so I am a co-founder of a place called
the workshop school which is a public
project-based High School located in
West Philadelphia we’re part of the
School District Philadelphia and when I
was listening to autumns talk just now
and particularly this idea of teenagers
pushing our ideas about what activism is
about what identity is I found myself
asking a question that I’ve been asking
for 10 15 years now which is whenever I
hear about young people doing super
awesome stuff why can’t that be school
right why is that having to always
happen on the margins and so we started
the workshop school to try and begin to
provide an answer to that question now
it’s June and what that means for me is
that in two weeks our first cohort of
seniors is going to graduate which is
very very exciting yeah applaud them but
because of me it also means that it’s
the NBA Finals I think a lot about high
school innovation I think a lot about my
students I think a lot about my family
and I think way too much about
basketball and so I’m preparing for this
talk and I’m thinking about the work and
I’m reflecting on how we got here
especially with this first cohort
graduating and I’m thinking about
basketball and these things are winding
together in my head and so when I
ultimately came to the point of thinking
about what lessons might I share what
takeaways might I have from doing this
work all these years I landed on the
Philadelphia 76ers now I’m a
Philadelphian I’ve been a Sixers fan all
my life I remember in 1983 like it was
yesterday that was the last time we
actually won anything for those who
aren’t from here I remember 2001 oddly
enough the same year that No Child Left
Behind Act passed the Sixers were really
good and went to the finals the Allen
Iverson era and since then the Sixers
have been mostly mediocre not good
enough to contend sneaked into the
playoffs missed the playoffs yeah just
kind of in the middle and stuff
there and unable to get out of that rut
of mediocrity that to me is what a lot
of high school is stuck in a rep of
mediocrity that we cannot get out of and
so when I started thinking about how
might I frame some of these lessons
learned I started thinking about what
the Sixers have done over the past few
years which a involves lots of losing
and we’ll talk about that briefly but it
also involves actually trying to do
something radically different and so
there actually oddly enough some lessons
from that experiment that are really
applicable to anybody who wants to be a
change agent in high schools in
basketball or otherwise first we’re
going to do a little bit of background
that dude in the center is Simon Hager
the guy on the right is Michael clapper
those are two of my co-founders at the
workshop we all met working at West
Philadelphia High School in the late
1990s they were both teachers fairly
early in their careers I was running
after school and adult education
programs in the building and beginning
to slog my way through a doctorate and
we connected pretty quickly and had a
lot of conversations about what was
wrong with the contemporary high school
and it really centered on a couple
things one students didn’t see the work
that they were doing is relevant if you
wanted to get a kid to care about what
you were doing in class you had to build
a really strong relationship with the
kid and then kind of trade on that
relationship in order to get them to buy
into learning about the war of 1812 or
the quadratic formula or whatever the
standard said you had to teach that week
and the second thing was that all of the
real student engagement was happening on
the margins so you’d have kids who would
come in at 6:30 in the morning for choir
practice and then cut school the rest of
the day or you’d have kids like in
Simon’s after-school automotive program
who may or may not have been train
wrecks during their regular classes but
we’re doing high level engineering work
in the afternoon right and so again why
can’t we make that school was one of
these questions that kind of stuck with
all of us eventually we shifted from
talking about what was wrong with school
to what might be right about school and
that was where the idea for the workshop
school came to be now I’d love to tell
you that we just hatched this idea and
every
thought it was awesome and we were off
and running we pitched this thing for a
good four or five years we couldn’t get
anybody to fund it we couldn’t get
anybody to let us start a school we
talked a lot about democratic
student-centered education back then and
it turns out district administrators
generally are made deeply uncomfortable
by the idea of kids running schools and
so that didn’t go over all that well so
we learned we had to like sneak that in
you can’t front-load the Democratic
student centered part you got it you got
to kind of work that in the back end and
so after a while of not being successful
we tried something different we backed
up we went to the district and we said
all right instead of starting a full
high school what if we ran an
alternative senior year program now one
of the hallmarks of No Child Left Behind
is that all of the school accountability
for high schools landed in 11th grade
and so the dirty secret was nobody
really knew what to do with 12th graders
was like are they tested we put all the
resources into the 11th grade they’re
gonna keep showing up right like you’re
gonna drop out you would have done it
already they’re gonna keep coming so I
think the district was like we’re asking
for 30 kids couldn’t hurt right we
raised our own money for it so we didn’t
ask him to fund it and we took these 30
kids from South Philadelphia High School
for an S High School which is also in
South Philly and West and for two years
we had these cohorts of seniors who
instead of doing the typical senior year
routine at their home schools would
spend it with us and we had them design
and carry out these projects projects
that were trying to take on and solve
real-world problems in particular in
this program we focused on kind of
sustainability and green technology
issues so we had kids doing things like
designing and building hybrid powered
cars this is one of the ones that Simon
and his students have have built that
got a lot of attention and we had
another team this is from our second
year that designed and built off-grid
modular housing that could be packed
into a shipping container deployed
anywhere in the world in the wake of a
natural disaster and then assembled in
two days on site they used Haiti as
their test case after the earthquake and
one of the things that they learned was
that these are places that don’t have a
lot of resources don’t have a lot of
working infrastructure and billions of
dollars of aid are pouring into the
country after this horrible disaster and
it’s all going into these temper
shelters that don’t change anything in
the long term so what if you could take
that money instead deploy a whole bunch
of these things and suddenly you have
housing that can hold a family of four
and that has a renewable source of
energy and sanitation and water and so
you’re laying down an infrastructure
this is our kids who hatched this idea
it’s our kids who drew the CAD drawings
in the animations it’s our kids who
wrote the business plan it’s our kids
who got to go down and pitch this idea
at Johnson Space Center at the finals of
the Conrad spirit of Innovation Awards
so this was the kind of thing oh and
ultimately it’s our kids who got to
build a prototype of it at bars rooms
garden in South West Philadelphia so we
had a lot of successes in those first
couple of years and it was also a real
blessing because we got to work out the
model on a very very small scale we
didn’t have to think big questions about
like how do you run a high school it was
just two teachers 30 kids
what’s the teaching gonna look like
what’s the learning gonna look like
what’s the assessment gonna look like we
had time to work our way into having a
school the second important thing that
happened was that we got to show people
this model and not just talk to them
about it talking them about it was
really unsuccessful but when suddenly
the superintendent or the chair of the
school reform commission or a journalist
or a funder or a filmmaker could come
down and hang out and talk to our kids
and see the work it changed everything
almost overnight and suddenly people
could kind of wrap their heads around
this idea that oh you really could
create a high school that’s not
organized by subject
for instance you really could create a
high school where kids design their own
projects and where the work is supposed
to get outside of the classroom so that
led us here to the workshop school
that’s our front door we’re near 48th
and walnut in West Philly and the school
is designed around three pretty simple
ideas community first that is the first
principle for a good reason most of the
work that we are doing with our students
involves building a healthy strong
community where kids respect each other
where they respect the work where they
can struggle where they can make
mistakes and where they can see that
what they’re doing is real we can’t get
to end
serious rigorous academic project work
if we don’t attend to this first second
the work is the work the addendum to
this is there are no makeup packets our
kids by the time they get to us in ninth
grade are experts at playing school
there’s a whole skill set that involves
just passing classes or how to tilt a
grade from an 89 to a 91 and the
incentives are all structured around the
performance of those things what does it
look like to ask questions about how was
your work changing the world around you
how do you rethink success a long time
ago one of Simon’s students gave a talk
on a stage similar to this and he talked
about his final assessment working on a
car was that if the brakes don’t work
his teacher dies right that’s a
performance assessment right that’s
authentic isn’t it and so the idea that
you are accountable for the work you are
responsible for the work but the work
also has real-world implications and
then finally persistent improve for a
couple of years this third principle was
making the most out of failure I
actually kind of liked that one better
but that’s another one that we learned
just doesn’t go over well with district
leadership it turns out they think
failure is bad and so we had to learn we
had a same idea but you got to reframe
it in a more positive way um we’ve had a
pretty good run so far plenty of
struggles but a lot of cool work coming
out of our first four years huge range
of projects that we run so John here is
standing in front of a mural that his
class painted as part of a classroom
redesign project most of our classes
have redesigned their rooms multiple
times over the years so the conversation
is what should learning look and feel
like in this space and then they can do
everything from repaint the room to
design and build furniture rearranged
get rid of stuff add stuff based on
their ideas about what learning could or
should look like at his feet is a model
our kids designed and built for a
neighborhood solar collective so this is
about how do you build out neighborhood
based infrastructure to share solar
energy so they built these models they
research the feasibility of them and
they presented them to Mayor canning and
council president Clark last year every
year our ninth grade class writes
produces stages markets a play the ninth
grade play was last night for this year
it was awesome it was hilarious it was
based on a midsummer night’s dream I
love
every minute of it two years ago our
students started a peer mediation
program the idea was if students could
learn how to mediate conflict with and
among each other a lot of that conflict
wouldn’t escalate to the points where
adults had to be involved and we’d see a
lot less fighting and a lot less
violence although we haven’t had a whole
lot of either of those things but a lot
of things that could become big
conflicts could remain smaller or be
solved so half the students were trained
as peer mediators and the other half
actually designed and built the room in
our school where the mediations are the
school is really small and we don’t have
a lot of space and so anytime we need
more space for something we have to
subdivide the spaces more so we’ve we’ve
had like three different constant
construction projects now to carve more
spaces out of the existing footprint of
our building students are continuing to
get trained for this every year and
we’re now at a place where our kids
actually request mediations of their
fellow peers when there are things that
are starting to go wrong or concerns
that they have and the car work has
continued to so this blue car here is
called the eight one eight and is
powered by biodiesel fuel that our
students make themselves with waste
vegetable oil from federal donuts a
couple of years ago it smells great
seriously um and and full disclaimer I
don’t know what thing about cars none of
that this is Simon and those students
saying I don’t want to claim any credit
for this part but it is really awesome
work that they continue to do a couple
years ago this car got invited along
with our students and with Simon down to
the White House Maker Faire and so some
of our guys got to meet President Obama
which was pretty cool so we’ve had a lot
of exciting stuff happen we’ve learned a
lot we’ve had a lot of successes what
lessons might I share based on this
experience and here we bring it back to
the Sixers that sad looking guy there is
Sam hinkie he was the general manager of
the 76ers for three years and in the
admittedly superficial world of
basketball he is indeed a change engine
he’s one of these people who thinks very
very differently about how the world
works and so his job was to get this
from being mediocre to being excellent
doing that involved a bunch of things
one it involved losing lots of games the
reason is that the way basketball works
is if you do not acquire elite top-level
talent you will never contend there’s
only a couple ways to do that and the
biggest one is being able to draft great
players out of college best way to do
that is to lose a bunch of games right
so he said we are going to do that at
all costs we are going to maximize our
opportunity for doing that but he also
did something really interesting which
is he said we understand that we are
super fallible as human beings we make
all kinds of assumptions about how
decisions will play out that turn out to
be wrong and so we have to bring a lot
of humility to this process we have to
increase the probability that we will be
successful even if our first five
strategies are wrong and so a lot of the
decisions he made in running the team
were based not just on like how do i
unearth that one gem somewhere but what
if the first six places I look for that
gem turned out to not work out I need to
have place number seven waiting for me
right so this was unorthodox and it was
criticized and a lot of the media didn’t
like it and a lot of the fans didn’t
like it and most importantly the NBA
didn’t like it and so finally they kind
of nudged the Sixers ownership and say
you guys can’t keep doing this right one
thing led to another
ultimately at the end of his third year
pinky resigned and in resigning he wrote
this letter has anyone read the letter
yes so the letter is 13 pages long and
it’s mostly not about basketball it’s
mostly about thinking and it quotes
psychologists and investors and this
huge range of people and some of the
things that he wrote in that letter and
things that I have read and when I was
looking at it are so directly relevant
to the work that I’m trying to do the
work that we’re trying to do that I was
kind of laughing that these two sides of
my life sort of converged so neatly so
for example he talked about the
importance of disruption he talked about
the importance of doing things that have
a fundamentally different goal or aim
then then most folks right so for us
what that means is school reforms since
2001 has been organized around primarily
increasing
scores on standardized tests right so
what’s wrong with that what’s wrong with
it is that while this research face is
growing and it is not ironclad at this
point it turns out a when you ask
employers what they want in the
workforce
nobody says kids who are good at taking
tests nobody even says kids who know the
quadratic formula what they want is this
stuff they want creativity and problem
solving right they want interpersonal
skills and the more longitudinal
research we see about what kids succeed
when they get out into college or out
into the workforce the list of skills
also doesn’t involve traditional
academic contact as measured as measured
by tests it’s around things like
problem-solving it’s around grit it’s
around mindset right think about what
our schools are organized what
opportunities do kids have to build
these skills what our schools really
trying to teach so why if these are the
things that matter why our schools
constrain so much to traditional test
scores so here I think he talked a lot
about the idea of going with things you
can control going with things that are
certain if you decide you’re gonna try
to do something different like assess
students performance on skills like
collaboration and problem solving and
and not emphasize reading and math
you’re going to be in a situation where
you’re having to figure out where as you
go along you’re going to be living in a
world of maybes there’s no great
playbook for me to understand how do I
effectively teach some of the skills
that I value the most in our school so
you have to get comfortable with a
certain degree of ambiguity and finally
quoting Jeff Bezos he talked about
success at Amazon is often the result of
something that happened years before not
something that happened that quarter
school reform right now is way too
concerned with year-to-year variation in
these small metrics in these test scores
very often the work I make or my
teachers might do with a ninth grader
won’t necessarily bear fruit until that
kid is in 10th grade or 11th grade you
may have 25 frustrating conversations
with the student and you feel like
you’re not yet
anywhere but one of our teachers last
summer during our professional
development said something and it is
stuck with me ever since he said I’m not
trying to be friends with my student now
I’m trying to be friends with the
student they will become in 10 years so
those are the lessons that I’ve learned
from doing this work know who you are
have your principles so for us community
first work is the work persistent
improve hold to those principles live by
them be willing to repeat them trust
each other you are going to go through
tough times you’re going to go through
setbacks don’t overreact don’t
overcorrect don’t regress to the mean
and remember to always take the long
view that very often the work you’re
doing today will not necessarily show
benefits until further down the road
then you then you may think thank you
very much
[Applause]
the workshop school which is a public
project-based High School located in
West Philadelphia we’re part of the
School District Philadelphia and when I
was listening to autumns talk just now
and particularly this idea of teenagers
pushing our ideas about what activism is
about what identity is I found myself
asking a question that I’ve been asking
for 10 15 years now which is whenever I
hear about young people doing super
awesome stuff why can’t that be school
right why is that having to always
happen on the margins and so we started
the workshop school to try and begin to
provide an answer to that question now
it’s June and what that means for me is
that in two weeks our first cohort of
seniors is going to graduate which is
very very exciting yeah applaud them but
because of me it also means that it’s
the NBA Finals I think a lot about high
school innovation I think a lot about my
students I think a lot about my family
and I think way too much about
basketball and so I’m preparing for this
talk and I’m thinking about the work and
I’m reflecting on how we got here
especially with this first cohort
graduating and I’m thinking about
basketball and these things are winding
together in my head and so when I
ultimately came to the point of thinking
about what lessons might I share what
takeaways might I have from doing this
work all these years I landed on the
Philadelphia 76ers now I’m a
Philadelphian I’ve been a Sixers fan all
my life I remember in 1983 like it was
yesterday that was the last time we
actually won anything for those who
aren’t from here I remember 2001 oddly
enough the same year that No Child Left
Behind Act passed the Sixers were really
good and went to the finals the Allen
Iverson era and since then the Sixers
have been mostly mediocre not good
enough to contend sneaked into the
playoffs missed the playoffs yeah just
kind of in the middle and stuff
there and unable to get out of that rut
of mediocrity that to me is what a lot
of high school is stuck in a rep of
mediocrity that we cannot get out of and
so when I started thinking about how
might I frame some of these lessons
learned I started thinking about what
the Sixers have done over the past few
years which a involves lots of losing
and we’ll talk about that briefly but it
also involves actually trying to do
something radically different and so
there actually oddly enough some lessons
from that experiment that are really
applicable to anybody who wants to be a
change agent in high schools in
basketball or otherwise first we’re
going to do a little bit of background
that dude in the center is Simon Hager
the guy on the right is Michael clapper
those are two of my co-founders at the
workshop we all met working at West
Philadelphia High School in the late
1990s they were both teachers fairly
early in their careers I was running
after school and adult education
programs in the building and beginning
to slog my way through a doctorate and
we connected pretty quickly and had a
lot of conversations about what was
wrong with the contemporary high school
and it really centered on a couple
things one students didn’t see the work
that they were doing is relevant if you
wanted to get a kid to care about what
you were doing in class you had to build
a really strong relationship with the
kid and then kind of trade on that
relationship in order to get them to buy
into learning about the war of 1812 or
the quadratic formula or whatever the
standard said you had to teach that week
and the second thing was that all of the
real student engagement was happening on
the margins so you’d have kids who would
come in at 6:30 in the morning for choir
practice and then cut school the rest of
the day or you’d have kids like in
Simon’s after-school automotive program
who may or may not have been train
wrecks during their regular classes but
we’re doing high level engineering work
in the afternoon right and so again why
can’t we make that school was one of
these questions that kind of stuck with
all of us eventually we shifted from
talking about what was wrong with school
to what might be right about school and
that was where the idea for the workshop
school came to be now I’d love to tell
you that we just hatched this idea and
every
thought it was awesome and we were off
and running we pitched this thing for a
good four or five years we couldn’t get
anybody to fund it we couldn’t get
anybody to let us start a school we
talked a lot about democratic
student-centered education back then and
it turns out district administrators
generally are made deeply uncomfortable
by the idea of kids running schools and
so that didn’t go over all that well so
we learned we had to like sneak that in
you can’t front-load the Democratic
student centered part you got it you got
to kind of work that in the back end and
so after a while of not being successful
we tried something different we backed
up we went to the district and we said
all right instead of starting a full
high school what if we ran an
alternative senior year program now one
of the hallmarks of No Child Left Behind
is that all of the school accountability
for high schools landed in 11th grade
and so the dirty secret was nobody
really knew what to do with 12th graders
was like are they tested we put all the
resources into the 11th grade they’re
gonna keep showing up right like you’re
gonna drop out you would have done it
already they’re gonna keep coming so I
think the district was like we’re asking
for 30 kids couldn’t hurt right we
raised our own money for it so we didn’t
ask him to fund it and we took these 30
kids from South Philadelphia High School
for an S High School which is also in
South Philly and West and for two years
we had these cohorts of seniors who
instead of doing the typical senior year
routine at their home schools would
spend it with us and we had them design
and carry out these projects projects
that were trying to take on and solve
real-world problems in particular in
this program we focused on kind of
sustainability and green technology
issues so we had kids doing things like
designing and building hybrid powered
cars this is one of the ones that Simon
and his students have have built that
got a lot of attention and we had
another team this is from our second
year that designed and built off-grid
modular housing that could be packed
into a shipping container deployed
anywhere in the world in the wake of a
natural disaster and then assembled in
two days on site they used Haiti as
their test case after the earthquake and
one of the things that they learned was
that these are places that don’t have a
lot of resources don’t have a lot of
working infrastructure and billions of
dollars of aid are pouring into the
country after this horrible disaster and
it’s all going into these temper
shelters that don’t change anything in
the long term so what if you could take
that money instead deploy a whole bunch
of these things and suddenly you have
housing that can hold a family of four
and that has a renewable source of
energy and sanitation and water and so
you’re laying down an infrastructure
this is our kids who hatched this idea
it’s our kids who drew the CAD drawings
in the animations it’s our kids who
wrote the business plan it’s our kids
who got to go down and pitch this idea
at Johnson Space Center at the finals of
the Conrad spirit of Innovation Awards
so this was the kind of thing oh and
ultimately it’s our kids who got to
build a prototype of it at bars rooms
garden in South West Philadelphia so we
had a lot of successes in those first
couple of years and it was also a real
blessing because we got to work out the
model on a very very small scale we
didn’t have to think big questions about
like how do you run a high school it was
just two teachers 30 kids
what’s the teaching gonna look like
what’s the learning gonna look like
what’s the assessment gonna look like we
had time to work our way into having a
school the second important thing that
happened was that we got to show people
this model and not just talk to them
about it talking them about it was
really unsuccessful but when suddenly
the superintendent or the chair of the
school reform commission or a journalist
or a funder or a filmmaker could come
down and hang out and talk to our kids
and see the work it changed everything
almost overnight and suddenly people
could kind of wrap their heads around
this idea that oh you really could
create a high school that’s not
organized by subject
for instance you really could create a
high school where kids design their own
projects and where the work is supposed
to get outside of the classroom so that
led us here to the workshop school
that’s our front door we’re near 48th
and walnut in West Philly and the school
is designed around three pretty simple
ideas community first that is the first
principle for a good reason most of the
work that we are doing with our students
involves building a healthy strong
community where kids respect each other
where they respect the work where they
can struggle where they can make
mistakes and where they can see that
what they’re doing is real we can’t get
to end
serious rigorous academic project work
if we don’t attend to this first second
the work is the work the addendum to
this is there are no makeup packets our
kids by the time they get to us in ninth
grade are experts at playing school
there’s a whole skill set that involves
just passing classes or how to tilt a
grade from an 89 to a 91 and the
incentives are all structured around the
performance of those things what does it
look like to ask questions about how was
your work changing the world around you
how do you rethink success a long time
ago one of Simon’s students gave a talk
on a stage similar to this and he talked
about his final assessment working on a
car was that if the brakes don’t work
his teacher dies right that’s a
performance assessment right that’s
authentic isn’t it and so the idea that
you are accountable for the work you are
responsible for the work but the work
also has real-world implications and
then finally persistent improve for a
couple of years this third principle was
making the most out of failure I
actually kind of liked that one better
but that’s another one that we learned
just doesn’t go over well with district
leadership it turns out they think
failure is bad and so we had to learn we
had a same idea but you got to reframe
it in a more positive way um we’ve had a
pretty good run so far plenty of
struggles but a lot of cool work coming
out of our first four years huge range
of projects that we run so John here is
standing in front of a mural that his
class painted as part of a classroom
redesign project most of our classes
have redesigned their rooms multiple
times over the years so the conversation
is what should learning look and feel
like in this space and then they can do
everything from repaint the room to
design and build furniture rearranged
get rid of stuff add stuff based on
their ideas about what learning could or
should look like at his feet is a model
our kids designed and built for a
neighborhood solar collective so this is
about how do you build out neighborhood
based infrastructure to share solar
energy so they built these models they
research the feasibility of them and
they presented them to Mayor canning and
council president Clark last year every
year our ninth grade class writes
produces stages markets a play the ninth
grade play was last night for this year
it was awesome it was hilarious it was
based on a midsummer night’s dream I
love
every minute of it two years ago our
students started a peer mediation
program the idea was if students could
learn how to mediate conflict with and
among each other a lot of that conflict
wouldn’t escalate to the points where
adults had to be involved and we’d see a
lot less fighting and a lot less
violence although we haven’t had a whole
lot of either of those things but a lot
of things that could become big
conflicts could remain smaller or be
solved so half the students were trained
as peer mediators and the other half
actually designed and built the room in
our school where the mediations are the
school is really small and we don’t have
a lot of space and so anytime we need
more space for something we have to
subdivide the spaces more so we’ve we’ve
had like three different constant
construction projects now to carve more
spaces out of the existing footprint of
our building students are continuing to
get trained for this every year and
we’re now at a place where our kids
actually request mediations of their
fellow peers when there are things that
are starting to go wrong or concerns
that they have and the car work has
continued to so this blue car here is
called the eight one eight and is
powered by biodiesel fuel that our
students make themselves with waste
vegetable oil from federal donuts a
couple of years ago it smells great
seriously um and and full disclaimer I
don’t know what thing about cars none of
that this is Simon and those students
saying I don’t want to claim any credit
for this part but it is really awesome
work that they continue to do a couple
years ago this car got invited along
with our students and with Simon down to
the White House Maker Faire and so some
of our guys got to meet President Obama
which was pretty cool so we’ve had a lot
of exciting stuff happen we’ve learned a
lot we’ve had a lot of successes what
lessons might I share based on this
experience and here we bring it back to
the Sixers that sad looking guy there is
Sam hinkie he was the general manager of
the 76ers for three years and in the
admittedly superficial world of
basketball he is indeed a change engine
he’s one of these people who thinks very
very differently about how the world
works and so his job was to get this
from being mediocre to being excellent
doing that involved a bunch of things
one it involved losing lots of games the
reason is that the way basketball works
is if you do not acquire elite top-level
talent you will never contend there’s
only a couple ways to do that and the
biggest one is being able to draft great
players out of college best way to do
that is to lose a bunch of games right
so he said we are going to do that at
all costs we are going to maximize our
opportunity for doing that but he also
did something really interesting which
is he said we understand that we are
super fallible as human beings we make
all kinds of assumptions about how
decisions will play out that turn out to
be wrong and so we have to bring a lot
of humility to this process we have to
increase the probability that we will be
successful even if our first five
strategies are wrong and so a lot of the
decisions he made in running the team
were based not just on like how do i
unearth that one gem somewhere but what
if the first six places I look for that
gem turned out to not work out I need to
have place number seven waiting for me
right so this was unorthodox and it was
criticized and a lot of the media didn’t
like it and a lot of the fans didn’t
like it and most importantly the NBA
didn’t like it and so finally they kind
of nudged the Sixers ownership and say
you guys can’t keep doing this right one
thing led to another
ultimately at the end of his third year
pinky resigned and in resigning he wrote
this letter has anyone read the letter
yes so the letter is 13 pages long and
it’s mostly not about basketball it’s
mostly about thinking and it quotes
psychologists and investors and this
huge range of people and some of the
things that he wrote in that letter and
things that I have read and when I was
looking at it are so directly relevant
to the work that I’m trying to do the
work that we’re trying to do that I was
kind of laughing that these two sides of
my life sort of converged so neatly so
for example he talked about the
importance of disruption he talked about
the importance of doing things that have
a fundamentally different goal or aim
then then most folks right so for us
what that means is school reforms since
2001 has been organized around primarily
increasing
scores on standardized tests right so
what’s wrong with that what’s wrong with
it is that while this research face is
growing and it is not ironclad at this
point it turns out a when you ask
employers what they want in the
workforce
nobody says kids who are good at taking
tests nobody even says kids who know the
quadratic formula what they want is this
stuff they want creativity and problem
solving right they want interpersonal
skills and the more longitudinal
research we see about what kids succeed
when they get out into college or out
into the workforce the list of skills
also doesn’t involve traditional
academic contact as measured as measured
by tests it’s around things like
problem-solving it’s around grit it’s
around mindset right think about what
our schools are organized what
opportunities do kids have to build
these skills what our schools really
trying to teach so why if these are the
things that matter why our schools
constrain so much to traditional test
scores so here I think he talked a lot
about the idea of going with things you
can control going with things that are
certain if you decide you’re gonna try
to do something different like assess
students performance on skills like
collaboration and problem solving and
and not emphasize reading and math
you’re going to be in a situation where
you’re having to figure out where as you
go along you’re going to be living in a
world of maybes there’s no great
playbook for me to understand how do I
effectively teach some of the skills
that I value the most in our school so
you have to get comfortable with a
certain degree of ambiguity and finally
quoting Jeff Bezos he talked about
success at Amazon is often the result of
something that happened years before not
something that happened that quarter
school reform right now is way too
concerned with year-to-year variation in
these small metrics in these test scores
very often the work I make or my
teachers might do with a ninth grader
won’t necessarily bear fruit until that
kid is in 10th grade or 11th grade you
may have 25 frustrating conversations
with the student and you feel like
you’re not yet
anywhere but one of our teachers last
summer during our professional
development said something and it is
stuck with me ever since he said I’m not
trying to be friends with my student now
I’m trying to be friends with the
student they will become in 10 years so
those are the lessons that I’ve learned
from doing this work know who you are
have your principles so for us community
first work is the work persistent
improve hold to those principles live by
them be willing to repeat them trust
each other you are going to go through
tough times you’re going to go through
setbacks don’t overreact don’t
overcorrect don’t regress to the mean
and remember to always take the long
view that very often the work you’re
doing today will not necessarily show
benefits until further down the road
then you then you may think thank you
very much
[Applause]
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