Building the future of learning for all.
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What if the most powerful tool in school improvement is a single, unhurried conversation? In this post, Jennifer Poon and Doannie Tran make the case for empathy interviews as the essential first step in genuine community co-creation, and explain why it matters deeply who conducts them. Drawing on their work with Burlington School District, they show how shifting the interviewer from consultant to…
The final installment in Norwalk's Portrait of a Graduate series asks the most important question of all: what do students say when you ask them to describe the Portrait? This post makes a compelling case that student co-design is not a nice-to-have but a core implementation lever, and it offers concrete strategies, from design sprints to feedback cycles to student-led reflection, for keeping…
When a leadership team meeting ends with everyone offering to help but no one agreeing to lead, something important has gone wrong beneath the surface. In this sharp, diagnostic piece, education leadership professor Andy Szeto names a pattern hiding in plain sight: voiceless collegiality, the organizational silence that masquerades as team harmony. Szeto identifies three distinct types of silence…
What if every community member, from a landscape architect to a university researcher to a sitting senator, could become part of a student's education? CommunityShare has been quietly building that reality since 2015, connecting more than 85,000 students and their educators with community partners across 12 states through a model it calls a human library. This Steward Stories profile traces the…
What does it look like when a school is genuinely designed around the lives learners are living, not the regulations they must comply with? In this new piece from Sarah Bishop-Root and Lindsy Ogawa, the Da Vinci Schools network in California shows how policy can be a tool for possibility and a source of fragility at the same time. Through the story of Da Vinci RISE and its students, this piece…
What if the most transformative idea in education right now has nothing to do with how big your school is? In this piece, George Philhower, superintendent at Eastern Hancock Schools and co-founder of the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, makes the case that the microschool mindset is a philosophy any school can adopt. From grading practices to flexible pathways to joy as a design principle, this…
What does it look like when a foundation built by a field scientist becomes the connective tissue of an entire regional learning ecosystem? The PAST Foundation's story, told through 25 years of timeline milestones and student voices, offers education leaders a concrete model for weaving together schools, industry, community, and out-of-school time into something greater than any single program.…
Field trips have always been more than a day away from desks. They are the moments students remember, the experiences that build empathy and ignite curiosity. A new Getting Smart post examines what the research says about virtual field trips and offers a classroom-ready framework that helps educators design experiences worthy of that same legacy. For leaders looking to expand access and deepen…
What happens when you build EdTech features by actually listening to students? Kyron Learning partnered with the AIMS Collaboratory and the Gates Foundation to study motivation and engagement among English language learners in middle school math, and the findings drove real product changes. This piece traces how closed captioning, highlighted transcripts, and clickable definitions emerged from…
When a student completes a writing test in a locked browser, we learn what they can do alone. But the world asks something harder: can they use AI without being used by it? In this sharp and timely essay, Eric Tucker argues that assessment for writing, speaking, and listening has not kept pace with how communication actually works, and maps a practical path forward. Education leaders navigating AI…
