Announcing the Getting Smart H3 Blog Series

Sponsored by LearnerStudio

I am delighted to curate a new blog series on what's possible in the redesign of education. Below is an except of the framing post. The entire series, with weekly posts from different organizations (nonprofits, schools, young people, districts, tech companies, and more), is being published over at Getting Smart on this landing page . Bookmark it, share it, tell us what you think in comments or privately here .

America’s education system was a groundbreaking effort to help a growing nation thrive in the 19th century. Now, 200 years later, the world has changed; the horizon looks drastically different. Collectively, we need to redesign our education system to enable all of our children — and, by extension, our nation —? to thrive today and tomorrow. “Horizon Three” or “H3” names the future-ready system we need, one that is grounded in equity serving learners’ individual strengths and needs as well as the common good. This series provides a glimpse of where H3 is already being designed and built. It also includes provocations about how we might fundamentally reimagine learning for the future ahead. You can learn more about the horizons framing here .

Some Good News

Every day you read grim news about K12 education. That’s not what you’re going to read about here. In this new blog series , we’re here to give you hope.?

All across the country, there are folks who have experienced the grim news, often before it made the headlines, and they’ve been taking steps to create a different present and future.?

They’re building locally, regionally, and nationally; in schools and school systems; in nonprofits and startups; in community organizations and policy shops. They’re gathering stakeholders and value networks to ensure that transformation is possible and sticks. They’re working to accomplish one common goal: redesign the education system to prepare young people to thrive and construct a common good in a world of accelerating change.?

These are not folks tinkering around the edges, creating the next iteration of the horse-and-buggy or the adding machine. They’re taking on our big assumptions about education; the core grammar of schooling , to leap us to the self-driving car or the AI-powered smartphone. We call this the Third Horizon or H3 Learning .

Humans are at the center of the H3 educational system. The emphasis is not first and foremost on structural elements like standards or test scores or evaluation systems or credit hours or even technology, but rather on humans having conversations and creating innovations to solve real problems to meet human needs. This new system redesigns the structural elements to enable education to grow humans and to feel human again.

We live in a world where things often feel out of control, or at least out of our control. Institutions seem huge and unbending, moving forward with a will of their own. Change feels impossible. In this series, we want to highlight that great things can happen when small groups of humans come together to build the world they want to live in.??

Read the rest here and check out the following posts from the series.

• Tom Vander Ark (Getting Smart), Why We Need More New Schools (Even with Enrollments Down and Closures Ahead)
• Kara Bobroff (NACA, NISN, One Gen), Our Past, Present, and Future ?
• Sujata Bhatt ( Incubate Learning ), How to Design Schools to Grow Thriving Adults: A Provocation

#innovation #K12 #leadership