Leadership Q&A with HP's Dan Gohl

Dan – what drew you to this role at HP???

I was drawn by the opportunity to support education leadership, practitioners, and most importantly, learners across the learning ecosystem. I've had a 30-year career in public education, working at local levels, with a couple of stints at being a consultant for various foundations, but I’d never seen an opportunity within a large corporation that allowed me to believe I could make a difference and aligned very strongly with my values. HP’s infrastructure, history, relationships, and absolute commitment to innovation are all very attractive. It was clear in my interview process and in my conversations with you that I could maintain my commitment to remain an educator at HP, but now with a different platform. You and I found a resonance on what all HP leadership is hoping to do for students in the U.S. and around the world. I look forward to adding value to those commitments, based on my broad range of teaching and administrative experience.

I’m looking forward to that as well. So, coming into this role now, what do you see as the biggest technology challenges facing public education and how do you hope to address them???

The biggest challenge, from my perspective, is the successful deployment of technology to improve the learning of students, both in terms of their learning as measured by academic achievement, but also as defined by their human development. We don’t just want knowledgeable students, we want compassionate, considerate citizens who will keep learning. Deploying technology to achieve that, for people that don't fully understand technology capabilities, seems like magic. And when you first start using magic tricks, they are not so successful. Lots of educators understand the capabilities of technology but are not sure how it applies to them. In working with the outstanding products that HP makes and our partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Intel, and others, we have a real opportunity to listen closely to the customer base and respond, not just with a product to deliver, but with?implementation insights to help them deploy tech to help students learn. That’s not to say HP has all the answers, but we can be unique conveners of innovators in education who can fill in the gaps.

Building on that spirit of convening ideas, ae there any key takeaways from your previous roles that you look forward to bringing to the team??

What stands out to me is that opportunities for acceleration, access to a breadth of resources, and collaboration are things all people need, but especially young learners. To provide these, we must look to technology to make classrooms more efficient, allowing for more time for student-teacher relationships to form. Through these relationships, educators can identify opportunities for tech-enabled, personalized learning opportunities. Students can be guided to access curriculum outside of their school that they're ready for or take industry-level certification exams without having to go to specialized labs. Teachers can connect with subject-matter experts and bring them into the classroom virtually. Schools can provide devices to students in need to take home and continue their learning, or invest to improve sound quality for students who are receiving special education services from speech pathologists who may be sitting halfway across the state they're in. At HP, we have a great opportunity to action on these possibilities

I couldn’t agree more. Now, you’ve worked with some incredible leaders across the education field throughout your career. What leadership advice has been most influential in guiding you to where you are today????

One of the things I’m proudest to have participated in was the design and opening of a technology school with District of Columbia public schools. As the first employee, I hired all the staff and wrote the curriculum with colleagues. It was great, but a tough situation. I came into a fairly small city as someone who was different culturally from most of the students. I was uncertain. But the chief of staff for the school district at the time gave me a very important piece of advice. He said that lots of people will question why you’re here, your credentials, your relevancy, but you do not have to justify your presence. What you need to do is ask them to partner with you and see if you keep your word. People needed to know that I was there to work with them and do things right in the district. Fortunately, we opened that school in 2004 and I stayed as principal through 2007. And I’ve carried that advice with me ever since. You don’t have to justify your presence.

What a great motivator to have in your back pocket. Before we finish up, I’m curious to know: what is one unexpected thing you would like people to know about you???

I was a physics major, but also a religion minor. People often think about those as two separate subjects, but what it comes down to is that both the physical and the metaphysical are questions about what's out there in the world, what it means, and what’s true within a limit of truth. I’m absolutely still that student who wants to understand both what's physical and consider what's metaphysical. ?So, if anyone's ever looking to hold the conversation ranging from the history of Christianity and Chinese Taoism to Black Hole theory, I'm your man.