Getting Smart

Not all experiences result in impactful and valuable learning. So what makes the difference? The degree to which it is personally meaningful, authentic, and situated. By Chris Unger I have taught a doctoral course on “The Power of Experiential Learning” for several years, to educators who have spent 10, 20, even 30 years in schools. Most arrive expecting to sharpen a familiar idea. Many leave saying some version of: I thought I knew what experiential learning was, but I really didn&#

This blog is the fourth in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Read the first post in the series. Read the second post in the series. Read the third post in the series. We want to close this series where it started, with a young person standing in front of a course catalog trying to figure ou

By: Simone Ravaioli It was Tyson Yunkaporta who recently introduced me to the uniquely generative idea of creolization, in a panel discussion on, well, inclusive recognition systems: how do we build recognition that actually includes all learners, and all learning? He describes borders as “places of increase of relations” rather than walls, dynamic zones where systems meet, make kin, and transform one another, not sites where one side quietly absorbs the other. I strongly believe that Reco

This blog is the third in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Read the first post in the series. Read the second post in the series. College level coursework does not become easier just because a student is still in high school. If anything, the stakes are higher. A struggling grade in a dual e

By: AJ Gutierrez Since 2021, U.S. public schools have lost about 1.18 million students. Projections indicate that enrollment will further decline by 2.7 million students by 2031.  To better serve students, schools have an opportunity to better understand their aspirations, interests, and relationships and use those insights to connect them with the opportunities and supports that can help them thrive. Advanced coursework offers a particularly clear example of what becomes possible when s

By Merita Irby and Karen Pittman  Our “Steward Stories” series captures lessons learned from interviews with leaders of mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries. An ecosystem steward is a boundary-spanning leader who goes beyond traditional out-of-school time (OST) system building to weave together the diverse people, places, and possibilities that shape a young person’s daily life. Rather than managing a single isolated network, stewards collaborate across K-12 schools, youth developme

This blog is the second in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Read the first post in the series. The Broken Promise on the Transcript A high school transcript is supposed to be a kind of promise. The credits on it are supposed to mean something, to count toward whatever comes next. But we heard a v

The field of school transformation is rich with thoughtful, purpose-specific design frameworks. Organizations and school systems across the country have spent years building powerful approaches to redesigning schools, and partners are right to value the specific models they have chosen and invested in. In practice, this often shows up less as disagreement than as translation. Leaders spend valuable time helping partners realize they are often describing similar ideas with a different language

This blog is the first in series called Beyond the Course Catalog: What Makes Dual Enrollment Actually Work, a four-part blog series from Getting Smart in partnership with Britebound focused on what separates a strong dual enrollment model from the rest. Intentional, Coherent Design & Equitable Access There is a particular kind of confusion that shows up in a high school counselor’s office every spring. A student sits across the desk with a course catalog open to a page

Many public schools face funding pressure right now. Contributing factors include a predicted 30-year trend of declining population of school-age children, completion of ESSER fund spending in spring of 2026, increasing competition from school options funded through vouchers, state tax credit scholarships, career scholarship accounts, ESA, and other mechanisms to allow funding to directly go to a student (rather than funding going to a school who spends it on the student). The launch of the fede

While partnering with systems in Virginia, Kansas City, and Michigan, we’ve observed that strategic organizations succeed by matching the right approach to the right challenge. As we explored in How Can We Build Strategic Organizations: The Power of When, high-performing schools avoid the trap of using a single toolkit for every problem. Sometimes we know what needs to happen and the work is making it happen well. Sometimes we don’t know yet, and the work is figuring it out. And sometimes

By: Kimberly Smith A construction worker analyzing a job site with a drone and a business analyst running a query with AI don’t have much in common on paper, but both are using tools that didn’t exist when their parents were growing up. The impact of emerging technology, from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence (AI), is reshaping the workforce that today’s learners are entering, making K-12 education the critical frontline for preparing students for tomorrow’s careers. The Burning Gla

By: Katie Martin and Devin Vodicka All photos are courtesy of Learner-Centered Collaborative In December 2025, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence kicked off its Secondary School Redesign Pilot Program. As part of this work, Hidden Valley Middle School in Escondido was named a lead demonstration site for other participating schools and districts to learn from. What makes Hidden Valley unique is its “school within a school”—a public microschool structure that doesn’t

By: Keaton Wadzinski I was a student voice once. I was named to dozens of youth advisory committees in high school and college. I was recruited and promoted to a leadership role at national by-the-students, for-the-students nonprofit, Student Voice (also known for #stuvoice) at age 18. I’ve been working in the world of education innovation since my start as a student activist. Now, I’m “all grown up,” as they say. I’m in my early thirties, and I’ve experienced much of what l

By Amanda Kocon and Mike MarrinerThis fall, a new kind of video is playing in classrooms, not as a break from the coursework but as an integral part of connecting curriculum to the world.  In one, Luis Padilla, an animal health director at the St. Louis Zoo, takes his post at the Sea Lion Sound exhibit while a group of high school students watches intently. After successfully bribing the sea lion with a treat (fish, naturally), Luis gently inspects its teeth. He then checks its eyes, bef

Education’s challenges are not due to a lack of new ideas. Every veteran teacher knows the feeling when the next “shiny object” emerges and the school or district jumps on it. While these initiatives are almost always launched to improve student outcomes, they often end up in the alphabet soup of school change. Parallel to this are top-down mandates from the state or federal level that fail to recognize the context on the ground. The tension between centralization and decentralization is the hal

By: Jennifer Poon and Doannie Tran What do you picture when you hear “stakeholder engagement?” A warm scene of solidarity and shared purpose, or a cold image of lip service and performative posturing? Too often, we’ve seen education leaders invite feedback from stakeholders in superficial ways that lead to the latter impression. Many of us are working to flip that script, using terms like co-creation to describe a deeper kind of stakeholder engagement–one that doesn’t just ask student

This blog post is the final in a series documenting Norwalk Public Schools’ journey to create, implement and be formed by a living Portrait of a Graduate (PoG). Abby & Kimberly met through a PoG workshop in May of 2025, and are documenting how their intersecting work is supporting the PoG coming to life in Norwalk. Post 1: Norwalk Public Schools: Levers for Living the Portrait of a Graduate (a 7-part series) Post 2: Norwalk Public Schools: Unpacking the Levers for Deeper PoG Implement

By: Andy Szeto A team leader asks a simple question during a leadership team meeting: Who will take the lead on this initiative? “I can help.” “I can assist.” “If you need me, I can see if I can help.” In organizational teams, you hear variations of these responses all the time. They sound supportive, signal willingness, and feel collegial. But listen closely: no one actually answers the question. What follows is not a lack of response, but a form of silence. The language shift

By: Karen Pittman and Merita Irby Our “Steward Stories” series captures lessons learned from interviews with leaders of mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries. An ecosystem steward is a boundary-spanning leader who goes beyond traditional out-of-school time (OST) system building to weave together the diverse people, places, and possibilities that shape a young person’s daily life. Rather than managing a single isolated network, stewards collaborate across K-12 schools, you