districts can pull, that really would start to change the mindsets of the folks throughout education in a way that would just be, frankly, I think, more creative, more joyful, more connected to the world around them, that ultimately I think would benefit not just the teachers, but the students themselves.

Nate McClennen: Right. I appreciate that. Ending with hope … Mason Pashia on our team and I talk a lot about abundance, and he’s been writing a lot about what is the abundance mindset in education, because we often talk about the scarcity mindset.

And you closing us with a sense of hope is that we can do things, and they don’t cost a lot of money, and they don’t require a massive amount of rule change. And we didn’t get to talk about this, but a lot of people put up barriers at the macro level

that appear to exist and don’t. They aren’t there. And so leaving with this idea of hope, and I would add to that, I would say in design thinking terminology, this bias toward action, right?

Rebecca Wolfe: Mm-hmm. Try

Nate McClennen: something. If you’re a leader, try something. If you’re an educator, try something within the bounds and constraints. So …

Rebecca Wolfe: It’s not an innovation until you take action on it.

Nate McClennen: It is not an innovation until you take action on it. And that’s really a great takeaway message.

So today we talked about these three phases that are really well articulated in the paper around this catalyst-first innovation, the spreading and scaling, and then what are the things we can do at the micro, meso and macro levels. And I encourage everybody listening to dig in, reach out to Rebecca if you have other questions or ideas or examples.

And Rebecca, thanks for putting this out in the ecosystem. I think it’s an important piece of work.

Rebecca Wolfe: Thank you, Nate.

Nate McClennen: And appreciate your time today. And audience, appreciate you listening. So …

Rebecca Wolfe: Great. Thanks, everyone.

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Guest Bio

Rebecca Wolfe

Rebecca E. Wolfe is founder and principal of Threadwell Solutions, which partners with mission-driven organizations to weave connections and amplify social impact through research, strategy, and innovation. She is serving a one-year term on Stanford Impact Lab’s Investment Advisory Council.

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