By Rosie Clayton (Original Post Here)
In what has to be one of the more surreal experiences of this trip so far, I spent the morning last Friday with Ted Fujimoto (in a super cool restaurant just off Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, hence the surreal-ness!) talking all things from systems thinking in the tech and comms sector, franchising processes in the car industry, brand development and transformation in the hotel and restaurant industry, innovation in digital music design and cloud based apps….and all boiling down into protocols and processes for school design, culture development and mindset embedding, and the effective scaling of new models of school! It was really fascinating to hear how his broad range of life and career experiences and personal interests have informed his thinking over time around this.
Ted has spent his career working across business, education and tech, and has been a key architect of the New Tech Network of schools, currently ‘speed scaling’ across the USA. His journey into the education world, as with most things in life for many of us, was serendipitous — having started a company in the logistics and comms sector in his late teens/early twenties in Silicon Valley, he decided to relocate his business (at the same time as a number of other successful entrepreneurs working in tech and bio tech) from Silicon Valley to Napa Valley in 1990. Within the first year all realised that there were serious difficulties with recruiting skilled employees in the area, which was primarily a farming town, even for administrative roles. So he and a number of the other CEOs approached the local District school board and said they would have to move out of the area unless something was done, and the skills shortage was addressed. The District threw it back to the group, saying, as employers — what are you going to do about it? How are you going to help solve this problem, it’s your problem too! (This is exactly the approach of the Studio School and UTC movements in the UK, co-ownership of the challenge)
From that point on Ted started working with a District administrator to look at new school designs, specifically with a model which had the initial aim of producing graduates and employees for the local tech companies in mind. The most ‘innovative’ school designs that they visited across the US had only minor components that came close to the authentic work and learning that was needed. So they began by looking at the systems, processes and design protocols within Ted’s own company — around project development and management — and created the first template for a PBL curriculum based on this. Ted also agreed to provide technologies to support the first New Tech school design as well as methodologies to enable the design’s replication.
He described it to me as bringing the DNA of his business into the school environment, focussing very much on three key things to start with:
Mindsets
Culture setting & people
Design protocols for projects
In 1996 New Tech Napa was born, set up from scratch in a previously mothballed elementary school building. In the first year the school attracted mainly traditionally ‘low performing’ students, those who felt they had nothing to lose by trying something different, and they delivered a full wall to wall PBL curriculum model. Nine months later the group graduated and outscored their peers under State assessments by 10–15% across the District. Ted then employed 6 of the graduates, and one has worked with him through a number of companies eventually ending up managing a $10+ million insurance enterprise.
Since 1996 the New Tech Network has grown and expanded exponentially — with currently over 200 schools open, and opening new schools at a rate of 20–40 per year. We discussed the key ingredients for scaling (systems and processes), particularly:
Systematising and calibrating experiences across and within networks
the filtering of best practice across and within networks
UX and customer experience — ensuring consistency and quality
And linked to this, the need to establish ritualistic processes for embedding values over time — for example in the hotel industry, having daily staff meetings where teams get together to identify and discuss how a particular company value has been exemplified during the day. I witnessed a particularly powerful example of this sort of activity at New Village Girls Academy, where at the end of the school day we met as a staff team to each discuss how we had supported a particular student during that day/week, then identify another student who was in need of additional help or support, and which other member of staff had been supporting that person too. It’s hard to describe, but building a chain of mutual support and understanding of individual needs, as well as reinforcing the importance of the value they place on care within the school community.
In both the school and the business world, the authenticity of interactions is vital for building cultures based on openness and trust. Ted described the most important values, that need to be identified and nurtured in individuals and schools, as:
Trust
Respect
Responsibility
Commitment to excellence
For the New Tech Network of schools, and the highest performing deeper learning school designs more generally, the common priority is a focus on relationships first, which enables developing relevance and then drives rigour — the complete opposite order and emphasis to traditional school designs.
So the big question — what does all this mean in terms of a strategy for scaling successful school models?
I asked Ted what the necessary conditions and factors are which need to be in place to effectively scale school models — and the first thing he highlighted was that an effective replication system needs to be designed, which requires 2 to 3 times more work than creating a single school design = resource, methodology, time. This he felt was the main reason that so few successful school models (in the USA), currently, have successfully scaled — not enough investment in an effective process and system for scaling. Capital is also needed to build out teams and refine processes, and the replication rate is also dependent on how good the underlying design is. He pointed out that for New Tech Network it took nearly 10 years to go beyond opening 15 schools per year, they were constantly iterating the model.
In terms of system design, a broad strategy (and this is especially useful for us in the UK who are looking to design and scale new school models) could look like:
1 — defining and getting everyone ‘calibrated’ around the non negotiable design principles. And giving significant thought to exactly how this is going to be done, for example how will you use the first few weeks of term, and inset days, to culture build. What activities will help develop and embed the culture you are aiming to achieve. How will time across the school week be used, how often will teams meet. At scale, you also need calibration processes across the network — how and when/