But what is a climate pathway? What are the specific features of a this funding that might help your LEA launch a climate pathway, no matter where you're starting from? How can you leverage your LEA's previous work in CTE or in sustainability? And who can help you navigate all the pieces of the process?

In this webinar, we'll help you think through answers to these questions, giving you a solid starting place for using GSPP to build robust and engaging climate pathways for your diverse learners. You will come away with a deeper understanding of the GSPP, as well as next steps you can take.

Webinar registration information

This webinar will be offered twice, please register for the time that suits you best:

Friday, February 9, 10am

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvcO-orT8vHdIVTmUYL1r43rrn1Xu67Gt3

Friday, February 16, 10am (NEW TIME)

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIvceGgpjosHtVx557ihgmkcJCDmQxmvo2Y

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Know anyone in a California public school or district who might be interested? Please share widely, using the button below, or by sending around the flyer (below).

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Download the flyer here (pdf): http://makeknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/MakeKnowledge-Climate-Career-Pathways-GSPP-webinar-flyer-.pdf

By the time you see this, the California Department of Education may have released the Request for Applications (RFA) for the new Golden State Pathways Program.

As you might know, this program provides $425 million new dollars to fund career pathway development and planning. For us, one of the terrific features of this program is that—for the first time in the state—climate pathways are called out as a priority area.

Some quick facts and background:

Eligibility:

All California LEAs (Lead Education Agencies) are eligible to apply for funding. This includes public school districts, charter schools, and county offices of education. The money is for high school programming. Community Colleges are not directly eligible, but could be included in a partnership.

One of the regional technical assistance centers put together some informational slides about the program here:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1x6D6EisqvRI83bgifQI-RbORabpxu6B/edit#slide=id.p1 Depending on where you are in California, you may have a different regional technical assistant center, but the information in these slides is relevant to LEAs throughout the state.

Grant sizes for LEAs, including charters:

$200,000 for planning grants; $500,000 for implementation grants. LEAs may apply for both.

Grant period:

2024-2028

Surprisingly, the state seems to want to disburse all $425 million in one round. This will be confirmed when the RFA is released. This means they won’t be setting aside part for future years. So, if you know of high schools that want to take advantage of this opportunity, they need to think about it quickly.

Key dates: (N.B. all dates subject to change)

RFA release -- very soon (was originally scheduled for January 26, but has been delayed — may come out the week of January 29, or early February).

Applications due: March 12, 2024

Award notifications: April 2, 2024

CDE GSPP page

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/hs/gspp.asp

GSPP enabling legislation / ed code:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codesdisplaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EDC&sectionNum=53023

How MakeKnowledge can help

As you know, MakeKnowledge provides consulting help for districts and schools on CTE grants, from ideation to program development and support. We have a particularly strong interest in helping schools and districts develop climate-focused career pathways. We brought over $3 million to two California schools for CTE in the last few years, in Los Angeles and in Oakland. Besides grant writing support, we can help with:

• program development. We’re excited about helping build climate career pathways in a range of sectors.

• Data to Design. One of our signature projects that allows your students to gather data about the climate impacts of your school community, and then use this data to design collaborative interventions that create year-over-year improvements.

• Strategic sustainability consulting that unites a green master plan with leadership development, staff professional development, student agency, community collaborations, and a rich approach to climate career planning and development.

• Climate Career Pathways Community of Practice. Join schools from across the state to share resources, learn from industry partners, grow your partnerships with your community, deepen your pedagogical practices, and encourage student agency and leadership.

If you know public high schools and districts that might be interested in this GSPP opportunity, please have them reach out to us at info@makeknowledge.org (And feel free to share this page!).

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Over the coming year, MakeKnowledge is going to be moving around the landscape of climate action in schools and communities, helping you think about how to create ambitious and sustained climate action, and what factors can get in the way.

Besides writing about the landscape of climate action, we continue to work on some generative projects that demonstrate some of our core commitments, while helping us deepen our knowledge. Here are a few examples of the work we’re doing in 2024:

We’re working with partners from across the US as part of the Accelerating Climate Capacity, Engagement, and Leadership Summit (ACCELS), examining at how we might scale up climate career pathways with education, government, nonprofit and philanthropic partners. We’ll be making recommendations by this summer, so stay tuned.

For public schools and districts in California, we’re creating resources and programs that will help them launch and expand rich climate career pathways for students, taking advantage of supports and funding such as the new Golden State Pathways Program.

For the Fall, we’re planning a conference about youth climate entrepreneurship, centering the creative work of youth and young adults who are tackling the climate crisis in innovative ways. Our hope is then to follow this up with a conference on the policy implications for schools, districts, and states: how might we prepare all of our students to help invent the new solutions, organizations, and careers we need?

We’re also excited to be talking to new schools and districts this year about our Data to Design climate project. We prototyped this work two years ago with a handful of school communities, showing them how they can use data about the school community’s carbon impact as a basis for student-generated design interventions. For instance, students considered how they might lower the carbon impact of all our students and adults getting to and from campus every day. This project demonstrates the power of sustained, collaborative action.

Finally, we’re also really interested in school-community climate and sustainability collaborations that start from a community need or question.

Over the coming months, we’ll be talking more about these projects, and about the ways we can work together to give climate action the creativity and energy it deserves (as well as how to avoid the common pitfalls that keep our efforts from having impact). I hope you’ll follow along. And get in touch if you’re interested in exploring any of these ideas and projects in a deeper way in your own setting.

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When we held the event in February 2020, there were few inklings of the COVID pandemic close at hand. Little did we know at that time what havoc the pandemic and shutdown would wreak in the worlds of work and education. And yet our conference was way ahead of the curve in modeling just how adaptable we could become — the conference itself was a hybrid event, with some participants joining in person, and some coming from around the world via Zoom. Likewise, many of our speakers joined us in person, but we also had one speaker Zoom in from Italy, and others from various parts of the US. It wasn’t only the format that foreshadowed the hybrid future we were about to enter. So did some of the speakers and their themes. Jen Dennard from Range.co gave us a glimpse into the world of remote and hybrid work, and how good tools and practices can support strong, healthy teams wherever their members happen to be.

One of the key organizing principles of the conference was that we need to think about work and education together. These are not separate spheres, no just sequential stages of human life, but they are intimately connected in a number of ways. This is sometimes ignored by the “thought leaders” on work, who imagine that education’s role is to fill up students with knowledge and skills, sort them into different buckets, and then hand them off to “work,” a separate domain with its own rules and structures. Hearing descriptions about the world of work and the future of work abstracted from human experience of growing, learning, and aging is like visiting a Victorian zoo. Over here in this cage, there’s a single male sloth, but what can you tell about sloths in general here? Are sloths social? Do they nurture their babies or let them fend for themselves? And so on. Creating a barrier between work and education also ignores the work that happens inside schools, specifically what teachers as workers do, and how the shape of their working together matters.

The COVID shutdown suddenly woke us up to one big aspect of the connection between work and education: when workers were all sent home, many had to figure out how to get work done while also parenting and managing their children’s remote schooling. Schools that figured out how to open early suddenly were deluged with inquiries about extra spaces. There was a short-lived cry to pay teachers way more: “Give them all a million dollars a year!” But of course many teachers were in a similar boat — having to teach 30 kids on screen, while managing children of their own in the background, dealing with iffy wifi, and leaning on tech support that wasn’t staffed for all the new demands.

In 2023 the shutdown is behind us, even if the virus is still with us. What does the work ahead look like? Society seems to have forgotten its fever dreams about supporting “essential workers” and teachers. Even leaving aside the places where extremists are politicizing teaching and curricula, there are still big issues to tackle in re-envisioning work and education. Our speaker (and former Minister of Education of Italy) Lorenzo Fioramonti reminds us that we can aim at creating a wellbeing economy where everyone can thrive. What do work and education look like when we dream together?

We’re still too susceptible to stories of what the market might do for work and education. In the last few months, the locus of that energy has been on the promise of generative AI. But the important question is not whether AI is inevitable, but how we harness it and other new tools. And the key word we need to interrogate in that sentence is “we.” Who is the “we” of our big visions and dreams? Will the power of our newest tools be used to further concentrate power in the hands of a few? Or can we find ways to empower communities that have been excluded? Can we create new onramps and opportunities for students of all backgrounds and zip code and latitudes?

I want to thank all of the presenters and all those who helped us launch that groundbreaking event in 2020. Some have moved on from the positions they held then, but all continue to do good work in different parts of the world.

Some of the videos from the event are up on our YouTube channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/@makeknowledge-org.

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On the other hand, there has been plenty of bad climate news:

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• Pakistan has just seen devastating floods that have killed at least 1100 people (see image below).

• Greenland’s massive ice shelves are melting so quickly that even if we stopped producing greenhouse gases today, we would still see a foot of sea level rise.

• In the American West, the Colorado river is in such crisis from climate-related drought that the future of Lake Powell is in doubt.

Carbon levels and global temperatures are still rising. All of the symptoms we see now are with the earth’s average temperature at 1.2 degrees warming above preindustrial levels. The most aggressive climate mitigation actions might limit us to 1.5 degrees, but that seems unlikely. So we know we’re literally baking in more severe climate disasters over the coming decades.

In the face of this incredible challenge, there are five mistakes I see school leaders making:

1. Ignore. In most cases I don’t mean that school leaders are denying the underlying science behind climate change. However the vast scope of the challenge can make it hard for to understand how to take appropriate action, how to position the school in the world to meet the challenge. Besides, there is a long-list of everyday urgencies in running a school. The result can be practical inaction. A close relative of ignoring is resting on our laurels, being content with what we did in the past, and not continuing to stretch and dream.

2. Delegate. In normal conditions, delegation is a managerial superpower. In the climate crisis this doesn’t work. It’s not enough to give this to your science team, your facilities team. The climate crisis needs our best effort and collaboration, and a powerful vision.

3. Individualize. You do know that it was the petroleum industry that popularized the idea of personal “carbon footprints”? We need to be far savvier about understanding the motivations of various actors, and about our own collective agency and responsibility.

4. Hope for a hero. All due credit to Greta Thunberg and other young climate activists, but waiting for “the next Greta” to emerge from one’s school community is not a robust strategy.

5. Diminish. We’re not doing justice to this challenge if we think it’s only in the realm of science. When we fail to see—and critically, help our community see—how climate intersects with so many other issues, we can’t design and build a future where all of our students will thrive.

The good news (and I promise you, you can face this crisis head-on and find good news) is that creating appropriate responses to the climate crisis brings our schools in touch with their deepest purpose and their boldest dreams.

I am creating a few ways to help schools move this work forward boldly, and can’t wait to tell you more.

If you work in a school in California, send a team to this year-long professional development series I am leading with the California Teacher Development Collaborative.

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If you’re not in California, or need something more customized for your school, let me know! (Send an email to info (at) makeknowledge.org, if we’re not already connected.)

We’re also growing our new cohort of schools that commit to year-over-year progress on climate impacts, and engage their community in generative design work. Last year we worked with a group of Stanford engineering students to develop generative school dashboards, and piloted them with four Bay Area schools to inspire bold action.

Do get in touch if you want your school to be a part of this work.

As designer and leadership expert Keith Yamashita said recently,

“What are the synonyms for love? You know, it’s being seen.”

As school leaders and as human beings, we know this to be deeply true. We may know, too, how painful it is to be invisible, to have our contributions overlooked or erased.

But recently I have wondered, if visibility is so important, why is it sometimes so comforting to be in spaces where you can be invisible?

When I lived in Philadelphia, the streets and public spaces there were generous in letting everyone there just “be,” all of us going about our business in relative anonymity. Nobody much cared what we were wearing, where we were coming from, or where we were headed. I remember Questlove saying a few years ago that he just liked to ride the subways for hours on end when he goes back to Philly. Anonymity can be healthy and welcome, a kind of freedom.

So I started to think about other factors that make visibility and anonymity attractive, or not. Like trust:

Low trust isn’t necessarily bad by itself—we don’t know all the people we meet in a concert, in the airport, on a subway. Strangers and neighbors can live peacefully with low visibility and moderate amounts of trust. Having high visibility and high trust is always a safe area—you want your democratically elected leaders to be trustworthy, and visible, and transparent. However, low trust (and and even more, active distrust) combined with high visibility is fertile ground for suspicion, scapegoating, and surveillance. More on that below.

The other thing I realized is that visibility also has a time component.

Generally speaking, it feels good to have your visibility go up over time. You enter a new high school, summer camp, or grad program, and get to know people and get to be known by the community. That’s a good thing. In your work, you want your colleagues and supervisors to see what you’re capable of. As a student, you enjoy when the school recognizes what you can do.

But what if you’ve been at your job for a few years, and with a change in leadership, your contributions are no longer seen as valuable, or recognized? This certainly happens to students too—coming back from summer break to realize that your classmates are no longer interested in the same things, no longer invite you to join them, no longer laugh at the things they found so witty just a few months ago. All of this feels bad.

Besides trust and time, there’s another factor in visibility that we should think about. That is, how mutual is the visibility?

For visibility to be healthy, It also matters how mutual it is. With your close friends, you have high visibility; they see you clearly, and you see them clearly in return. If you’re just classmates or coworkers, it’s fine to have high mutuality but lower visibility—a new class starts and nobody knows much about each other, and that’s fine. And if visibility is low but mutuality is low, that seems acceptable too—your neighbors in your new neighborhood might know a little about who you are before you know them, and generally this isn’t problematic. But in the high visibility / low mutuality area seems more dangerous. This is an area where surveillance lives: red light cameras, predictive analytics, and credit agencies and ad agencies collecting and exchanging data about you.

Modern nation states and markets move in this quadrant as well. As the political scientist and anthropologist James Scott has pointed out, modern states and markets strive to make people visible (or “legible” in his phrasing) by simplifying their individual complexity into broad categories. “Surnames were imposed [by nation states] to keep track of individuals and to tax them; the streets of [Hausmann’s] Paris were redesigned to make individuals easier to control.”1 These invented categories helped bureaucratic efficiency, but inevitably removed much of the tacit knowledge, variability, and uniqueness of people in these categories.

Today, algorithms also put us all into categories, even as we pay our bills, listen to music, find our way from one place to another, connect with friends online, and so on. On the one hand, these algorithmic categories may be more fine-tuned than the categories of the past (just think about Netflix’s recommendation engine, or Spotify’s), but still we usually don’t know how these algorithms are actually built, nor understand fully how they might be used. We know that there are many examples of algorithmic bias, and that end-users of technology often are unaware of the categories they are placed in, and how that might be affecting their use of the software/platform.

All of this should make us ask, “To whom are we visible? And with what dignity?”

This question is relevant for us on technology platforms, whether we are consumers on commercial platforms or as citizens on government platforms. It also needs to be asked in relation to new technologies such as “smart cities.” And of course, as school leaders, we need to ask these questions of the data systems that we create and manage.

In our school dashboards and systems, how are students and faculty visible, and with what dignity?

In their recent book, Street Data, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan suggest we can’t fulfill the promises of equity and deep learning in our schools without this “street data,” i.e., qualitative, experiential data, that honor the assets and all of the tacit knowledge of each person.

Stanford education professor Antero Garcia is getting at a similar point when he makes a distinction of seeing people on a surface level—seeing to confirm our existing ideas—versus a deeper sensing, in this beautiful short reflection:

“How do we open ourselves up to sensing beyond the taken-for-granted in our fieldwork, in our classrooms, and in our day-to-day interactions?”

As humans we are both those who know and those who want to be known, those who see and those who want to be seen. Those who speak, albeit imperfectly, and those who want to be heard—and to listen to others better. As Rowan William writes in his recent piece on Dostoevsky:

“If we truly share a capacity (a destiny?) as beings who speak to each other, we must always attend to how we are heard; we must imagine our own voices in the ears of another. In that moment, we understand that we owe it to one another to make every voice heard, to be responsible for securing the freedom of the voice of the other and the stranger.”

As we attend to visibility in our organizations, to seeing better, we are confronted personally with visibility’s inevitable human complexity. The task is large, we are finite, and so we want the efficiency of tools and systems; but we also need to hold ourselves accountable that others will truly be seen and heard. To design and redesign systems for visibility and dignity, and to lead and manage for these ends, we need an active, sharp, and humane kind of care—not just technical proficiency and pedigree. We need an empathy that is both patient and persistent.

If you want to know more about how MakeKnowledge incorporates these ideas into our work with schools—designing dashboards for climate action, tools for student reflection and growth, and consulting on strategy, please reach out: info (at) makeknowledge.org.

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“The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern,’ is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the … world controllable. Yet, it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.”

So says the German sociologist Harmut Rosa, in his recent book The Uncontrollability of the World (2020). In his view, this need to control gives modern people a fundamentally aggressive stance towards the world: everything must be ‘known,’ made accessible, made immediately useful. It’s worth thinking about the alternative to this, an approach of encounter, or as Rosa frames it, “resonance” with the world. 

Control and Innovation

Most school administrators are good at control—we have to be. There are a thousand rules, guidelines, frameworks and protocols to know, so that students keep learning, and so that all our constituents stay productive and safe. However, these same practices can get in the way of any kind of deep innovation. How might we create an adult culture of innovation in our schools, when most of our leadership development pathways focus elsewhere? 

In The Uncertainty Mindset, (2020) Vaughn Tan looks at how world-class innovation teams are created and sustained. The teams he studies work at some of the most cutting edge, prize-winning restaurants, but the lessons are applicable in any domain. “Innovation teams need to be forced into doing things they don’t yet know how to do to keep their members happy and engaged, and to be effective at innovation.” How many schools are willing to give staff “projects that create desperation by design”? It might sound like a recipe for high staff turnover, but that’s not what Vaughn finds. Read this book if you want to know how to create or support an innovation dream team in your organization. 

Real Self-Care

Let me simply say that this article is the best piece I have read on self-care, pandemic or no. It avoids all the superficial “nice” ideas, and also avoids solutions that are consumerist and economically privileged. Instead, Minaa B. focuses on things we can all do, like putting boundaries in the center of our care. Read it, absorb it, and pass it along.

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Briefly Noted:

Want to get you students involved in dreaming about a post-COVID year and the future of school?  Two terrific education researchers are spearheading this project and want student voices from across the US.

Get in Touch!

Looking for help on a big strategic project in your school or district? Want to know more about creating a robust culture of innovation? You can reach out to us by replying to this email or finding us online at https://makeknowledge.org. 

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It has been a while! Here’s what’s new at MakeKnowledge, and some of what we have been doing and thinking about: 

CONSULTING. 

We are expanding the consulting work we do with schools and districts on strategic projects, both in California (Northern and Southern) and on the East Coast. Sometimes, this means helping to craft a full strategic plan over a year or more. Other times, it has meant helping a school on a specific strategic project, whether a curriculum innovation, or assessment redesign, or helping schools understand how to build a culture of innovation. Intrigued? Please drop us a line to learn more.

COURSES

Another fun project that has taken shape is a hybrid course we’re developing for adults on the “Ecosystem of Education.” There are already plenty of amazing courses (whether in graduate schools of education, through PD organizations, or even online) that dive into specific topics like classroom techniques, content knowledge, the science of learning, or education policy. This course is something different. It will give participants a broad view of what K-12 education looks like, across all of its diversity in the US and beyond, and across all the fractured systems that sustain it (and sometimes limit it). It’s analogous to an aquatic biology course—not only learning about the individual “species” in the ecosystem, but whole pathways and lifecycles of students, teachers, administrators, and institutions. Stay tuned for more information about how this course might help you or your team find new opportunities for good work. And do reach out if you have questions.

“California is the place where the future is invented.” 

Agree with that statement or not, California is the world’s fifth-largest economy, and carries an oversized cultural and economic influence on other states and regions. Last week, California’s Future of Work Commission published its final report on the future of work, entitled “A New Social Compact for Work and Workers.”

It’s far better than what often passes for thought leadership in this space. For one, the people on the Commission represented the diversity of the state. The report is also keenly aware of the challenges of deep inequality here: the first three of the report’s key findings all deal with inequality in some way. The report goes on to call for five big moonshot goals the state should pursue by 2030. The first one goal is a call to guarantee there be enough jobs for all who want to work, and includes specific calls for climate jobs, boosting entrepreneurial job development, and giving assistance to social enterprises that connect people to jobs. Another moonshot aims at creating a “21st-century benefit model and safety net,” which has more training and reskilling implications. Another moonshot concerns what future jobs might be, and making sure the state is rapidly and equitably increasing the number of people in these areas, such as climate resilience, technology, and public health. All of this is very good, assuming that the Governor can take all the momentum the Commission built and translate it into action with a wide variety of public and private stakeholders. And assuming the Governor uses the bully pulpit of his office to spark the public imagination about the needs and possibilities sketched out in the report. There’s plenty of good news in the report for education, broadly speaking. And also plenty of ways education voices should step up to fill in some of the missing details. 

The Work of Education

We in schools often forget to think about our work in education as…work. Sometimes our stories are so focused on students (a good thing!) that we don’t think about the quality of our own adult work, interactions, work conditions, and learning. 

The COVID pandemic has stretched so many of us in so many ways, and caused new mental health stressors for our students, families, and for our school staff, too.  Here’s a very helpful article on mental health at work from Jen Dennard, who some of you remember from our 2020 Future of Work and Education conference. 

We are starting to hear about people not returning to school, as schools reopen now, or in the fall. This includes teachers, and even some students.

Just how long is “too long” to stay in a job? This three-minute video, from Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat (another friend of our 2020 conference) and Minn Kim, gives great advice, even if not education-specific.

Briefly noted: 

For some Black students, remote learning has been a positive change.  

Over in the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan’s recent article “Private Schools are Indefensible” has been getting a lot of attention, and some strong opinions.

Education & Work (& Connection & Love)

Perhaps as an antidote to the adult culture described in Caitlin Flanagan’s Atlantic article, Sarah Jaffe’s “Work Won’t Love You Back” (2021) could make for a good summer reading for your broader school community. If we tell ourselves that education’s goal is to get people to gainful employment, then what happens when work doesn’t love you back? 

Jaffe concludes her book with these profound meditations: 

This is what being alive is. It’s your heart pounding in your chest because of a text, the up-and-down swing that you get from connection and then loneliness. The work itself only matters as a way to connect. All of the labors of love…are really at bottom attempts to connect with other people.

and

if there is one thing worth doing with our brief, flickering lives on this dying planet, it is loving other people, attempting to understand them across a space of difference that will always contain mystery no matter how well you think you know someone.

To us, that is not a bad aim for education.

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I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.

— Ivan Illich, in a 1996 interview

On the eve of an unusual American Thanksgiving, I am thinking a lot about hope and gratitude, against the background of the exhaustion and anxiety of the last year. Ivan Illich’s tying together of hope and hospitality offers us some clues to creating more sane and humane spaces for the next season of remote learning and teaching in our schools. How might we recover “threshold, table, patience, [and] listening,” even if we are mostly not gathering in person over the next few months? How might we design opportunities for hospitality at different levels within our schools and communities? 

These are essential questions in a country that has still failed to take full, coordinated action against the worst pandemic of the last hundred years, and a country with schizophrenic, often unhelpful views about K-12 teaching and learning. The lack of early federal action has deepened the effects pandemic and lengthened its stay, and forced us to be in reactive mode, left to our own devices and resources. Some state and local leaders, and some education leaders, have stepped up, and done wonderful, generous work. But in many places, the stresses of dealing with remote learning, remote teaching, pandemic parenting, unemployment, long-haul COVID sickness, financial and health precarity have left people and communities strained. In some school communities, people are not able to “bring their best selves” to work, and professional relationships are stretched or damaged. 

Some friends of ours just bought a big, old house on the East Coast. Soon after they bought it, but before the deal closed, the realtor called them to let them know that rain was pouring into the front porch, damaging the ceiling tiles, pooling on the wooden floor. When they went to inspect, it turned out the roof itself was fine. It was late autumn, and the big deciduous trees from their yard had dropped so many leaves over the house that the gutters had completely clogged, so with a big rain the water level rose to a point where it simply bypassed the flat roof and poured between the roof and brick walls. 

Seeing anxiety and exhaustion levels at schools in the last few weeks reminds me of this roof. As leaders, we’ve created systems that normally work really well to keep all the people in our community connected — to each other, to their purpose, to our missions. These aren’t normal times, and we have to figure out how to clear the gutters. As we set our small tables tomorrow, let us think about the tables of hope and hospitality we can set in our schools and communities throughout this school year. 

None of this is easy, but as bell hooks reminds us:

To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way.” (bell hooks, All About Love, 2018)

As leaders, what we model, what we diffuse, matters. As Etty Hillesum wrote in her diary while in Auschwitz,

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: To reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace. And to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
(Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-1943.)

Wishing you all a peaceful and safe Thanksgiving no matter where you are, and a season of courageous gratitude and hospitality.

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In my last newsletter, I looked at the way we think about tools and practices at various levels in education: for students, for teachers, and in our work as leaders. We saw Roy Bahat suggest we become more thoughtful about the tools we choose and use, as we look to the future of work and education.

Choose your own tools?

The idea that people should be free to choose their own tools might be a little confusing. What if some teachers decide to use Microsoft Word while others are on Google Docs? And the one lone holdout insists on WordPerfect? Wouldn’t that mean chaos for a school trying to work together in a cohesive way?

I think this objection ignores that the tools we use are always bound by constraints. If you’re working alone, you have relative freedom to choose widely among whatever tool feels most comfortable, either because it fits your work style best, or because it asks the least of you in terms of learning or changing. But when you join a faculty, you have a new constraint: you’re part of a community of learners and teachers. It is natural that the community will make some choices about some tools it will use: for communication, for sharing and collaborating on documents, for assessing student learning, and so on.

Even so, individual students and teachers should feel individual ownership over at least some of their tools. Why is that?

Because teachers are professionals, growing in expertise over time. Professionals grow in their craft, over the course of their careers. (They should, in any case! There’s a famous quote about the immense difference between a teacher who has twenty years of experience versus the one who has just had one year of experience twenty times.) Teacher expertise grows not only in content knowledge, but in pedagogical knowledge, and that hidden, generative area Lee Shulman called pedagogical content knowledge.

As a thought experiment, what if teachers knew they could get a tax write off for their own technology tools? Instead of a $250 US federal tax credit per year, what if this amount were ten times as big? What would it mean for all teachers to know they could have up-to-date tools to carry with them as they moved among schools, between districts, or even across state lines?

“But technology is just a tool”

As my friend and professor of education at Kobe Shinwa Women’s University Masataka Nakaue recently said, we do ourselves a great disservice when we say that “technology is just a tool.” Masataka asks us to think about why it is that among top performers, among people at the top of their craft in any field, their tools are not “just tools:”

“In recent years, Ichiro Suzuki used a bat that was custom-made by a Japanese bat-maker and he never let anyone else touch it. [Formula One racers] Ayrton Senna and Prost… won 15 of 16 races together, not only because of their outstanding abilities, but also because of the meticulous analysis of McLaren-Honda's telemetry system with their staff.”

Shouldn’t it be the same with teachers, as they grow in expertise? And with us as education leaders — what tools and practices are supporting you as you grow as leader? As you lead a complex learning organization in a chaotic time? (Check out this great interview, as Range.co CEO Dan Pupius talks about building “sensing systems” in an organization here, starting at the 1:15 mark.)

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Tool shout-outs:

I couldn’t work without a set of key tools. For writing this newsletter—and for any personal writing I do—I lean on the wonderful app Ulysses. Among other things, it allows me to brainstorm, write, and edit seamlessly from my computer and phone, wherever I am.

And for this issue, I started to play with DeepL for translating, which at least for Japanese does a better job than Google Translate (and far far better than other tools).

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At the beginning of 2020, a few months before everything shut down for COVID-19, I had the chance to sit down with the head of Bloomberg Beta, Roy Bahat. Bloomberg Beta is a venture fund that invests in the future of work, so it is no surprise that California Governor Gavin Newsom tapped Roy to join the state’s Future of Work Commission last year. Unlike many in Silicon Valley, his take on the future is wonderfully humane (see, for instance, his TED talk on work and dignity.

I knew it would be interesting to get his take on how we could prepare ourselves and our students for what even then was an uncertain future. Take a look (2m video):

Not only do our tools matter, but it matters that we’re choosing them consciously, not just because we’re in a particular role or space, or because someone else has told us what to use. Let’s take a moment to explore a few facets of this idea.

Choose your own tools

For students, it’s great when schools can provide strong tools for learning. In the United States, it remains the case that there’s tremendous inequity from school to school and district to district about the level of tools available to students. Funding isn’t the only issue though. There’s also a pedagogical stance to be considered.

In some of the schools I have worked with, each subject had its own very specific tools. In English, students might use Word or Google Docs to write a five-paragraph essay, for instance. In math, they may use Excel or Desmos. On one level, this is fine—these tools are open-ended and powerful. There are times we can do more, where we can have our students ask themselves “What kind of problem am I trying to solve?” and “What’s the best way to solve this, and present my solution/ideas?” Many of the same tools may be in the mix, but the students will also gain the metacognitive practice of matching tools to challenges.

As adults, we should be just as choosy with the tools we use for teaching, managing our teams and projects, and leading.

Leadership & Tools

The tricky thing is that as leaders—whether in a classroom, school, or district—our responsibility for outcomes tempts us to control the means. If we want our teachers to be comfortable picking the best tools for their work, how does that change our process, budgeting, assumptions, and professional development? If we want our students to have the cognitive flexibility of owning their toolbox, what must we do differently to enable that?

Tools and Practices

We do well to remember that tools are connected to specific practices, for good or not. In the case of screen and media addiction, Chad Wellmon points out, “Apple, Twitter, and Facebook want us to believe that it is all up to us as individuals to learn how to say yes or no to their products. Just like…the gambling industry wants us to believe that it's simply up to us not to gamble when we go into these casinos…But in reality the industry spends a tremendous amount of money to design these casinos with their flashing lights and suggestive sounds—all in order to create an endless feedback loop that draws people in. Similarly, Silicon Valley builds cultural jigs to keep us wrapped up in their ecosystems.“

A Few of my Favorite Tools

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a few of tools I’ve discovered in the last few years. If your needs are similar, please check them out and let me know what you think:

Ever struggle to find a Google doc, or some other file on Google Drive or Dropbox, etc? This tool installs a quick keyboard shortcut on your computer that makes finding cloud documents as easy as finding something on your computer. It’s called Command-E (the keyboard shortcut!) and you can download it here. It’s been a game changer for me.

Range is software for teams, whether your team is a few busy people in the same building, or a remote team (aren’t we all now?) spread out across a city or around the globe. Range is terrific for daily check-ins and tracking long-term team objectives, and integrates really well with Slack. The people at Range care deeply about how people work well together, and it shows.

Range’s co-founder and COO Jennifer Dennard spoke at our February Future of Work and Education event. Her talk “How Learnings from the Future of Work Can Change Your Day-to-Day,” (41 min) is a valuable look at improving the working lives of teachers and educators.

Briefly noted:

Stanford Graduate School of Education’s educators have started sharing their findings and resources about remote teaching and learning here.

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Thanks to everyone who sent appreciative emails after receiving the first newsletter! These notes were very much appreciated, and a big encouragement to keep this work going. If you find these to be helpful, please share with your friends and colleagues, and encourage them to subscribe!

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A sense of urgency, a sense of agency

If you live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know that this is how our skies looked last week, in the middle of the day. It was apocalyptic. As I write this, the air is just starting to become breathable again.

For months, we all have been deprived of gatherings, spontaneous encounters, travel and exploration, sharing our highs and lows, and noticing the feelings of the three-dimensional people on the other side of the screen. The weeks of smoke and heat further isolated us in our own homes and apartments, all while we were trying to keep our classes and school communities running. And then hearing Dr. Anthony Fauci say that life might not approach pre-COVID ‘normalcy’ until late 2021.

It all felt so heavy. 

To be sure, there is a lot of hidden grief in our zoom classes and remote meetings that we need to acknowledge. We ourselves are grieving many things, a majority of which are “ambiguous losses,” losses we sustain without closure.

And yet we need to remind ourselves and those around us of our inalienable sense of agency, in the face of the multiple crises we are facing: environmental, public health, political, and social. We may not have the resources to implement our dreams, but we have the human and moral agency to act, to speak up, to notice, and to care. Fundamentally, we have the agency to recall the deepest goals of education — creating a healthy public, raising caring and creative citizens, building resilient communities — even when the short term goals become difficult and our means have to change. 

Recently Kara Lawson, the coach of the Duke women’s basketball team, posted a powerful short video talking about the difference between working hard, and being internally motivated to compete: (3 minutes)

I have been thinking about this with respect to our work as educators. We’re all working hard. Hopefully we’re not trying to compete against one another, but I wonder whether we can draw a similar distinction in education: just working hard versus being deeply, internally motivated to bring opportunity to more students? To building healthy relationships with our students and faculty? To wake up with that kind of ambition for the greater good?

One of the speakers from our February “Future of Work / Future of Education” event is an inspiring example of this kind of agency. Dr. Youngmoo Kim runs the ExCITe Center at Drexel University. Check out his 49 minute talk on Civic Engagement for Inclusive Innovation:

See all the talks from our Future of Work & Education playlist, here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLClhmDT3ximXcR0svrulnf4ql9Y3zVVZE

Briefly noted

It’s not too late to join this free online course about teaching students how to sort truth from fake news, from two world-class instructors (Justin Reich of MIT, and Sam Wineburg of Stanford). Details here.

Speaking of Justin Reich, his new book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education was just released yesterday.

The Center for Humane Technology released their new documentary about the harms of social media last week, called The Social Dilemma. It’s unflinching, not at all a cheerful tale. I’ll be interested in hearing your reactions.

Next week:

In the next edition, we’ll look at the future of education with respect to the tools we choose, and how we might encourage our students and teams to build and maintain their own toolboxes. 

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No matter how you’re starting the school year, it’s surely not how you imagined it would be a year ago. As you work with your colleagues, administration, and boards, I thought I would offer you some food for constructive conversations and connection. 

COVID Futures

How long will this all last? Even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, K-12 schools are all over the map in what they are telling their communities, and the degree of certainty they claim. Some announced early that they would be remote through 2020. Higher education and industry have similar variety — on the outer edge, Google has announced that its workers can stay remote through July 2021.

In light of all the uncertainly, I think this presentation from Salesforce’s futurist Peter Schwartz is really helpful. He looks at the pandemic in context of all the other simultaneous crises we’re in — political, social, and economic. Take 30 minutes and check it out (or just get the details on the slides here). One quick takeaway is that the level of uncertainty is high, and nobody knows what things will look like in nine months. 

Others seem to agree. The innovative head of Arizona State University, Michael Crow, notes that they’re assuming “that the COVID-19 pandemic will not be ‘over’ or substantially mitigated by vaccines, treatments and other public health measures for the foreseeable future.”

So in the short term, we’re all doing the best we can to help our students learn, and to hold our teachers. As Chris Lehmann (CEO of Science Leadership Academy Schools in Philadelphia) tweeted the other day, “If you’re in school administration right now, you have one main job — make it easier for teachers to do their jobs well. I mean… that’s pretty much our jobs all the time, but it’s never been more important or harder to figure out how to do well.”

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Holding teachers and students

Just how important is holding teachers? Here are two good pieces. The first is a new paper that explores the importance of teachers’ sense of success — especially during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. “Teachers who could depend on their district and school-based leadership for strong communication, targeted training, meaningful collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their efforts were least likely to experience declines in their sense of success.“ Read and download the full paper here, and to learn why this sense of success is so important. The second is Gianpiero Petriglieri’s article in Harvard Business Review about good crisis leadership and holding.

Then take a few minutes to look at this great article in EdSurge about creating systemic change with a focus on social emotional learning within your school communities, while building better community supports around your schools.

Education’s bigger context

Seeing our schools in their bigger societal context is so important. In a crisis, we might be tempted to narrow our focus, as Sal Kahn seems to do in this interview, where he says districts should just focus on “reading, writing, and math.” Depending on how that’s put into practice, it may well rob our our teachers of agency and our students of opportunity to learn through and about this pandemic — in building relationships, and investigating meaningful issues, and helping improve the communities around them. 

In that vein, I’d love to share with you some of the videos we at MakeKnowledge have produced this year that explore education in its larger context. As part of our work exploring the connection between the future of work and the future of education, we’ve been hearing from some amazing people across the country and around the world. 

Most recently, Dr. Aki Murata joined us to talk about her new book “Reopening Better Schools: Unexpected Ways COVID-19 can Improve Education.”

You’ll find many other important voices on our Future of Work & Education YouTube playlist.

Need help putting all of this in action in your schools? Feel free to reach out to us: info @ makeknowledge.org to see how we can be helpful.

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