In this month’s Lead the Change interview, Justin Reich reflects on his work on educational systems improvement by targeting the instructional core through adaptive design models. Reich is an associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at MIT and the director of the Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools and Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, and he is the host of the TeachLab Podcast. He earned his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?
Justin Reich: I’ve had the great privilege of doing a little bit of work with AERA Past President Rich Milner. In a webinar in 2021, Rich explained that twenty years ago he felt isolated and off the beaten path in his work on advancing racial equity in schools. Then, he expressed his excitement at the current surge of interest in these crucial issues. The field caught up to where Rich had been for many years. His welcoming frame reminds me that some work in educational change and improvement hasn’t always centered these issues, and there are other scholars who have been building in this domain for many years. So, as any of us take up this “call to action” to dismantle injustice and construct possibility, we’d do very well to look back on prior bodies of research to discover what we can learn from folks who have been doing the work for some time.
Justin Reich
When you ask about “steps,” it reminds me of some of the research that I did for Iterate. Over the last decade, human-centered design has developed and become more prevalent, as has the field of “Design Justice,” the name of a book by my colleague Sasha Costanza-Chock. And, of course, human centered design has encountered the same turn to anti-racism/ anti-oppression that education reform and many other humanistic endeavors have in recent years. My question was this: In design models that take design justice seriously, does this entail new “steps” in design processes, or new attitudes, frames, and moves within existing steps? In Plan-Do-Study-Act or Design Based Implementation Research or ideo/d.school style Design Thinking, does design justice show up as a new “step” or as modifications to existing phases? My investigation revealed the near universal consensus is that there isn’t a “justice” step. It’s a set of values, mindsets, and actions that affect all the parts of our work.
All that’s to say, in improvement cycles, there probably isn’t a “justice step” or an “anti-racist step” but rather a commitment to those principles throughout our work.
LtC: In much of your work, you offer strategies for teachers and their organizations to approach educational change in manageable and thoughtful steps that leverage strengths. Across this work, what are some of the major lessons practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?
JR: A distinctive feature about improvement work in schools is that the changes that matter most happen in what Richard Elmore called the instructional core, the place where teachers, students, and the resources for learning connect. Schools have lots of other parts–HVAC systems, busses, cafeterias, parking lots, standardized tests, intercoms, and on and on–but if you are interested in improving learning, the action is in the instructional core.
Schools have lots of other parts–HVAC systems, busses, cafeterias, parking lots, standardized tests, intercoms, and on and on– but if you are interested in improving learning, the action is in the instructional core.
The work that teachers do in this instructional core is astonishingly varied and fine grained. On any given school day, we teach kids to sound out diphthongs, tie their shoes, stand in line, factor polynomials, convert carbohydrates to ATP in the Krebs Cycle, conjugate Spanish verbs, hit a shuttlecock with a badminton racket, how to have sex safely, why they should not have sex until marriage, to obey their government, to challenge their government, and on and on and on. So if you are a superintendent with an idea like, “let’s use formative assessment more frequently to guide our instruction,” and you want the school system to use those assessments weekly, then, functionally, you’ve just placed an order for 45 weeks of assessment multiplied by 13 grades multiplied by the number of subjects that you teach in your district. These are not interchangeable assessments: if someone makes a great formative assessment about factoring polynomials it probably won’t help you in evaluating students sounding out diphthongs. In fact, a formative assessment in your earth science unit on meteorology may not help you much in the next unit on plate tectonics.
The only people in the system numerous enough to generate the variety of specific, contextual innovations needed to implement a straightforward change like “add more formative assessment” are teachers. There are simply not enough coaches, TOSAs, APs, principals, central office people, etc. to do that work. So, this is my first point: teacher leadership is absolutely essential to innovation. The only people who can make the fine-grained modifications to each local classroom context are teachers.
So how do teachers choose to adopt new practice? How do they pick up new innovation? If you ask them, as John Diamond did in his article “Where the Rubber Meets the Road” they will tell you their main source of inspiration is “other teachers.” So, every change leadership or innovation problem is actually a peer learning problem.
When you put these two stylized facts together—that teacher leadership is essential to generating innovation and teacher peer learning is essential to scaling innovation, in my mind, you have the basic model for the conditions of innovation. Want new things? Teachers will have to build and adapt them. Want new things to spread and scale? There need to be time and space for teacher to teacher peer learning. Even when you see things that look top down, like some of the science of reading initiatives going on, look under the hood and you’ll see this same basic process. A small cohort of enthusiastic teachers chooses to adopt a new practice, while the bulk are patient pragmatists–participating in limited compliance until they see results and learn from their peers.
In Iterate, I call this the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning, and it’s the core model that I use to explain how schools change, and how we can think about supporting that change.
LtC: In your new book, Iterate, you offer different models for envisioning and enacting change. How do you think about balancing the need for immediate change to more equitably serve students and the iterative processes that quality work requires?
If there were known, immediate, dependable, effective steps to improve educational environments or to make them more equitable, we would do them! Even things that work well in one place, do not easily translate to new spaces. They need to be broken apart, reassembled, and grafted into their new environment.
So, to me, “immediate change to more equitably serve students” is not a realistic option. There is only the slow, steady, shoulder-to-the-wheel work of tinkering and incremental improvement. I happen to think iterative cycles of experiment, testing, feedback, and sharing are great ways of doing this shoulder to the wheel work, but there are other more linear models as well.
Change takes time! Start today!
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
JR: I have a few thoughts in Iterate about this. One is to take joy seriously, and to cultivate environments where faculty sincerely enjoy working with each other, because it’s fun. With the incentives and career ladders that we have in schools, and with the demands we have on teachers contracted time, work on systems improvement essentially takes place during teacher discretionary time. Maybe they’ll make schools better. Or maybe they’ll grade or go home and play with their kids. In my experience, the schools where faculty effectively collaborate with each other are places where the teachers really enjoy their time working together to make schools better. So, joy, enjoyment, satisfaction matter.
On the flipside, we need to acknowledge that all change involves loss. Doing new things involves saying good-bye to old things. Launching new ideas requires leaving old practice behind. That means experienced teachers needing to grieve as they say goodbye to old practices. Even when there is a certain joy in picking up something new, there needs to be time to mourn what we leave behind. Robert Evans The Human Side of Change has good ideas on this.
Take joy seriously and cultivate environments where faculty sincerely enjoy working with each other because it’s fun...the schools where faculty effectively collaborate with each other are places where the teachers really enjoy their time working together to make schools better. So, joy, enjoyment, satisfaction matter.
I also share some research in Iterate that my colleague Peter Senge did with folks at the MIT Sloan School of Management and others. I like to tell the story this way. Peter and colleagues are trying to figure out how to make firms better. Where does work get done in firms? In teams. What do teams do? Well, fundamentally, they communicate and collaborate. What are some of the best predictors of effective communication? One turns out to be “the quality of listening.” Typically, we listen to hear moments in a conversation where we can break in with our ideas, or we listen to see if people agree or disagree with us. But we can also choose to listen to sincerely understand the perspective of others– not to wait to say our next piece, but to really hear another person out. I love this story because these nerdy MIT guys look at firms and economic success and they identify “the quality of listening” as an essential element of success. But of course, the other thing to do is to pay teachers more, which is probably the best way to show and offer support.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
JR: There are many folks who know a lot more about the field than I do; in some respects, I approach it much more like a practitioner than a researcher. As an observer of the field, I’m excited about growing interest in issues of racial injustice. I’m also heartened by a general consensus across multiple models–design based implementation research, networked improvement communities, some of Peter Senge’s work on Learning Organizations, and others– about how schools get better. I don’t think Iterate pushes a whole lot of new ground forward in terms of theory or principles, it’s really about getting these ideas to educators in an accessible format. Put another way, we know a lot about the broad contours of how effective school improvement can work: the core challenges are how to implement these sound ideas in the infinite variety of contexts and specifics. Even if we don’t have a map for every context, we have a pretty good compass.
[W] e know a lot about the broad contours of how effective school improvement can work: the core challenges are how to implement these sound ideas in the infinite variety of contexts and specifics. Even if we don’t have a map for every context, we have a pretty good compass.
To me the most exciting thing about this particular moment for working in school change is this: while the pandemic was devastating in many respects for schools, teachers, and students, it also showed how incredibly malleable schools are. Everything we thought was fixed turned out to be contingent–schedules, buildings, routines, busses, grades. As a teacher in Madison, Wisconsin told me, “We know how to change. We’ve been changing every three weeks for the past 18 months.” Teachers are tired and beaten down, but I think this newfound sense of possibility remains a latent seed that we can cultivate and help grow.
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