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Notes From The Field
As a professional peer reviewer, you will see the entire system of a school in just three days. That is because Middle States standards and indicators map to every aspect of school operations—from daily classroom practices to long-term planning to foundational documents.
How, When and Where Does Change Happen In Schools?
At Middle States, we worried that attitudes of compliance or credentialism would result in schools “integrating” AI into what they are already doing.
That’s why RAIL is not just an accreditation-style endorsement, but also an implementation framework. It relies on the wisdom of Stewart Brand’s “pace layering” model, which reflects how complex, adaptive systems change (or resist change) over time…
Seton Hall Prep Helps Students Cope with Anxiety
At Seton Hall Preparatory School in West Orange, N.J., school leaders are working to address student mental health and using data to measure the impact of their programs.
The Imperative to Facilitate Change in Schools
Tectonic forces often lead organizations to adopt a posture of “threat rigidity.” When this happens, as Horn writes, “an organization doubles down on its existing processes or routines. That results in more top down control; reduced experimentation […] and a focus on an organization’s existing resources, rather than questioning what else it might use to respond to the threat.”
From Waterfall Planning to Discovery-Driven Planning
Even more fundamentally, discovery-driven planning produces good strategy. Horn says that “In a discovery-driven planning process, start with the desired outcomes in mind. From there, the crucial next step is to list all the assumptions that must prove true to realize the desired outcomes.” This echoes the brilliant strategist Roger Martin, who advocates asking, “What would have to be true?” rather than “What is true?” before committing to a strategy.
From Cognitive Biases to New Narratives
Another cognitive bias at play was a failure to calculate opportunity costs. By investing finite resources in choices that would not differentiate them, the school was foreclosing opportunities to serve their community better while “playing to win,” as the strategist Roger Martin puts it.
From Hygienic Factors to Motivational Factors
Hygienic factors include things like compensation, status, and work conditions. These are “table stakes” for schools. Just as poker requires each player to pay an ante (the “table stakes”) to join the game, so too must schools invest in “good enough” hygienic factors to attract and retain faculty and staff.
From Everything-to-Everyone to Jobs To Be Done
Schools certainly need the right “interfaces” so that “modular” solutions can “plug in.” For example, does the daily schedule built-in time for students to access an outside provider for self-directed learning? Does the school transcript have space for credentials earned elsewhere?
Michael B. Horn’s From Reopen to Reinvent: A Must Read for School Leaders
He cohosts the top education podcasts Future U and Class Disrupted. He regularly contributes to Forbes.com and writes the Substack newsletter The Future of Education. Michael also serves as an executive editor at Education Next. His work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, and NBC.
From Threat Rigidity to Opportunity
To be sure, a full shift from threat rigidity to opportunity will take more than answering those four questions—and the rest of From Reopen to Reinvent explores that territory. It begins, as Horn implies, with having enough empathy to understand that threat rigidity makes perfect sense when you’re in the midst of a crisis. But if we remain in that place, we will merely “reopen.”