The MVP of School Change

Innovation in schools looks like a conversation.

When it comes to evolving education, we have always thrown more tools at the problem rather than do the most obvious thing first: talk to teachers and administrators about what the issues are and then solving for those issues.

That takes time. Ugh.

So does any change in a school, let alone across an entire system.

Ask any teacher about adopting a new math curriculum, and you will see how long it takes and how expensive it is. You will see that there are only so many meetings and, therefore, so many minutes that teachers and administrators have to learn a new anything. You will also see in spades the want to learn and change the system in order to meet students’ needs.

It’s just that the dynamics outside of schools make it so damn hard to change within schools.

In no other industry are there so many competing voices, all of whom have some level of influence over another—teachers, administrators, parents, district board members, for-profit companies, local and state politicians, the latest TikTok trend. When all of those voices are speaking at the same time, there’s no conversation.

Change within schools requires dialogue. The most effective dialogue begins with listening to understand. Ask any teacher who has run a conflict resolution.

AI prompt: A group of adults are engaged in a conversation outside of a school. Everyone is talking and no one is listening.

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MVPs

Teachers and administrators are experts. They understand the rhythms of the day and of the year, and how those rhythms affect learning. Teaching, after all, is relational. It’s context-dependent. It also relies on outdated systems, tools, and processes.

Changing how anything gets done in a school, though, whether short-term or long-term, is a long, drawn-out process because education itself is process-oriented. It takes time to learn how to teach, to develop the physical stamina of standing up all day and wandering the room making sure everyone is paying attention, to understand the mental fatigue of the million micro-decisions that go into classroom management, to be comfortable enough with the professional element of teaching in order to make it personal.

Students pick up on inauthenticity better than anyone, and that will halt any lesson in its tracks.

It takes time to learn how to be a teacher, and it takes time to learn how to leverage the systems to do so, outdated or not. The process of learning applies to adults as much as it does to students. Forever.

The process of changing any element of that system is complex because schools are people and people are complicated. Try and launch a new initiative in a school without building relationships with faculty, and good luck to you. And that initiative.

The issue is that the world is outcome-oriented. And impatient. We want innovative schools and we want them now!

There’s a misguided belief that schools can pivot just like businesses (the last time schools pivoted quickly was super fun!). The difference is that businesses respond to earnings statements and are built to spit out Minimum Viable Products to increase profits while schools respond to, well, all those people listed above. And all those people listed above have an opinion about what teaching should and should not look like because they went to school once.

Can you imagine a group of teachers and principles pitching a new business plan to Google because they searched for a new restaurant a few times?

AI prompt: A group of teachers gives a presentation to business executives. The presentation is in an office with a sign on the wall that says "Pitch, Please"

That’s how the world speaks about school and about what needs to happen in order to improve it.

Teachers and administrators know what needs to change. They know the world is rapidly incorporating AI into anything and everything and that students need to learn myriad new skills in order to succeed after they graduate. They know that there are tools out there that could probably really help in their daily efforts to prepare students for that world.

But no one is asking them how to get from A to B.

Part of my job is to do just that—ask educators what they need to better be able to do their job—and then co-create those solutions. Sometimes that is AI, and sometimes that is just more time.

Always, though, it’s the drive to connect with students.

The Minimum Viable Product in teaching is relationships.

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Listening Ears

Low test scores make headlines. Low budgets make headlines. Low student engagement makes headlines.

What doesn’t make headlines is how hard teachers work to be flexible within inflexible systems. Societally, we pour resources into every other industry except education, and then we rage when schools suffer and we point the finger at the people who are trying their best with what they’ve got.

I taught middle school English, but even I can tell you A+B=C.

The shifts we need to make are not within schools but outside of them. Collectively, we need to stop pretending that discourse about change is change itself. We need to talk intentionally about which AI tools enhance teaching and which ones are just shiny. We need to talk about how to redesign systems so that teachers and administrators can focus on the human element of schools. We need to talk about how education is the infrastructure that carries children into adulthood.

The conversation requires a lot of talking, but it begins with listening. If you listen to teachers and administrators who live school day in and day out, you’ll see that the answers are already in the building.

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