What happens when you bring five school teams, each comprised of board members, administrators and teachers, together for two days to design strategy for their schools? That’s the question we asked ourselves when we envisioned our Strategic Planning Institute. We had two big hypotheses to test. The first was that schools could design better strategy if they were in an environment that allowed them to support, inspire, question and challenge one another. The second was that if schools experienced this type of collaboration, and were offered helpful tools and structures for the process, they would be equipped to return to school and lead a strategic design process that was entirely their own.

Sometimes what you don’t plan to learn is what really sticks. 

Liz and I just finished our first year working with seven extraordinary school teams in High Tech High’s Education Leadership Academy (ELA). Last week, the program culminated with Presentations of Learning where each team exhibited the leadership project they designed and launched at their schools. All teams shared a goal to strengthen deeper learning and equity in their schools. But every project was profoundly different in design—some represented whole school change, some targeted a particular practice or question—and all had a unique focus aligned with the team’s interests and their students’ needs.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Sarah Goldin, a friend, teacher, and partner to us in innovation received a distinguished teacher award. In this video, she reminds us of why great teachers matter so much, and she pushes us to understand what it means to do this work with students well. No need for me to summarize, because it's all here. Listen closely to this amazing talk celebrating all adults who are willing to be "a little less fish in the bowl, and a little more cat in the hat." Fast-forward to 4:40 for her speech!  

This week was one of those moments when everything came together. So often, it feels like I (and my colleagues at GLP) have been out on a limb—carrying a message that seemed hard to grasp, or if understood, somewhere too far to go for so many schools. On one hand, the change conversations stimulated by Most Likely to Succeed and HTH GSE’s Education Leadership Academysurrounding deeper learning, equity, and school reimagined, are compelling; however, on the other hand, the hard work of making change happen may feel too high stakes for traditional school communities. “Blowing up” the status quo would be impossible within entrenched systems. Ah, but this week! This week I felt like the message about change has been delivered, has arrived, has been heard. And I saw this arrival, this fruition of an idea, in person here in Connecticut. Still it was humbling, too: the realization of the moment, the coming to life of a new way to learn for students, teachers and a community.

The past year has been a whirlwind at GLP. Almost exactly a year ago we were getting ready to fly out to Park City for the premiere of Most Likely to Succeed at the Sundance Film Festival—an exciting debut after two years of working with visionary people. While at Sundance, we spent a lot of time with members of the High Tech High team and agreed to come and visit in February. Since then, we’ve been out to San Diego five times and are on the faculty for High Tech High’s Education Leadership Academy (ELA) and why that is important (and relevant, we promise) is because that program model is where the inspiration came for our Strategic Planning Institute.