Town Hall Recap: Ask Away a Getting Smart AMA

Key Points

  • Addressing school culture is one of the most important jobs of a school leader.

  • Innovation is a prioritization challenge with so many fundamental aspects of schooling up in the air.

Getting Smart recently hosted a monthly town hall event called Ask Away: A Getting Smart AMA (Ask Me Anything). We invited the audience to ask us questions about leadership and the future of learning and we did our best to answer them. We recorded the session and you can listen to it now. 

You can register for our next town hall on Difference Making here

We opened the event with quotes/lines from some of our favorite poets who address the difficulty in providing answers:

My apologies to large questions for small answers.

Wislawa Szymborska

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue […] Live the questions now.

Rainer Maria Rilke

We addressed some of the following questions:

  • What is the best way to truly change culture in a school? 
  • How do you get the teachers and administrators to work as a team, and not in competing and conflicted silos of practices and values? 
  • After seeing various models of success, what advice might you have for schools in fully adopting innovative approaches? Specific to visionary approaches where innovation is not just an add on or one thing more. Seems schools’ missions, visions, attributes, values, etc continually are an array of laundry lists. As if to cast a net across the oceans of education. Is success largely contingent on the progressive nature of newer schools or might you be able to speak to examples of schools with history and tradition which are stepping out and doing more than lip service to innovation?
  • My school is trying to be responsive to needs of everyone involved, but current circumstances are making this incredibly slow and difficult.  How are you communicating progress and action to the community, the teachers, and the students?  There just seems to be a disconnect.
  • What is the best way to empower teacher voice and decision-making in the change process?
  • How can a design professional join and contribute to the conversation?
  • How can UX design be implemented in school change?

You can find the links and resources mentioned during the event here.

Getting Smart Staff

The Getting Smart Staff believes in learning out loud and always being an advocate for things that we are excited about. As a result, we write a lot. Do you have a story we should cover? Email [email protected]

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