Posts by Guest Author
Digital Fluency Is the Missing Foundation in K-12 Career Pathways
What separates a student who can use a digital tool from one who can build something new with it? Kimberly Smith of Digital Promise argues that digital fluency, not just digital literacy, is the foundational skill K-12 career pathways have been missing. Drawing on credentialed cybersecurity programs in rural Alabama and a six-part fluency framework, this piece offers a clear, actionable case for why every career pathway, in every industry, must embed digital fluency now.
Student Voice, All Grown Up
Keaton Wadzinski has been on both sides of the student voice equation — as a young person who was sometimes tokenized, sometimes genuinely empowered, and as an adult now designing the conditions for youth agency to flourish. In this deeply personal and strategically rich essay, he challenges education leaders to move beyond advisory committees and symbolic inclusion toward something far more honest and far more powerful. This is essential reading for any leader who believes young people deserve a real role in shaping the future of learning.
Core Plus Explore: How Embedded Career Relevance Improves Engagement in Foundational Courses
What if the answer to student disengagement lived inside the curriculum itself? A new partnership between Edmentum and Roadtrip Nation embeds short, unscripted career exploration interviews directly into core high school courses, connecting algebra, biology, and English to real professionals and real possibilities. With data showing fewer absences, greater relevance, and students discovering careers they never knew existed, this model reframes a familiar question: school is not just preparation for graduation. It is preparation for possibility. Education leaders will want to see how this approach works, and what it signals about the future of instructional design.
How Empathy Interviews Transform Stakeholder Engagement into Shared Ownership
What if the most powerful tool in school improvement is a single, unhurried conversation? In this post, Jennifer Poon and Doannie Tran make the case for empathy interviews as the essential first step in genuine community co-creation, and explain why it matters deeply who conducts them. Drawing on their work with Burlington School District, they show how shifting the interviewer from consultant to community member transforms not just the data collected, but the relationships and shared ownership that follow. This is a must-read for any education leader serious about building strategies that reflect the full truth of their community.
Voiceless Collegiality: When Getting Along Gets in the Way of School Leadership
When a leadership team meeting ends with everyone offering to help but no one agreeing to lead, something important has gone wrong beneath the surface. In this sharp, diagnostic piece, education leadership professor Andy Szeto names a pattern hiding in plain sight: voiceless collegiality, the organizational silence that masquerades as team harmony. Szeto identifies three distinct types of silence eroding school effectiveness and offers concrete shifts for leadership teams ready to trade comfort for clarity.
Steward Stories: CommunityShare Proves That the Community Is the Curriculum
What if every community member, from a landscape architect to a university researcher to a sitting senator, could become part of a student's education? CommunityShare has been quietly building that reality since 2015, connecting more than 85,000 students and their educators with community partners across 12 states through a model it calls a human library. This Steward Stories profile traces the vision, the timeline, and the hard-won lessons behind one of the most compelling ecosystem intermediaries in the country. Education leaders who are wrestling with relevance, learner agency, and community trust will find both inspiration and a practical framework here.
Exploring Policy From the Ground Up: Illuminations from the Da Vinci Network
What does it look like when a school is genuinely designed around the lives learners are living, not the regulations they must comply with? In this new piece from Sarah Bishop-Root and Lindsy Ogawa, the Da Vinci Schools network in California shows how policy can be a tool for possibility and a source of fragility at the same time. Through the story of Da Vinci RISE and its students, this piece offers education leaders a grounded, human-centered lens for understanding the gap between what our best schools are trying to do and what our systems are designed to support.
The Microschool Mindset: Why Small Thinking Is the Biggest Shift in Education
What if the most transformative idea in education right now has nothing to do with how big your school is? In this piece, George Philhower, superintendent at Eastern Hancock Schools and co-founder of the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, makes the case that the microschool mindset is a philosophy any school can adopt. From grading practices to flexible pathways to joy as a design principle, this is a grounded, visionary read for every leader asking what school could look like if we built it around learners instead of legacy systems.
Steward Stories: How the PAST Foundation Turned Real-World Problems Into a Learning Ecosystem
What does it look like when a foundation built by a field scientist becomes the connective tissue of an entire regional learning ecosystem? The PAST Foundation's story, told through 25 years of timeline milestones and student voices, offers education leaders a concrete model for weaving together schools, industry, community, and out-of-school time into something greater than any single program. From portable STEM labs to microschool pathways co-launched with universities and industry partners, PAST demonstrates how systemic change begins with a commitment to learning that is rooted in real work and real relationships. This is essential reading for leaders ready to move from coordination to transformation.
Beyond the Classroom Walls: What Research Says About Virtual Field Trips
Field trips have always been more than a day away from desks. They are the moments students remember, the experiences that build empathy and ignite curiosity. A new Getting Smart post examines what the research says about virtual field trips and offers a classroom-ready framework that helps educators design experiences worthy of that same legacy. For leaders looking to expand access and deepen engagement without waiting for a bus, this is a practical and visionary read.