How to innovate: The essential guide for fearless school leaders, by Mary Moss Brown and Alisa Berger
Brown and Berger paint a glum picture of the status of United States' schools in the introductory section of How to innovate. They cite dropout rates, a pedantic approach to classroom instruction, the stodginess of teachers' practices, and the overall unpreparedness of students for today's workplace. They use these woeful assertions as support for what they call an "urgency for school transformation" (p. 2) The authors divide the book into three parts: Why Innovate, The Four Levers of Change, and Transforming Your School: A Guide. Each section contributes to what they consider the essential pieces for necessary innovations for transforming schools. They base these recommendations solely on the example of the New York City iSchool Model. This model, depicted in Figure 1.1 (p. 6) includes two overriding categories (mastery tracking and area of focus) and five components (challenge based learning, online learning, core experiences, field experience, and advisory) Three additional pieces follow under the category of individualized student scheduling: individualization and personalization, innovation, and metacognitive skill development. The authors establish these areas early in the text and build their specific attributes and importance in subsequent sections. The authors consistently acknowledge the importance of contextual factors present at the iSchool and the implications of their presence or absence for other schools attempting to follow suit. Any change effort benefits from levers that can be used to move it forward. The authors promote four levers that allow them to maintain a focus on students: curriculum, culture, time, and human capital. The importance of these levers warrants careful attention to them. Curriculum includes the commonly included learning goals, but the iSchool model addresses them through a unique combination of formats: learning modules, online learning, and distance learning. This curriculum also includes core experiences that align with typical curricular experiences, the students' selection of a topic for extended study, and opportunities for students to engage in internships beyond a school setting. Under mastery tracking, students' curriculum includes areas intended to prepare them to meet external standards and other areas the iSchool considers important for later success such as critical thinking, metacognition, and collaboration. Prior to listing and explaining these various curriculum pieces, the authors encourage educational stakeholders to clearly distinguish between constraints and perceptions. This important reminder joins their promotion of context for readers to hold in mind as they learn about the specifics of the iSchool model. The authors define culture, the second lever, as "the way in which adults and students live in the school how they act, interact, and communicate, but also the expectations set for the school, and the systems, policies, and structures that communicate those expectations and ways of being in the school" (p. 38) Their consideration of cultural components (e.g. alignment of policies to values) comes with an admonition to continually ask "Why?" and "What if?" The third lever, time, receives the least amount of attention. Perhaps this stems from the more traditional nature of the ideas under consideration such as scheduling. Flipped instruction and blended learning, two areas of more recent prominence, also receive attention as ways to maximize the use of students' learning time. Human capital is the fourth lever. The authors explore revisions of school personnel to better use their time and talents. This includes expecting teachers to assume a more active role in determining curriculum, reconsidering the implementation of curriculum by capitalizing on teachers' strengths, giving attention to the presence of technological support, and offering professional development that gives the same individualized attention to teachers as the model holds for students. The authors conclude by offering guidelines and activities in Part III. They view these suggestions as vehicles for moving forward the process of school innovation. As they state, "This guide is not intended to be a one time experience, but rather part of a habit of innovation, through which you will continually question and rethink your school practices" (p. 67) These activities allow others to rethink the culture, structure, and practices of their schools. The authors again stress that offering a model must be joined with a critical consideration of it. They also underscore the temporary status of any changes. In their words, "Given the expected rate of change in the 21st century, your school's ability to remain agile and responsive to the changing needs of your students and the world for which you are preparing them, will become the true test of school effectiveness" (p. 67) Brown and Berger pack much information into their 121 pages. The relative brevity of this text forces them to be clear and concise with the ideas they propose. Readers will come away with much to ponder, consider, and (hopefully) enact. The successful use of these authors' ideas comes with an ongoing attention to their caveats about holding contextual variations in mind and keeping students at the center of decisions. Should Brown and Berger consider an expansion of their proposals, two additions might prove helpful. First, the authors could make their attention to contextual variations more prominent throughout the text. They mention the importance of context and offer a few examples, but fall short of clearly evidencing the specific pitfalls that might occur when contextual variations are