This has been an interesting week
of professional learning and growth. We welcomed Dr. Robert Marzano
to join us on Monday to dialogue on our continued implementation of the
Instructional Framework and our trajectory toward becoming high reliability
schools. From the Twitter posts and reactions from colleagues, the
response was overwhelmingly positive.
Similarly, I had an opportunity
on Wednesday to spend part of the day with two amazing educational pioneers - Nancy Conrad and Kim
Day. Nancy is a former high school English teacher who now heads the Conrad
Foundation, and Kim is the Science Chief for the Department of Defense
Education division. Both are passionate about transforming education, with our
students at the center. Kim had an interesting question for us – if Michigan
was the leader in the industrial age due to the automotive industry, why can’t
Michigan be the leader of the new knowledge age? I’ll come back to this in a
bit.
Nancy’s late husband, Pete
Conrad, is one of the few people to ever have walked on the moon. Nancy
reminded us that when President
Kennedy announced America’s plan to send a man to the moon, the science
community was basically starting from zero. In a collaborative effort that
brought approximately 400,000 people from government, industry, and academia together,
the goal was achieved in July of 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission. During the
years between President Kennedy’s audacious vision statement and its realization,
there were many failures, including the loss of life, but the team did not
abandon the goal. They took those
failures as opportunities to learn and re-design. Nancy told a great story of a
reporter coming to Houston and wanting to interview astronauts; she met a man
on site who told her he was part of the team that was sending a man to the
moon. He spent about an hour telling her all about the space program and what
went into the effort. At the end of the conversation, the reporter asked the
man for his job title so she could insert it into the news story -- he
responded: “janitor.”
Using the moonshot as a metaphor,
Nancy spoke about recruiting new crew members for an education moonshot. This
is remarkably similar to what Superintendent Dan Behm has envisioned for our
own Destination:
Innovation program. Through the generosity of our community, coordinated
via the Forest Hills Public Schools Foundation, we are designing our own “Kennedy
moment,” our own audacious version of the moonshot, and we need all team members
to take part. Taking Kim’s question of why not Michigan as an educational
leader, let’s take it a step further – why not Forest Hills as the leader in
Michigan and the country? Why not Forest Hills as a “thinkubator” for
innovation, and designer of a new educational ecosystem? Together, we can be
the agents of transformation, and we’ve already started. Great examples include
the anticipated launch of a STEM Academy in the fall of 2015, Gone Boarding
classes, and blended learning opportunities.
Fifteen years into this century,
our only limit is our imagination. Using structures like the Instructional
Framework, and not just thinking about the perspective of our students but actually
inviting them into plotting their own educational journey, we have a unique
opportunity to lead. As President
Kennedy stated, “we choose these things not because they are easy, but because
they are hard.”
