By: Tom Vander Ark on February 8th, 2018

New School Rules: A Changemaker’s Guide to Innovation

In high functioning schools and systems, leaders play four important roles: governance, operations, community building and change leadership. As El Paso superintendent Juan Cabrera and I discussed in a recent post, each of these roles can feel like a full-time job.

Just maintaining the status quo (governance and operations) are complex and politically charged roles. Mobilizing collective community action to better supports youth and families can be an enormous lift–and school leaders almost always have a role in making it happen.

But it’s the changemaker role where there is a big opportunity for contribution. Building an improvement and innovation agenda is complex work. It combines technical solutions (proven methods applied to known situations) and adaptive solutions (designed approaches often including new tools). This is the stuff they didn’t teach you in graduate school (at least not most of them) but it’s where you can really make a difference for your community.

That’s why we were so excited for the release of The New School Rules by Anthony Kim, CEO of Education Elements. For school system heads, it’s the best changemaker’s guide out there.

This article originally appeared on Getting Smart. Access the full article here.

About Tom Vander Ark

Tom Vander Ark is author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, Smart Cities That Work for Everyone: 7 Keys to Education & Employment and Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning. He is CEO of Getting Smart, an education consulting firm and leading advocate for innovations in learning. Tom has been studying the future of work and the implications of artificial intelligence. He published his finding in a new paper: Ask About AI: The Future of Learning and Work. His upcoming book (Wiley, 2018) advises educators to work together in networks to improve personalized and project-based learning. Tom is a director of 4.0 Schools, Charter Board Partners, Digital Learning Institute, eduInnovation, and Imagination Foundation, and advises numerous nonprofits.