Thomas Hatch on The Education We Need and the Future We Can’t Predict

You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica and today we’re talking with Thomas Hatch, professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching.

Thomas’ research includes studies of school improvement efforts at the school district and national levels. His latest book, The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict, focuses on efforts to create more powerful learning experiences both inside and outside of schools in developed and developing contexts.

Let’s listen in as he talks with Tom about the future of powerful learning, micro innovations and change. Dr. Thomas Hatch, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thanks Tom, I really appreciate it. It’s good to see you again.

Dr. Hatch, I thought we could start with a little backstory on NCREST. It’s really one of America’s long-standing research institutions that’s really focused on school quality and system quality. We appreciate the work that you’ve done there at the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching.

What’s the origin story and the mission of the center? Well I really appreciate your point to the importance and value of NCREST, Tom, because it’s been around for now almost 30 years. It was started in 1991 by Linda Darling Hammond, who is now in California, many aspects of state education in California, as well as her colleague Ann Lieberman, both of whom

were at Teachers College together at the time and then both of whom moved out to California afterwards. Ann has been very well known in her own right for tremendous work on professional development and really mentoring a whole generation of scholars and educators, including many women in leadership roles in education today.

But the origin of NCREST is really reflected in the title, the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching, which basically tries to pile everything together because in the 1990s when NCREST got started, that was kind of the heyday of the small schools movement and the movement towards comprehensive reform. It was really a transition to recognizing that, look, we can’t just focus on curriculum,

we can’t just focus on community engagement, we can’t just focus on parents, we can’t just focus on assessment, we really have to change everything about schools. And NCREST was really created to support and document the work on the development of small schools originally in New York City, but since then has really expanded as you indicated to working with both schools and systems around the country and now to some extent around

the world. Dr. Hatch, I think I first ran into your work around 2000 when we were starting the Gates Foundation. I particularly remembered your early work on the subject of coherence. Yes.

I recall reading something that you had written and then visiting High Tech High and really for the first time seeing what coherence meant in the beautiful and simple sense that everything works together for teachers and kids. So I wanted to note that I appreciate your early work on that subject. Maybe if you recall the sort of backstory on what led you to that observation of coherence,

what it is and why it’s important. Yeah. Yeah, that really goes back to the very beginnings of my work and so I came to NCREST, I took over as the co-director in 2003. I’m the director now, but my work in education started in the 1980s when I was a graduate

student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and there I worked with Howard Gardner who was just getting very well known for the theory of multiple intelligences at the time. And so trying to make the long story short, the theory was so popular that we had a chance at Project Zero to begin working with educators and education leaders all around the country and all around the world who wanted to create more personalized student-centered schools

that embraced all aspects of abilities. And it was a fabulous opportunity, but it really was a crash course and kind of the failures of large-scale educational reform. And part of the challenge that I found was not a problem in our schools per se, but in a problem in our approach to reform and I would argue in many of the organizations that

were dedicated to helping schools. So the reality was I would go to Norfolk, Virginia to work with a school that Project Zero or Atlas Communities Project, which was one of the big designs that was supported by the New American Schools Development Corporation in the early 1990s. And I would go and work with a group of teachers and I would literally run into colleagues

from down the hall at Harvard who were working on expeditionary learning or I’d run into someone from, you know, Success for All or another program. And each one of us thought that we were providing the overall umbrella, the comprehensive approach that the school was going to put in place. And what in fact they were doing is they were taking and grabbing, you know, advantage

of whatever resources they could for a wide variety of reasons. But my argument was that ultimately these multiple initiatives ended up being conflicting and really undermining the capacity that schools had to make the really significant reforms that needed to be made rather than building that capacity. And so that led to that article which you probably saw, which was all about, you know,

the how multiple improvement efforts collide. And in fact, it was one of those articles that before actually got into print. I had people calling me telling me they’d read it because, you know, I mean, there were, you know, superintendents, Ray Cortinas, who was, you know, superintendent later in New York originally LA later called me out of the blue and said, you know, this is exactly

what we’re struggling with. So it was a fascinating learning experience. I think I came to appreciate coherence so much that it’s why at the Gates Foundation I really stress new school development because with high schools, it’s much easier to create coherence from scratch than to try to take a comprehensive high school that has had this

sedimentary effect of all these changes added over time and try to create coherence in a large complex system. So there are some advantages to starting from scratch when you can. That’s absolutely right. And you know, at Larry Rosenstock at High Tech High was able to bring together a wide

variety and draw on lots of expertise, but put it together in a coherent way, you know, from the beginning. And I think so often that just doesn’t happen. So congratulations on your new Corwin book. It’s called Education We Need For A Future We Can’t Predict.

We love the book. We love the title. We love the focus on creating more powerful learning experiences, both inside and outside school in developed and developing context. So that’s the kind of the blurb of the book.

There’s a lot that we appreciate about it. I’d love to have you just talk about, say a few words about each of the sections in the book. The first one is the case for change. Part one, how would you sort of headline the case for change and then maybe any suggestions

for how school leaders can create conversations that result in agreements around a case for change? So what are they and how do you create agreements around them? Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that’s where the work has to begin with a common understanding sort of of why

we’re doing this work and what we’re headed for. And in that section of the book, one of the things I try to do is in a way capture a little bit of an experience that I share with my students. I teach a course on school change. I was actually inherited Linda Darling Hammond invented this course originally.

Well, she didn’t invent it. She actually borrowed it from Ted Seiser from the Coalition of Essential Schools. And originally it was a seminar, it was called Travels with Ted and he had the funding at the time to take his seminar students up and down the East Coast visiting small schools in the 1980s.

So I have to say we do not have those kinds of resources and many of my students are already working in schools as school leaders or teachers. But the focus is on helping them work in groups to develop their own designs for learning. At one time it was about developing schools, but we got so many proposals for small schools that looked the same that we finally tried to change the design experiment and say, well,

it’s not just about reinventing schools, it’s really about imagining all kinds of learning experiences. But in that course, I try to motivate the work in the very first day by asking students to think about what education was like when they were a student, which for many of them wasn’t that long ago, but maybe when their parents were in schools and what it looks

like today and to talk about what’s changed and what hasn’t. And part of the point is to get beyond this basic debate that I think still goes on about whether schools today are better or worse than they were before. Because the answer is yes, they’re better in some ways and they’re worse in some ways. They’re better for some students and they’re worse for some students.

Even for most of us, we might experience ways in which the system is better and ways in which the system is worse. So what I try to do in at least one of those chapters in that section is to help people recognize both where improvements are being made. And if you look around the world, we have increased access to education substantially

and we have to recognize that and build on that. But then at the same time, we have to recognize that we have not nearly made the progress that we need to in terms of the quality of schooling and actually enabling students all around the world to be able to read, to write, to communicate, to collaborate, to work together.

And it’s not just a problem in the developing world. So I also try to point out that even in the US, there are students who have been left behind forever, often black students, indigenous students, other students of color, students in poverty, students in rural areas. These are students for whom the system we have has never worked.

And I really try and in that way, lay out that we both have to improve the schools that we have to build on what we’ve done before. But at the same time, that will never reach the many students who’ve never benefited from the education that we have today. I appreciate how in that section, you talk about unpredictability and complexity.

And while these have always been the case, 2020 is sort of a case study in novelty and complexity. That’s the one thing we know for sure that young people are going to face more of that. And I think as you point out in that section, really coming to terms with what that means for school, where we’ve spoons fed kids with small problems with right answers. And if they’re headed for a world of unpredictability, as you said, it has big implications for the

kinds of problems that we introduced to young people. So I appreciate it how you dealt with that in the first section. Second section is on barriers to change. Maybe you could list a couple of those. Well, that really recounts my experiences in the 1990s, as I talked about that kind of crash

course in large-scale school reform. And I guess during those experiences, it was a tremendously depressing time. Honestly, it really made me feel in some ways that we couldn’t make progress. But I think building on work of Larry Cuban, David Tyak, and later David Cohen, and Joel Meta, they emphasize, yes, there are lots of institutional barriers that are making it difficult to change

schools on a large scale. But again, at the same time, we have to recognize that some changes are being made and have been made. But for me, as I look back on that experience, it really, and I try to distill this in a whole set of principles related to school improvement and educational transformation.

But the lesson in that section and the lesson for me from the 1990s is that we really have not worked hard enough to try to fit and adapt our solutions to the problems that people have. And so just as you were alluding to, we keep trying to determine what’s going to be needed in the 21st century or the 22nd century, what our students are going to need in 20 years from now. When, as you were indicating, it’s hard to anticipate.

And we haven’t focused enough on what are the real problems and needs that people have on the ground in different schools and in different communities. And I believe the lesson from that work is that if we can find a match between the needs that people have, the resources and capabilities that they have, and really the tenor of the times, the values, the beliefs that people have, and we can match those to the goals of our reform

efforts, to the kinds of resources and expertise that we’re providing and understand how values and beliefs may need to change, that then we can be much more successful. But we can’t go around ignoring the institutional pressures that reinforce standardized testing, that reinforce age-graded schools and more direct instruction or road learning. And we can’t ignore the fact that many of us have grown up and our image of what learning looks like

is sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher. For better or for worse, that’s what it’s come to mean for us. So it’s, my argument is really, okay, let’s recognize that, let’s deal with those barriers, let’s not pretend that we can dream up some fabulous future and just, you know, transcend where we are today. In part three, you talk about how schools improve. And in particular, you focus on high leverage problems. What are those?

So to me, this is really critical. And I’ve done a lot of work with superintendents. And the challenge for superintendents and other education leaders is they’re responsible for the entire system. So that kind of pushes them to constantly be making decisions and developing plans that work for the whole system. But it’s also absolutely critical that they work closely with their colleagues, their educators, their community members to focus in on specific problems where

real progress can be made in relatively short periods of time. If you want to bring people together and inspire them, you know, you can’t tell them 10 years from now, we’re going to raise test scores. You know, you have to identify problems that matter to people again. So that’s the first criteria of a high leverage problem. If you tell it to somebody, well, everybody’s, oh, yeah, that’s a problem I have, I’ve experienced that. The second is, you know, is there something you can do about

it? Do you have the capability or capacity to put in place some, you know, some changes, particularly at the classroom level, where you could then see some signs of visible progress, which is really the third issue, or the second issue, see that visible progress that can help people and motivate them to move forward and to continue. And the third is that it provides a foundation for more systemic work and, you know, kind of the continuation of your effort.

Hey, listeners, we’ll get right back to Tom. But first, wanted to tell you about a new Getting Smart report about what’s next in learning. Over the last few months, the Getting Smart team has been working on identifying 20 invention opportunities in learning and development, and have pulled all of that together into a report that was made possible by the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. These opportunities have the possibility to completely shift what we

talk about when we talk about schooling. Check out our recommendations, insights, and more at the link in the show notes or at GettingSmart.com slash Invention Opportunity. All right, let’s get back to the show. I love that concept. I was just talking to a system head a few minutes ago about about this of tackling high-level problems early to build political capital for for long-term work. The next section is on how education can change, and you introduced this

beautiful concept of micro-innovations around the system. What’s a micro-innovation, and what can they do to move a system agenda along? Well, in my view, micro-innovations are the developments that we need to address those high-leverage problems. I mean, I do stress in the book that we do have the capacity to solve some problems already. We don’t need a lot of innovation, for example, to making sure that more people get access to the Internet. These are things that we should do right

away, and we don’t need new solutions. But there are some very challenging problems that we’ve experienced for a long time where we do need some new developments. But rather than focusing on a broad general approach, we need to get very specific. And so that’s the micro level. And for me, something I really kind of experienced in some ways, what I consider to be a good example of this first in Singapore, when I went to an organization called EduLab, which was set up by the Singaporean

government to work with teachers and bring teachers together with researchers and ed tech companies to develop new tools and resources to improve teaching and learning. And one of the innovations that I learned about that I would consider a micro innovation was a game that a chemistry teacher had developed that worked primarily for his 10th grade students in introductory chemistry during the first weeks of the course. It was a game that introduced the nomenclature and the vocabulary

they were going to need for the rest of the year. Now, the game didn’t work in other subjects. It didn’t work even the rest of the year, but it was a really powerful way to engage students in a critical topic and to enable them to do much better in learning about it than they had been previously. And Singapore actually, they took this teacher’s game worked with him and turned it into an app that’s now available on, you know, App Store and Google Play, you know, around the world.

And my argument is that we need micro innovations like that in every subject, you know, every, you know, every age group of students, every type of students, you know, we need these for the students who are struggling to read as well as those who are excelling. But the, you know, the tools and resources aren’t going to be the same in each case. We need to really develop those that will match the needs of the situation and the particular students.

All right. I love that idea. Our friends at 4.0 schools in New Orleans have, for 10 years, been teaching this idea of micro innovations, where they help people pilot an idea in a very small scale. And that might be for two hours after school. And then it turns into an afterschool program. Then it turns into a summer school program. And then it turns into a micro school. But the idea of iterative development in a system that attacks, as you said, these, the low-hanging

fruit, these high-leverage problems can really make a big difference in terms of creating momentum for systems change. Absolutely. That’s a great example. Yeah. Chapter 5 is on systems change. And it’s a beautiful framework of coherence, which we’ve talked a little bit about, but capacity building and collective responsibility. I wonder if you could talk about capacity building and collective responsibility as critical elements of systems

change. Yeah. And the capacity building also goes back to my work in the 1990s, where really what I was seeing was that we weren’t building the capacity that was required. And part of my argument is that we had a very impoverished view of what it really takes to build capacity. So in fact, a lot of the policies of the 1990s, 2000s, NCLB is a perfect example. Richard Elmore has said that we over-invested in accountability and under-invested in capacity building. And in NCLB’s

case, we invested in creating this testing infrastructure and trying to incentivize people to improve teaching and learning and to improve outcomes. But we really didn’t invest as much as we needed to in terms of professional development, higher quality materials and resources or anything of that kind. And so in order to deal with the depression of the failures of large-scale school reform in the US, once it was time to take a sabbatical in 2008, 2009,

I decided I wanted to go study what was happening in some higher performing education systems. And through a various strange sequence of events, I ended up in Norway, which funnily enough actually performs about the same as the US on international tests, not nearly as well as its neighbor and neighboring country Finland, which many of us think are Finland and Norway are basically the same country. So how could they have such different educational outcomes? But it really gave me a

chance to take a look at what was happening in quote unquote higher performing countries and so-called lower performing countries. And I want to hasten to add that I see strengths and weaknesses of both higher performing and lower performing education systems. And I learned a tremendous amount from my experience in Norway. But looking at systems like Finland and Singapore, it really helped me to see that they are not just focused. And the story is

it’s all about the teachers, right? They just get the smartest people to become teachers and they basically let them go. And yes, they do have teachers that are very well qualified. They also have really strong and powerful teacher preparation, as you know. But that’s only a small part of it. Finland and Singapore are also well known for having some of the most powerful curricula in the world. They’re known for having very powerful and effective assessments. So I talk about they have

beautiful facilities. So they have what I call technical capital, the resources and materials that are a critical part of capacity to improve instruction. They also have a focus on preparation for teachers, but education leaders, policymakers, all of these goes into developing the expertise that is also crucial for improving teaching and learning. And then finally, and I think this is often overlooked, both Finland and Singapore pay attention to the relationships amongst people in

schools, amongst students and teachers, amongst school and their surrounding communities. But they also work very hard to make sure there are close connections between different elements of the education system, researchers, teacher preparation and schools, as well as policymakers and their connections between educational institutions, health institutions, economic institutions in the country. And so they’re working on technical capital, human capital and social capital all at

the same time. And in this country, you know, unfortunately, we have really not made the same investments that would allow us to develop that kind of high powered education system. I really appreciated this section that highlights capacity, building coherence and collective responsibility. Thomas, it reminded me of Tom Pesant in Boston, the work he did, Terry Greer did in Houston, the work that Tom Boosburg led in Denver, that Pam Iran led in

Albomarle County. All of those are examples of extending these three concepts over a decade, right? Because it really does take a decade long push on all three of these primary levers to really promote systems change. Does that sound right? Yeah, but I mean, if we look at Finland and Singapore, I mean, those are, you know, those are 50 year endeavors, right? 10 years, you know, 10 years is a good start. But it just shows that our timeline is completely out of whack.

It does. And we’re already seeing unraveling in many of the cities that I just mentioned, because you have a leadership change, and then that agenda comes comes apart. So right, I appreciate that point. But that’s why collective responsibility is so crucial. Because these efforts have to outlast, they have to be bigger than any one individual, they have to be bigger than any generation. And that’s what we’ve seen in things like, you know, movements for racial

and social justice, the Black Lives Matter movement, the, you know, the climate emergency, these are going to take, you know, the work of generations, and all of us working together to change these conditions that will actually allow us to be successful. And so the point I try to make around collective responsibility is that in some ways, you know, this is, this is part of the DNA of societies and cultures like Finland and Singapore. But it’s, you know, it’s not like we can just say,

oh, you know, they, you know, they value that more than we do. Therefore, you know, we can’t do it. They also build mechanisms into their systems that bring people together to talk actively about curriculum and student work and how the system is working across sectors. And that builds that kind of collective responsibility that we need in the US. I appreciate that. Hey, you’re listening to The Getting Smart podcast. We’re talking to Dr. Thomas Hatch. Today’s the author of The Education

We Need For A Future We Can’t Predict. Thomas, you’ve been incredibly productive for the last 20 years. I wonder if you could just reflect on your own professional learning, how you keep learning about complex systems and maybe a little bit of how that changed in 2020. That’s a great question. I mean, for me, it’s a part of what I live. I mean, part of the reason I’m in academia and I can, you know, I can go on sabbaticals. I can do the work I do is because

learning is central to everything, you know, that I’m about. I just happen to have focused on learning about education systems. But I’m fortunate in that sense that, you know, that means that I’m learning with my family, with my children. A lot of what I learned in Norway and about some other systems, my kids spent not only time going to school in Norway, they spent a couple of weeks in a finished school. So I’m constantly learning from them and from their experiences.

And, you know, the pandemic has been so devastating and the school closure is so difficult. But it also means that my junior in high school is also sitting next door. And honestly, I’ll tell you know, it’s been very hard to both be writing about the future of education and where I think it can go. And at the same time, you know, working with her on what is a very, you know, challenging year, she’s got to get into college, you know, she’s onto the SATs and, you know,

dealing with that whole college process that is so challenging for so many. And it’s a real, it’s, I just feel like I’m constantly in this work where, you know, we’re trying to be hopeful, trying to build steps and avenues and pathways into the future at the same time that part of my message is in order to get to a better future, we have to recognize how difficult the challenges are today, particularly, you know, not just for my kids, but, you know, kids who are in much more

difficult circumstances, you know, black kids, Latin kids who have, you know, been faced systematic, you know, racism and discrimination for so long. Thomas, you seem to be somebody that learned by writing. Is that fair that you’ve been really productive as an author? Is writing part of the learning process for you? Writing is definitely part of the learning process for me. And actually, for me, writing blogs has

now become a part of it. And starting in Norway, but really later, when we were visiting Finland and other places, I started to write shorter pieces, kind of reflecting on what I was seeing, which actually slowed me down from writing some of the more academic work I was supposed to be doing and the books, which is why it’s taken me 10 years to come out with this book after my earlier book. But this book has really grown out of those experiences. And the opportunity to share those

blog posts with and get some feedback and get some reactions. But also, you know, both in writing, but also in conversations like this with you, with other, you know, other authors, education leaders, I’ve worked for 10 years now, I’ve been working with a group of superintendents in New Jersey called the New Jersey Network of Superintendents, appropriately enough. And those conversations have been just instrumental in helping to keep me grounded and focused on what matters.

What’s next for you, Thomas? Do you have another book in mind or a project you’re working on? You can share with us. You know, the work that I’m trying to do is really about finding that closer connection between practice and research. And I know we often say the connection between research and practice, but I think it has to go the other way around. And that’s the whole idea of high leverage problems. We need

to be starting our research and data analysis with the problems that matter, with problems that people are experiencing in different communities. So I would love to see institutions like my own, like Teachers College and Columbia University, you know, partnering with schools and other educational organizations like New Visions for Public Schools and so many others, some of the others I talk about in my book, Beam, which works with developing large-scale art installations in

schools. But, you know, I want to see us working together with schools and community members to identify, you know, what the high leverage problems are, get started. It’s a Michael Fulin readyfire, you know, aim situation. Let’s pull together whatever we know, what local expertise we have, what the research says. Let’s give it a shot. Let’s document it. Let’s collect the data. Let’s see what progress we’re making. And, you know, let’s build that capacity for making improvements

around these specific critical issues, you know, in the short term. But at the same time, what I’m struggling with is if we do that, all we’re going to do is make the current system more efficient and a little bit better. And that’s never going to be enough. So at the same time, we’re doing that, I’m also trying to figure out, well, how do we connect education to these larger, you know, global social movements that are really going to, you know, fundamentally, I hope address the issues

of equity and, you know, racism and, you know, climate change that we absolutely have to address if we’re really going to transform education in the future. We appreciate that. Dr. Thomas Hatt, author of The Education We Need For A Future We Can’t Predict. Thanks for joining us on the Game Smart podcast. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. A big thanks to Thomas for joining us on this week’s episode. For more on powerful learning

experiences, be sure to check out episode 256 with Jenny Pyra on powerful PBL. We’ll be sure to put a link in the show notes. Alrighty, that’s it for today, listeners. But before you go, don’t forget to hit subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. And that way, they’re ready for you every Wednesday morning to press play. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast. This is Jessica, signing off.