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School redesign - intro and big ideas

Created by Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute.

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Video transcript

What does this look like when we redesign an entire school? Now, I know some of you were saying, "The entire school? I don't have control of the school. I have a classroom or I work with one group of teachers." We understand that, but we think it's really important to understand what this looks like if you can plan holistically across an entire organization. And if you dig in with us, what you'll see is that the principles we introduce this week, while we're introducing them with the frame of changing an entire school -- they actually apply just as much as changing an individual classroom, where if you're a teacher going over to the neighboring teacher and collaborating on how to change your learning environments together. The idea we want to focus on here is that you can't just focus on a single period of the teacher's day. But when educators start innovating on different kinds of classroom models, they quickly bump into the constraints on having a 57-minute period that's chopped up into 6 blocks a day. So this week, we want to remove those barriers -- remove the constraints and think about, what's possible when you design from the ground up at the whole school level? Now, some of you may already be a part of this redesign process at a school level. And others of you were just thinking about it at a classroom level. But we suspect that as you get into this work deeper and deeper, you're going to ask the same question that we started out this whole blended learning course with asking at the classroom level about schools. Why did we run schools the same way that we have for the last 100 years? Do those assumptions still make sense? And on these assumptions are on very "sexy" and exciting topics like bell schedules and student grouping policies and grade levels. I know, heart thumping kind of stuff. But I truly believe that if you show me how schools set up their bell schedule, their teacher assignments, I can show you 90% of where they're using old, financial resources, and frankly, already show you where they're constraining all possible innovation into the future. So this week, we're going to look up some assumptions about how school is always been, and then we're going to look at some schools that are actually questioning these assumptions, and see how they're reorganizing school as a result. And then we're going to look at the economics of all this. How much does it cost to go blended and how are schools thinking about affording these additional cost? We finish by talking to the actual experts in the field who've done this process and see how they navigated the process of changing their schools to these blended models. Now, it's easy to focus on the "what of blended learning," but how we get there -- the actual change management process, that's where the magic really happens, and the best superintendents, principals, and teacher leaders are the ones that are really good about thinking about the leadership about all of this.