In today's episode, Mike Zavada and Monroe Jones have a conversation with Grant Lichtman. Grant is an internationally recognized thought leader in the drive to transform K-12 education. He speaks, writes, and works with fellow educators to build capacity and comfort with innovation in response to a rapidly changing world. Since 2012, he has worked with nearly 200 school and community teams in both public and private schools, helping them to develop their imagination of schools of the future, and their places in that future. In addition to Grant's TED Talk, videos and podcasts, he is the author of numerous books such as Moving the Rock: Seven Levers We Can Press to Change Education; #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education; and The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School, and Grant's most recent book is entitled, Thrive: How Schools Will Win The Education Revolution.

You can find all of these great resources as well as Grant's blog at his website, GrantLichtman.com.

Some history on Grant—For fifteen years he was a senior administrator at one of the largest and oldest K-12 independent schools in California with responsibilities that included business, finance, operations, technology, development, campus construction, and global studies. Before working in education, he directed business ventures in the oil and gas industry in the former Soviet Union, South America, and the U.S. Gulf Coast. He worked close to center stage in the economic and political transformation of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and the historic opening of that communist-dominated economy to the outside world.

Grant graduated from Stanford University with a BS and MS in geology in 1980 and studied the deep ocean basins of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Bering Sea.