A feature of innovative schools, and probably innovative organizations more generally, is a tendency to under-design from the top*. I’ve worked at two K-12 schools designed to continually innovate, and each takes a slightly different approach to avoid over-fitting theory on praxis.

First a note about constant change: One might reasonably think that, yes, the antiquated industrial model of education that unfortunately many schools still cling to must be replaced with a newer and better model. But because learning and education involves all the complexities of human beings, what’s needed is not a new model to replace the old, but a new framework or set of extensible processes that constantly evolve according to feedback loops that are themselves part of the design.

At High Tech High, a core value related to innovation was expressed in the design principle called Teacher as Designer.#  In practice, this means that rather than purchasing a curriculum or allowing Sacramento or Washington D.C. to dictate what and how students learn, teachers were the ones designing learning experiences and assembling curricular materials.

The experiences and expertise teachers brought to HTH were valued and revealed through an activity they engaged in during their first week. Teachers were asked to recall a significant learning experience from their own schooling and write down a narrative of that experience. The group of new-to-HTH teachers then constructs some of the key common ingredients, which often included: working in a team, creating something that matters to the world outside school, having opportunities to receive feedback and revise, doing things that resembles the work professionals do, learning new skills, and having fun.

With this common ground established, the activity concludes with the question: given that these ingredients were crucial to your significant learnings, how can you design curriculum to include as many of them as possible? HTH founder Larry Rosenstock called this process midwifery: drawing out what incoming teachers already know about learning and helping them see it. This is the opposite of bringing new teachers to an organization and telling them what teaching and learning should look like.

It’s noteworthy that the process of this significant learning activity can remain the same for the next 10 or 100 years or more. The list of ingredients may evolve, but the process needn’t.

A tradeoff of this approach derives from the fact that teachers can design projects that are subject to very few top-down constraints. It’s difficult, therefore, to ensure that students have a coherent experience, building skills and acquiring knowledge as they progress through grades levels.

To combat this challenge, HTH is small by design and not intended to scale. The largest of the schools serves 600 students; the staff at each school know one another well and can fit in a classroom; the school directors can comfortably sit around a largish conference table. The frequency of contact and discussions among these educators enables a constant working toward coherence that sidesteps the perils of top-down curricular autocracy.%

Next week, I’ll discuss Avenues: The World School’s approach to innovation. Avenues is built to scale, but also recognizes the importance of empowering teachers to design transformative learning experiences for students.

*Maybe an obvious exception is Apple, where Jobs’ top-down constraints regarding non-extensibility and design drove what might be termed (slightly hysterically, in my view) revolutionary innovation and a trillion dollar market cap.

#This design principle has been updated to Collaborative Design, and is redefined in an even more expansive way.

%It’s important to note that curricular autocracy isn’t just bad because the curriculum might be “bad.” There’s a good chance the curriculum will not be a best fit for a given set of students and teachers in a unique context. But also, top-down curriculum is non-optimal because teachers can hide behind their lack of control and blame student apathy on someone else.