Promoting 21st Century Learning

“Government is set up to cause the routine to occur in a non-extraordinary way. If you do the same thing every day and you don’t do it negligently or stupidly, no one will notice in an adverse way.

Change, on the other hand, involves risk to the public servant. Somewhere among the citizens, the unions, one’s fellow employees, middle managers or other constituents, there’s a chance that innovation will raise ire.

All those things are aligned to suffocate innovation in a bureaucracy.”

- Stephen Goldsmith, Director of the Innovations in American Government Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Adam Stone, Creating an Innovative Government Environment, May 2, 2013http://www.govtech.com/e-government/Creating-an-Innovative-Government-Environment.html

The iZone is 250 schools dedicated to personalizing learning.

We rethink structures, create new models, and promote innovation across the system.

Where do ideas come from?

Creating Markets

What you can buy is only as good as what people will sell you.*

* and what the rules permit.

Listen to the people with the problem.Ethnographic research.User–centered design.

Create a provocation.Not a specification.

Engage solvers, engagingly.They have choices.

Let the stakeholders judge.They have to use it.

Solution Sourcing

Diffusion & Perfusion Prototype & Ite

ration

Prob

lem D

efini

tion

Recruit educator–collaborators.Give them skin in the game.

Iterate out loud.Celebrate your failures.

Share what you learn.All of it, with everyone.

Rinse and repeat.With new learning, new stakeholders and new collaborators.