Leadership+Design
"We design experiences for the people who create the future of teaching and learning."
In our work, we build capacity, create conversations, and make connections.
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Plan your professional learning adventures with L+D in 2017.
Coming this Summer . . .
 NCGS Annual Conference
"Pop-Up Learning: Developing an Experimental Mindset in Schools"
June 25, 2017
Washington, DC
Join us for a three hour session on ways to bring more experimentation to your school community.
4D Studio: Design. Dare. Disrupt. Dream.
June 26-29, 2017
The Steward School/Bryan Innovation Lab, Richmond, VA
A deep dive into developing a culture of innovation at your school.
Wonder Women!
July 10-13, 2017
Castilleja School, Palo Alto, CA
Uncover your signature presence and lead more effectively and joyfully.
November 5-8, 2017
La Fonda on the Plaza, NM
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L+D Board of Directors
Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy
Jump Associates, CA
Lee Burns
Headmaster
McCallie School
, TN
Sandy Drew
Non-profit Consultant, CA
Matt Glendinning
(Secretary)
Head of School
Moses Brown School,
RI
Trudy Hall (Board Chair)
Interim Director of High School
Forest Ridge School, WA
Brett Jacobsen (Vice Chair)
Head of School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian
, GA
Barbara Kraus-Blackney (Treasurer)
Executive Director
Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools (ADVIS), PA
Karan Merry
Retired Head of School
St. Paul's Episcopal School
Carla Robbins Silver (ex-officio)
Executive Director
Leadership+Design, CA
Mary Stockavas (Treasurer)
Director of Finance
Bosque School,
NM
Matthew Stuart
Head of School
Caedmon School, NY
Brad Weaver
Head of School
Sonoma Country Day School, CA
Paul Wenninger
Retired Head of School
Welcome New Board Members!
Brenda Leaks
Head of School
Seattle Girls School, WA
Marc Levinson
Executive Director, MISBO, CO
Natalie Nixon
Director, Strategic Design MBA Program
Philadelphia University
Founder, Figure 8 Consulting PA
Kaleb Rashad
Principal
High Tech High School (CA)
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Carla Silver, Executive Director, Leadership+Design
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The theme of this month's newsletter is Future-Ready Schools, so let's start with a pretty straightforward question: How ready for the future is your school?
Straightforward, yes, but how do you
know if your school is really ready for the next decade? Educators are not, by training or by nature, futurists. But the reality of our rapidly accelerating times will force us to develop futurist skills, to adapt quickly to emerging technologies and human needs, and to manage huge amounts of ambiguity. Our
4D Studio program in Richmond this June is designed to help educators and school leaders do just that - develop a futurist skill-set and also practice the habits and mindsets that are required to lead in these times of exponential change.
If you can't make it to 4D this summer, here is a list of 10 things you can do to ready your school for the future.
- Get curious about why you do what you do. As a professional community, collectively question your assumptions about the way school works. Start with the question, Why school? And proceed from there. Why classrooms? Why 180 days in a school year? Why 8-3? Why desks? Why final exams? Why AP? Why grades? Make it a year-long exercise of asking questions. If every answer that comes to mind is "because of college" get curious about that too.
- Get unstuck. Experiment with those assumptions. Find systematic ways to test and pilot new ways of teaching that challenge and test those assumptions.
- Get inspired. Get the professional community to visit modern workplaces - not colleges - and to ask "How is my class preparing my students for this world? How is my classroom mirroring the world outside of school?
- Get empathetic. Shadow students for a day. You might be amazed to see how much self-directed learning they do outside of the classroom. Walk in their shoes for the day. How much of their day do they find relevant? How much IS relevant to their future - beyond college.
- Get listening. Listen to millennials. Seek to understand their values, motivations and perspectives. Don't survey them. Walk and talk with them. They are a good barometer of your future.
- Get freaked out! Visit futurist websites like The Institute for The Future and Singularity Hub to see what kinds of predictions futurists are making. Could it really be that in just a decade intelligent machines will have surpassed biological humans in almost every capacity? Let your imagination take you to those possibilities.
- Get strategic. When you are strategic planning, look outward as much as you look inward. Understand the context in which you are planning. Use context mapping to think about all of the external factors - from demographics to industry trends to political and economic forces.
- Get real. Seek to really understand the world into which your students will be graduating. Tools like IFTFs Ten-Year Forecast is one example. What does Generation Transition really need to know and and be able to do?
- Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. (Note Greg's article below!) Whether that is having critical conversations with colleagues or trying something new and seeing it fail, this next decade is going to be filled with discomfort. Not comfortable with discomfort? Maybe try some "comfort challenges" this summer.
- Get playful. The future is not a dystopian destiny. We must take an optimistic stance on the future. We must jump in and go with the current and not let anxiety paralyze us from getting ready for the future. Play is one of the greatest cures for anxiety. It's hard to worry when you are laughing and playing. Don't forget to play.
If there is one thing we've learned this year by focusing on the future of teaching and learning is that there are some amazing things happening out there in the world of school. There are new schools emerging that radically change the experience of school for students -
Brightworks and
DesignSchoolX. There are schools that are not afraid to disrupt themselves by offering new models of school either on or off their campuses - Lovett's
Lab Atlanta and Mount Vernon's
MVIFI. There are even colleges and universities that believe they can move the dial -
SNHU and
Minerva.
And of course, don't forget to register for one of our two summer programs - 4DStudio: Design.Dare. Disrupt. Dream. and Wonder Women - both filling up! A list of all of our upcoming programs are listed on the sidebar. More Bootcamps coming!
Warm Regards,
Carla Silver, Executive Director
P.S. Interested in spending a year as a
Leadership+Design Fellow? We are accepting applications for 8-10 fellows who will spend a year learning with us and applying their learning back at their schools.
Check it out.
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| Three Principles for Schools of the Future |
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Greg Bamford, Head of School, Watershed School
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Watershed School
, where I've been Head since 2014, was founded with the explicit purpose of translating research into daily practice. We were founded to be different, to be a model whose successes and failures other schools can learn from.
Outsiders are often fascinated by Watershed, coming to our
Traverse conference
each June or visiting for one of our
Educator Visit Days
. But we're different enough that they often also see our school as a unicorn: fascinating, but unalterably
other
.
We're a small school, fully enrolled with 98 students. Our schedule allows for interdisciplinary, 3-hour classes that allow for hands-on projects and off-campus field work. We don't use a conventional grading system, and we've never had an AP class. We're different enough from most independent schools that visitors can leave intrigued, but saying, "we could never do that here."
After all, many independent schools do quite well with traditional grades and 55-minute class periods. But those surface-level features aren't what makes Watershed a school of the future.
What makes us a "future lab," to borrow the theme of this newsletter, is a set of beliefs about the nature of school. If your school finds ways to act on these premises about learning and the future, you'll be future-focused within your unique context.
So here's what we think defines a "future lab" in education. In a future-focused school:
1. Relevance Drives Learning
Watershed's core courses are connected to real world questions, challenges, and experts. "Expeditions" run all afternoon, are team-taught, and offer English, history, and science credit. For example, "Borders and Biodiversity" asks the question: "how do borders impact human and natural communities?" In an era when talk of a border wall dominates political debate, this relevant question drove inquiry and problem-solving.
The opportunity created by this question was for students to travel to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, interview stakeholders on both sides of the border, connect history and economics to the reality on the ground, and collect field samples as a way to assess biodiversity.
Whether or not your school can do such adventurous travel, the relevance of the guiding question - and the access to authentic sources and audiences - drove student learning powerfully.
The final project, rather than being a test, was the collaborative development of an Environmental and Human Impact Statement (EHIS) documenting the impact of a proposed border wall along the entire border. Students sent it to relevant government agencies, as well as Congress.
For a future-focused school, a relevant curriculum prepares students to deal with complicated issues, understand multiple perspectives, identify the intersections between disciplines, and design original solutions.
2. Who You Are As Important As What You Know
The research is clear: what some awkwardly call "non-cognitive traits," and we just call "character," is just as important as academic skills in determining life outcomes.
At Watershed, we use consistent language to talk about seven character traits we seek to build in our students, and we design our program to provide consistent opportunities to practice and grow these ways of being in the world.
There are tradeoffs. Our wilderness program, for instance, delays the start of academic courses by two weeks. But this shared challenge sets the stage for conversations about grit, optimism, and empathy that bleed into the year. Even in a student-teacher conference about calculus, for instance, this same framework used to deliver feedback and set goals, making it clear that character is something we're always working on getting better at. 
For a future-focused school, this emphasis on character develops some of the most complex and difficult human abilities. In an age of constant re-learning and re-invention, the ability to understand yourself and to manage how you react to others becomes ever more valuable.
3. We Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
While I joke with prospective parents that "adversity and failure" doesn't make an appealing slogan for a bumper sticker, I also share that they need to value constructive adversity if they choose to send their kids here.
Challenge should certainly be academic. It is important for students to develop higher-order thinking skills and familiarity with meaningful academic content. That's one form of discomfort, as students are progressively asked to do more and more.
Discomfort can also be physical. While we are not an outdoors school like HMI, our Wilderness program builds this skill early. When we engage in global travel during
May Term
, our accommodations are non-touristic, typically home-stays or hostels.
But so much of the discomfort we believe in encountering is personal, even emotional. It can be hard to be away from home. It can be hard to be in a culture that is unfamiliar, to be challenged with new foods or new ways of thinking. Collaboration can be uncomfortable because it leads to conflict, and requires negotiation skills. And it can be hard to be given feedback on your character traits on top of feedback on your writing skills.
I don't want to overstate things. We are careful to make school fun, and to provide time for students to return to their comfort zone. We value play, we have celebrations, and we schedule time to come together as a community.These things are critical to provide everyone a chance to recover and reflect on the lessons that comes from challenge.
But it's also important to be explicit about the value that comes from discomfort, so there aren't surprises later.
We live in an era of rapid change, what many thinkers describe as VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Navigating the environment requires a comfort with discomfort, a lack of rigidity, a willingness to be stretched.
Some of the most powerful memories a student will have at our school come as the result of personal discomfort. Our goal is for students to not only become familiar with that feeling, but to see it as a source of growth and personal meaning.
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Eric Juli, Head of School, Design Lab Early College High School
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When I was in high school, my history teacher once said, "School is practice for life." He clearly defined how school and the "real" world had different rules and measures of success and failure. The conversation drove me crazy. I didn't want to practice life, I wanted to live it. I had that frustrating conversation with my teacher more than twenty five years ago, and I've been working to prove him wrong ever since.
Now I'm the principal of Design Lab Early College High School, in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm immersed in the work of trying to make an inner city school a place where any reader of this newsletter would feel comfortable sending their child. It's incredibly hard work and while we're the best we've ever been, we're not yet close to that goal. There isn't space here to give all the context of what it is to teach and learn in the inner city with students in extreme poverty, but one important piece of information is the following: Life happens
to
my students. They have no choices. They don't choose where to live, or how to deal with the constant and pervasive threat of violence in and around their lives. They don't choose to enter high school four or more grade levels behind in reading and math. And until this year, they didn't even get to choose their own classes. Everything happens to our students. 
Other than the fact that it's in the inner city, school doesn't look much different than when I attended. Despite the world changing rapidly around us, my history teacher's words still ring true; school is still practice for life.
I want students to see that school and the world are not twodistinct places with the Grand Canyon between them. To attack that existing belief, we've added an X-Block into our schedule. X-Block takes place every Wednesday morning for three hours. Instead of regular classes, students participate in two ninety-minute blocks to engage with community partners. Our partners come into our spaces to do the work they do in the world - just with our students. Early in the year, we told our students about each partner organization and students chose who they wanted to work with. In our first year of trying this, we managed to give 100% of our students the X-Blocks they chose. There are no tests or quizzes of any type. There's no homework either. There is only learning by doing and engagement with our partner organizations.
Because of X-Block, Wednesday is the best day of the week, and the worst all at the same time. It's the best when I walk into a session at
Lake Erie Ink
and listen to young men and women share their hopes, dreams, and hurt through the poetry they are writing and the book they are publishing. I love watching
Upcycle Parts Shop
give our students the chance to paint polka dot stairwells and turn found objects into art. The day that
Chef Anna Harouvis
made curried tofu with students was amazing. Students living in food deserts, with no access to fresh fruits and vegetables, loved curried tofu and it brought me to tears. I watch students struggle to program helicopter drones and Raspberry Pi with our
Cuyahoga Community College Youth Technology Academy
partners, and I see students finding their positive voice with
Effective Leadership Academy
. It's refreshing watching students discover a love of
yoga
, and an interest in learning to repair bicycles with
Two One Fix Bicycle
and
St. Clair Bikeworks
. Hearing students in our makerspace say aloud with wonder, "I made that?" is just beautiful. For three hours every week, the line between school and the world is blurred. School isn't practice for life. School and life are one and the same.
X-Block is also the worst part of my week. Too many students continue to say, "You are doing school wrong. Give me a worksheet or a test. This isn't school." It hurts my heart when our students say, "If I'm not getting credit for this, it isn't worth doing." We've also exposed our students to future careers and opportunities they didn't know existed, and we haven't yet built a bridge to actually get them there.
Discipline incidents are down significantly during X-Block. Students who sit passively in class and never speak are fully engaged in X-Block. Inner city schools are purposefully structured to be places of power and control. X-Block takes that away and levels the playing field setting teachers and students as learners together. What are the implications of this for learning and for how we do school? These are hard questions with even harder answers.
We're starting to plan X-Block again for next year. We've enrolled almost a hundred new ninth graders in part because they are drawn to our X-Block. I anticipate we'll lose at least a dozen current students because they are convinced we're doing school wrong. X-Block is about learning by doing. It's an opportunity to create and question and wonder by doing real work that matters in our community. Next year we're going to try and do more problem solving in the community and not just at school. My not so secret plan is to continue to blur the lines between school and X-Block each and every year. Finding the dollars, the time, the partners, and ensuring we still pass all the state tests remains a very real challenge.
Last week, I was driving Marquel, a 10th grader, back from his bike repair class. During the drive he asked, "Why do we have school with desks in rows and textbooks, when learning is so much better when we're actually doing something real that matters?" For twenty five years, I've stewed over my high school teacher's declaration that school is practice for life. I haven't proven him wrong yet, but Marquel's question convinces me that we're on the right path.
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Engaging With Communities Through Collaborative Inquiry
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Aaron Gerwer, Co-Principal, Science Leadership Academy
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I am struck by a problem that a group of our students at Science Leadership Academy solved last year during their Individualized Learning Plans. Three students had chosen to spend Wednesdays working with an international chemical company at one of their local plants. On the day of their final presentation, a nice event in a downtown Philadelphia highrise where execs had made sure to purchase the kids' favorite ice cream, it came out that the students had solved a long-existing piping efficiency issue. Their site supervisor had basically given them the blueprints to the plant, and our kids poured over the prints and company records and found that in switching systems several years previously, some of the systems were overlooked. Our kids provided a fix that increased plant efficiency and the company was eager to now follow our kids through college and support them in transitioning to the company post-college, if they were interested (hence the attention to ice cream).
The opportunity for open inquiry and the receptiveness of the community partner were crucial here in creating the conditions for meaningful work and change for our students. It's important to think about the applications for this type of relationship and the rejection of a "service for" or "helping to" model. In a truly inquiry-based relationship, openness is an essential condition and student work is always collaborative in spirit and intention - a "work with" model. This has applications far beyond industry.
A friend of mine, who is a principal at an elementary school in Southwest Philadelphia, agreed to host one of our community collaboration inquiry projects last year. Essentially her school had both a unique identity and a set of questions about itself that we wanted our students to explore in collaboration with the school. A group of our teachers and students worked with staff and students from the elementary school in the reimagining of their playground, hallways, and outer walls, together creating the expression of a shared vision. This was the enactment of our ideal for a "community" oriented project - a collaboration that bettered existing conditions through mutual respect and shared design.
Similarly, this year three of our teachers collaborated on an immersive field study around the topic of Girls in STEM. These three teachers were approaching the project from different lenses - one taught Spanish, another History and the third BioChem. With much work and not a little bit of hustling, the field study was set for Havana Cuba. A group of our girls traveled with the teachers and engaged in a week of dance lessons, community farm excursions, and discussions with professors. They have designed a website about their experiences on the
Cuba Inquiry Project
. Engaging in open dialogue and collaboration with a previously closed off country has inspired our students in their research and ignited a dialogue between peoples.
Through processes and experiences such as these we move closer to our goal of ensuring our students are citizens of the world. Being a citizen of the world is incumbent on the ability to design with and share questions between communities. We work to weave this concept through every class largely grounded on our core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. Importantly, we don't leave these values behind outside of our school walls and work to engage in them together with communities we interact and build with.
Science Leadership Academy is an inquiry driven, project-based public magnet high school located in Center City Philadelphia with an enrollment of 500 students. At SLA our mission is the pursuit of 3 essential questions- How do we learn? What can we create? What does it mean to lead?
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