Getting Smart

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

By: Sarah Bishop-Root and Lindsy Ogawa All images are credited to Da Vinci RISE. Hundreds of learner-centered leaders who deeply understand their learners’ needs have told us a similar story: they spend an extraordinary amount of energy navigating regulations and engineering workarounds. They’d prefer that energy be invested in young people and learning. This creates a constant tension between local leaders and the broader system structures, priorities, and conditions that were not designe

By George Philhower When we launched the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, the questions started coming quickly. At first, they were practical. Questions about enrollment, staffing, facilities, and logistics. But before long, the questions shifted. They became more fundamental. More philosophical. The kind of questions that linger after the meeting ends. One question kept coming back. How big can a microschool be before it’s no longer a microschool? When people hear the word micr

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 development programs, and workforc

By: James Fester Without thinking too hard I’m sure most of us can recall one or two meaningful days we spent outside of the classroom at a museum, theater, or nature center that provide us with a learning experience impossible to re-create from inside our classroom walls. The field trip is a time-honored part of the K-12 student experience, and yet its value is continually questioned.   While some may consider them a break from learning or a “treat”, field trips are in fact an essent

By: Olivia Martens What if teachers had the resources to give every student the individualized support they need to succeed? For many it’s an ideal that seems out of reach. That’s because teachers today are responsible for keeping students with diverse academic backgrounds and learning styles motivated and engaged. This task becomes monumental when considering English language learners (ELLs) who are not only acquiring new skills but also a new language. Aiming to find a solu

Our son Robert took the annual Arizona state writing test. The browser was locked. The tabs were closed. The phone was away. No notes, no search, no chatbot. Then he enters the world the test claims to prepare him for. There, writing rarely begins with one person and a blank page. A memo may begin with research and an AI prompt, move through edits and fact-checking, and end with human review; a meeting becomes a transcript, summary, and action list. What counts as work is changing. Asses

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 development programs, and workforc

A few days ago I read about proposed legislation to use generative AI to raise student test scores in North Carolina. That same day, I reached the midway point in Robert Wright’s extraordinary new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. I had to stop for some extended processing time when I read his explanation of subordinate goals. The best way I can explain that concept is by referring to a famous thought experiment from University of Oxfor

Picture a sixth-grader solving a ratio problem. He sketches a table, erases it, and switches to a number line because it helps him ‘see the quantities against each other.’ His reasoning is sound, but a minor arithmetic slip ruins his final response. Traditional tests mark this mathematical practice a zero, seeing only the final response. But an educator watching captures the student’s active sense-making, strategic representation, and productive struggle. For decades, ass

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

What does a school district do when 13,000 families speak up and ask for more options for their students? If you’re Aldine Independent School District, you listen and then you get to work. In 2021, Aldine ISD, located in the southeast part of Houston, surveyed their parents, community members, and students about what they wanted to see from the district as it related to learning options and the message was clear: families wanted more choices. According to Chief Transformation Officer Adria

A Note From Getting Smart This week we pause to remember Jon Ketler, an educator who spent his career proving that public schools could be built around real relationships, real community, and real work — not just curriculum. Through SOTA, SAMI, and IDEA in Tacoma, he showed what one person with enough imagination and nerve could build inside a public school system. Article By:

What happens to the learner if an AI-powered decision is wrong? Education is trapped in a false AI binary: heavily restrict it to prevent systemic harm, or blindly embrace it to avoid leaving learners behind. This obscures a deeper risk: the unprecedented rush to integrate AI without an evidentiary framework. As Ercikan and Solano-Flores (2025) warn, “Rapid adoption of innovative sources of data in assessment without proper support of empirical evidence on validity and fairness may compromise

By Karen Pittman and Merita Irby Learning ecosystems may be found anywhere. But it takes careful stewardship to help them thrive. That sentence, borrowed from our friends at Remake Learning, is the one we keep coming back to. We spent the better part of the past year interviewing the founders and leaders of four mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries — CommunityShare, the PAST Foundation, the Providence After School Alliance, and Heart of Oregon Corps. We went in looking for lesson

On The Difference Between Moving Fast And Moving Honestly There is a question I find myself asking more often when I work with district and state leaders. What are we actually talking about? I don’t ask because people are being unclear. Most teams can describe their initiatives in great detail. They know the timeline, the goals, the milestones, and the progress they have made. What I am often less certain about is whether we are using the same language to describe where the work really

Every multi-year transformation effort passes through a stretch that textbooks and strategic plans never quite account for. The old approach has been disrupted, but the new one hasn’t yet produced enough data to defend itself. Teachers are working harder than ever without feeling effective. A new mandate arrives, pointing somewhere that feels entirely off-course. Then, a board member forwards an analytical article questioning whether this kind of innovation works at all. And sent with n

What fire should I put out next? How long is my list? Many education leaders spend their days solving immediate challenges where everything seems critical. Yet, as the landscape changes, leaders need time to reflect on how to lead through these catalytic shifts. To address these challenges, leaders must support all professionals in their system in understanding the potential impacts of these shifts and building the competencies to reach the community vision. The Six Big Shifts Reshaping Our E