Class Disrupted

Arguably the scarcest resource in schools is people. And people are imperative for doing a pilot and innovating well. In this episode of Class Disrupted, Diane Tavenner and Michael Horn delve into how to best use people when innovating and what are the key roles that you must fill to do a pilot well.

Episode transcript:

Diane Tavenner shares with Michael Horn her excitement about a school visit she did recently in South Carolina to the Anderson Institute of Technology—which raises the question of why aren’t there more schools like what Diane saw?

Episode transcript:

Schools typically have long laundry lists of all the pilots and innovations they want to do—if only they had the time and resources. Or they have laundry lists of improvement projects that are in the works—but then the execution suffers on all of them. How should a school choose which innovations and improvements to invest in trying? In this episode of Class Disrupted, Diane and Michael offer both a framework for how to make these decisions, but also describe how Summit chose to do its pilot on better supporting its school heads rather than all the other things they might have attempted.

Episode transcript:

Whether there’s a teacher shortage depends on who you ask and the definition of “shortage” it seems. In this episode, Diane and Michael welcome reporter Kevin Mahnken from The74 to provide up to date information on the data and storylines in the media. Then Diane details what her reality is on the ground in her schools — and Michael and Diane analyze why the on the ground educator reality is often different from the current national data and what to do about it.

Episode transcript:

Diane and Michael reflect about how all too often educators tell them that they’re piloting something, but when they dig in, what they’re doing doesn’t actually sound like a pilot. To make this crystal clear, they put one of Summit’s current pilots under the microscope to start to break down just what is a pilot and how do you do it well.

Episode transcript:

Although classrooms are not disrupted as they were over the last three school years, Diane and Michael are back with the goal of finding a way to disrupt them. In their opening episode of Season 4, the two catch up on headlines from their summers and share a preview for how they plan to help educators innovate over the course of this season.

In the final episode of season 3, Diane notes that many of the solutions to help make schools safer all focus around banning things: banning CRT, books, speakers, and more. Michael and Diane discuss what these ideas from both sides of the political spectrum share in common—and whether this instinct is actually the way to make our schools safer.

In this episode, Michael brings Diane a puzzle. A reader recently pushed back on an assertion in his upcoming book, From Reopen to Reinvent, that “fixed grouping of children by perceived ability… narrows opportunities,” by suggesting that older students are in fact relatively fixed in their abilities. In turn, Diane unpacks what’s behind the statement and why the traditional education system perpetuates this flawed belief.

As charter schools face challenges in the Beltway, Diane and Michael go back to first principles around the purpose of charter schools by revisiting the original 1992 California Act that created charter schools in the state and assess how they’ve done. They then do a deep dive into innovation theory to revisit the promise and potential of charter schools and discuss how the reality lived up to the theory. Finally, they project forward to thinking about what the future might hold for charter schools.

Having returned from Germany, Diane shares what she learned about how Germany remembers the Holocaust and what it teaches its children about it so that it does not repeat its past. Michael and Diane reflect how the way Germany approaches the conversation could offer a new starting point to help America move past its polarizing conversations about teaching race and racism.