2014 iNACOL Symposium - Michael Horn Keynote Address

Thank you so much, Susan. It's just been an unbelievable pleasure over the last six years since I had the opportunity to keynote this conference when Disrupting Class came out to be able to work with you and your team on a regular basis. Our team at the Christensen Institute just loves getting together with the Inacol team to help change the future of education, to improve students' lives all over the world. It's been an amazing, amazing journey that we've been on as partners in that effort. And I just want to also, if we can, just as a group here, acknowledge the amazing job that Susan and the Inacol team have done all week here in Palm Springs with this conference. It's truly an incredible event. I don't know if you all realize, but Inacol literally does not advertise, and yet over 2,600 people came here in the desert knowing that something is brewing, something is happening to change the face of education, and we all want to be a part of the pioneers to make that change, to improve the lives for all students. And it's just an incredible testament to what you have built and the wisdom and vision you've had there. So thank you so much, Susan. Now, this has been a fun week for Heather Staker and me. Heather and I have gotten to work together for several years now, and we had a lot of fun this time. As opposed to Disrupting Class, where it came out in June before the conference, this time we chose to debut our new book, Blended, at this conference, starting on Tuesday with Heather leading an all-day workshop. And it's just been a blast for us to come out and really take the next step from Disrupting Class, which was sort of a 50,000-foot view of how innovation would go forward in this world toward a student-centered vision for all students, and really take this down into a practical design guide to really help educators on the ground with how do we move in this direction to embrace the promise of blended learning. And so we're really excited about this book, and we hope it's helpful as a resource to all of you changing the lives of students and designing those environments. We at the Christensen Institute are also really excited because next week we're going to introduce a new website with free resources at BlendedLearning.org to make our research and others' research in the field on blended learning far more available to practitioners and others on the ground, with a much cleaner design to try to help people who are implementing these blended learning environments do it much more easily and successfully and evenly throughout the world. So we're excited about this launching next week at BlendedLearning.org. This is your little sneak peek at it, and part of that is going to be a directory of schools around the world doing blended learning to describe and show people how many people are doing this and what the different designs look like and how great the innovation is in our sector. This is going to be a sneak peek of that, so I encourage you to jump on next week and help us fill this out. We're going to have a team working to fill out these profiles, but we really want to hear from you and reflect the great work that you're doing as a resource for the field to help connect innovators and make this work easier to do, not harder.

Now, one of the things that I think this field has recognized and all of you understand is that online learning is growing rapidly. In 2008, when Disrupting Class came out, we projected that by 2019, 50% of all high school courses would be delivered online in some form or fashion. And what Heather and I concluded as we looked at the data—that is sparse, but we dug our way through it—is that that trajectory seems roughly on pace. Some people, like Tom Vander Ark—where are you, Tom? Somewhere out there—say we're a little conservative on our prediction. But the basic idea is that online learning is growing pretty rapidly. And we know that most of online learning in the United States is growing in blended learning environments—online learning where students have some control over the time, place, path, and pace of learning in brick-and-mortar schools with teachers, where the modalities along each student's learning path are connected in some way. And we also know, as a field, all of you know, that blended learning looks different in different places for different students in different circumstances. There's a whole taxonomy that we've put together of different models that are appearing out there. There's more innovators continuing to push the field forward along these ways. But the question is not about the growth of online and blended learning per se, because that's a how, that's a thing. The question is: why should we care? Why should we care about this growth? And for us, the exciting thing is that blended learning appears to be this engine to carry at scale this destination to student-centered learning, which we define as personalized learning and competency-based learning combined. And really, blended learning is that engine to realize that at scale, which is why it's so important. And people around the world are adopting it for three core reasons. The first is the promise of personalization for each student who has different learning needs at different times, to meet each student where he or she is and where they need to go. The second reason that's driving this is access and equity. Students who live in different geographies that do not have access to high-quality educational experiences need not be in that plight any longer thanks to online and blended learning. They connect to high-quality resources anywhere, which is an unbelievable opportunity that we all have. And the third reason is to bring these benefits to students at a cost we can afford. In the past, the only way to bring personalization to students was a tutor for every child, which has been prohibitively expensive. But thanks to this technology, we can accomplish these aims and goals in an affordable fashion.

So with those potential benefits, the question turns to: how do we seize its potential? This enormous potential of blended learning, which is quite frankly uneven right now across the world—in some places there are terrific blended learning programs doing terrific things for students, and in some quarters they are not. We have to be honest about that as a field. So the question is, how do we seize its potential and make it great for every single child? And that's really what this book, Blended, is concerned with. How do we seize that potential and how do we help people design environments with these things in mind from the get-go? And the first step along that journey is actually not to start with technology—not to start with technology for technology's sake and cram technology, as much of the country had done before the advent of online and blended learning, which has added a lot of cost to the system but not benefited students. Unfortunately, we continue to see that across the country, as well-meaning educators try to implement technology for technology's sake in one-to-one deployments and other things that don't ask a fundamental question first and foremost in that design process. And that's: you've got to start with a SMART-ring cry. What we mean by that is: start with what are the problems you're trying to solve, the goals you're trying to achieve, the opportunities you're trying to seize. So some of these problems will be core problems—core problems in your core academics—like high school teachers want more time to give feedback on writing assignments, or we want to fundamentally boost our academic reading results. Other problems that you're seeking to solve are what we would call, in the disruptive innovation language, non-consumption problems. These are those where you literally can't offer something—so you lack, for example, specific subject-matter teachers to offer core classes for students, or you want to help students recover units and credits to stay on track for graduation, and without the capacity of online and blended learning you just can't provide those opportunities. Both of these sets of problems are worthy and important problems to be chasing and strategically addressing. But that first step is to identify that problem and do not let it reference technology when you do so. That's what we would call a circular reference. If you have technology and you say, 'We just want to get 21st-century tools in the hands of kids, therefore we will buy iPads'—it's a circular reference. It just does not compute in this field. Instead, what we want is that you say it's SMART: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related, meaning that you have a specific goal in mind, something like: 'Our goal is to raise school math performance by 10 percentage points by the end of the 2014-15 school year.' Make it a learning goal. Make it meaningful for students and teachers. And the reason to make it specific is so that you know whether you've been successful or not as a community.

Now, the next step after that is to organize the team to start to implement a solution around that ring cry. This is a step that all too many people forget in the process, but it's a really important step. And the reason is, a lot of schools are trying to solve meaty problems by asking teachers to do things that they just don't have control over, or imposing bureaucratic structures on top of teachers that limit their ability to innovate. And so the key thing is really matching the team to the task. And we have a longer section in this book about this, but I'm going to breeze through it for the moment just to give you a sense of what this looks like. Sometimes your project will be a relatively simple one, like you want to flip a classroom, and the team that you need to bring for that is often a team of one—that individual teacher—or just a department to help solve that problem. You don't need to bring the whole school community to bear or the whole district to muck up that process. Other times, teachers will want students to rotate to a lab a few times a week for their blended learning. That requires some coordination across the school to schedule with other teachers in the learning lab, and so you need what we call a coordinative or lightweight team—simply just to manage across different departments. Other times, you actually have a problem that requires a bigger rethinking of the architecture of school. It's going to involve rethinking bell schedules, teacher roles. You really fundamentally want to boost reading achievement across a district—that's going to require what we call a heavyweight team. And the fundamental principle of this is: we're going to take people from different parts of a school and appoint a project leader who can make decisions that people will follow, to rethink the fundamental architecture of what schooling looks like. And then the fourth part is these non-consumption problems, where we have disruptive models and therefore we need to be autonomous from the classroom as we know it, so that we can rethink: what should a learning environment look like for students?

Now, after we've organized the team, we're ready to start designing. And this is where it gets a lot of fun, but it also gets tricky. And that first step is to start with a student in mind—just as Julie Young, who started the Florida Virtual School, reminds us always when she says how she started the Florida Virtual School: she put a student in the center of that paper and said, 'Let's design around this person as though there were no school ever before, and think about what we would want.' The question is: how do we design the student experience well? And to that end, it really begs the question: how do we motivate students so that they want to show up to school eager and ready to learn? And it turns out that from our innovation theory, we actually have a fair amount of research on what motivates people more generally that we thought would be useful to bear to this. It's a really important question. And the finding that we've had is that what motivates people—in order to understand that motivation—you can't study the people or the demographic or the product category, in this case schooling, that we're trying to get them to do. But instead we have to do what we say is understand the job to be done in their lives. What are their priorities? What are they actively trying to get done? You cannot observe this from a focus group, but instead observe their daily lives and figure out what they are prioritizing. And I just thought I'd tell you a silly story about that so you could think about what this means and get a sense for what I'm talking about.

So in the 1990s, there was a fast food company that wanted to improve the sale of milkshakes. And they did what—this is, by the way, a pressing public policy problem, improving milkshakes, so come on, everyone, stay alert. So this company did what most people did, which was they had marketing consultants come in. They took the average demographic most likely to buy milkshakes—men and women aged 35 to 49—called them in to a focus group, and said, 'How should we improve milkshakes?' And they would get very clear feedback, and they made changes to the milkshake, and sales did not budge one bit. So they called in a different person to come along and try to study this problem—one of our colleagues who lives in Detroit. And he came and had a very different question on his mind, which is: 'I wonder what job people are hiring milkshakes to do.' And so instead of asking people what they thought of milkshakes or how to improve them, he stood at the back of the restaurant one day for 18 hours and took copious notes of any time anyone came in to buy a milkshake: what time of day was it? What were they wearing? What else did they buy? Were they with anyone else? Did they drink the milkshake in the restaurant or run off to their car and drive off with milkshake in hand? On and on and on. And at the end of the day, he saw a couple of interesting things. 80% of milkshakes were sold at two times during the day—50% in the early morning rush hour commute, kind of gross, I know—and 30% in the late afternoon. So what was going on? Well, as he looked at his notes of the 50% that were in that early morning rush hour commute, every single one of them would go to that restaurant, buy themselves—go to the front of the line, get nothing but a milkshake, and then go off to their car again, not drink it in the restaurant, but go off to their car, milkshake in hand, and drive off sipping it. So the next day he came back and stood outside the restaurant this time. And whenever someone came out with a milkshake in hand, he confronted them. And in language that they would understand, he said, 'Excuse me, when you just hired that milkshake, what job were you trying to do?' And they looked at him kind of strangely—and he's a bit of a strange guy, so it makes sense, but I swear it's not me. And he said, 'Let me restate it: think about the last time you were in this circumstance, doing whatever it is you're trying to do. What else did you buy maybe to help you do that?' They said, 'We think we get what you're saying. You see, we've got this reasonably long, 20-30 minute drive to work in rush hour traffic. We're not starving now, but we know if we don't put something in our stomach, we'll be starving by 9:30 or so. It's pretty boring, so we want something to keep us occupied and full until, you know, 11:30 or so. And so come to think of it, last week we hired bagels to do this job. But take it from me, bagels don't do this job well at all, because they're dry and tasteless—unless you live in New York City, in which case you're not driving—and so to make them taste good you've got to spread cream cheese and jam on them, and that means you're driving with your knees while you're doing it, and if the cell phone rings you've got major problems. Now, I hired donuts last week as well, but that actually was terrible because I had to lie to my wife about it, and it wasn't a terribly believable lie because the steering wheel was totally gummed up and sticky when she got in the car the next time, and she called me out on it. I hired bananas once, but that was actually the worst of all things, because the banana was gone in 30 seconds, so I was bored for the entire commute, and it only kept me full until about 8:30, and I was starving the rest of the morning. But it turns out that when I come in here to this restaurant and get this milkshake, it does the job perfectly. Because it's so thick and viscous, it takes forever to suck up this tiny little straw, it easily lasts me the 20 or 30-minute commute, and I have no idea what they put in it, if it's healthy or not, but I don't actually care, because it sinks to the bottom of my stomach and easily keeps me full through the morning. And you know, God has given me two hands, and I always put one on the steering wheel and never knew what to do with this one, but there's a cup holder here and it just fits perfectly. So it turns out that the milkshake did the job better than its competitors, which were not just the milkshakes from Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, etc., but those things plus bagels, donuts, coffee, bananas, Snickers bars, you name it. And understanding it from a job perspective allowed you to see how you had to improve it to do that job.

Now contrast this with the afternoon—and I'll be brief here—people, same demographic, coming in, but this time as parents with their kids. And they would hire the milkshake to basically feel like a good parent. And they would drink it inside the restaurant, and invariably it was so thick and viscous that the kids would struggle to drink it up that tiny little straw, that about halfway through, the parents would get so frustrated they'd take the milkshake and throw it out and have a tantrum as they were going to the car with their kids. So it didn't do that job well at all. And you call that person in and ask how to improve it—what are they going to tell you? Now, this points to something fundamental about our schools as well. Understanding the job is critical—of what students are trying to do. And I got news for us: school is not a job that students are trying to do. I suspect that's not a revelation for many of you. But as we've studied this question, it seems clear that students have at least two critical jobs in their lives. Number one is to experience meaningful success and make progress basically every day in their lives. And two, to have fun with friends. And they can hire a wide variety of things to do these things. Ideally, schools compete with video games, athletics, arts, gangs, dropping out, and cruising around town, on and on and on along these jobs. And schools don't always do them so well. The factory-model system actually is set up to sort people out and make them experience failure. Contrast that with a competency-based online system where you have opportunities for success on a near-daily basis, as you have assessments woven into the delivery of learning so that you can get rapid feedback and constantly experience success as you master material and move on.

Now the question is: how do we, knowing these jobs, how do we actually execute a design to deliver on them? It turns out there's three levels of architecture in a job. The first one is that fundamental job to be done along functional, social, and emotional dimensions. The second one is: what are the experiences we need to provide to get the job done perfectly? So in that milkshake example, should we make the milkshake thicker or thinner? Should we put it in a different type of cup with a bigger straw? On and on and on. What are these experiences? And understanding the experiences then tells you what you have to provide and how you have to integrate these things to provide those experiences to get that job to be done. So how does this translate to school? I want to give an example of Summit Public Schools, a school network out of California expanding into Washington. It's a blended, competency-based school that I think has done this extremely thoughtfully. And while they didn't think of it quite this way, as Heather and I were observing it, we really felt that Summit's goal was how to help students achieve lifelong success. And for them, that meant students had to learn content knowledge, habits of success, get experiences beyond school in lots of different careers and parts of life, and develop cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills that would prepare them for ongoing success. But to get that done seamlessly, it meant that they had to get students' jobs to be done as well. And so they had to knit together eight experiences, as we've looked at it, to provide students. Student agency was a critical part of this. Individual mastery. Access to actionable data and rapid feedback. Transparency in learning goals to enable that opportunity to feel success and know where you're going. Sustained periods of quiet, solitary reading time so you could build those cognitive skills and experience success. Meaningful work experience to have opportunities to have fun with friends and experience success. Mentoring experiences. Positive group experiences. This is sort of how they conceptualized it. And to deliver on this, they started to put lots of things in place: individual playlists through Activate that allowed every child to go along at their pace and pathway toward mastery. Sixteen hours a week of what they call personalized learning time with a self-directed learning cycle for students to have that time to go through these playlists and really experience the success cycle. A comprehensive scope and sequence through graduation that is transparent, with transparent, rich, rapid feedback. And as you can see from this sample schedule, time for project-based learning to really enhance what they are doing. On Fridays, the students spend most of the day on their personalized learning time, but they have one-on-one sessions with mentors to fill those mentoring experiences. And they have eight weeks a year where they get off campus and go on expeditions in the community to really seize and see what is out there beyond schooling that might want to integrate with their opportunities for lifelong success.

Now, the next piece of this, after you've designed the student experience—and I just want to call out something our friend Alex Hernandez at the Charter School Growth Fund always says—is really just start with a blank slate. What are those student experiences? Don't even think about schedule and things like that, because once you've gone there, you've given away more design autonomy than you knew you had. So really start with that blank slate. But the next piece is to stay with that blank slate and now think about the teacher experience. So the first question of this is: how do we knit the teaching experience together such that it helps students with their jobs to be done? And the big question we would ask you to ask is: what's the best use of face-to-face time? And we would submit, increasingly, it's not a lecture, but instead opportunities for mentorship, facilitating discussions, tutoring, evaluating and providing rich feedback, counseling on all the non-academic aspects of a student's life that get in the way of learning, and really helping out in that way. But there's a second dimension to this teaching experience that's really critical to think about, and that's what motivates teachers. Because if we don't figure out and design experiences that motivate teachers, we aren't going to get anywhere.

A quick story just to tell you to illustrate why this is: there was a company that started some years ago called Color Match. And Color Match had this really cool idea where they would basically create the scanner that would analyze someone's hair color and tell you the exact blend of colors that you needed to blend together to be able to color their hair the color they were desiring to get. Now, I know what you all are thinking—that's how Michael gets the perfect silver in his hair. But actually, this is natural, because Color Match never took off. And you ask yourself a question: how could that be? Color Match sounds like an amazing technology that could take the guesswork out of coloring someone's hair—right? No more botched jobs that you just have to wait away for weeks and weeks at a time until it grows out. How could this not take off? And the answer was that this device that they sold—it was a few hundred dollars—they tried to sell it to high-end salonists who do the hair coloring for their clients. But from the perspective of the salonists—look, I don't have much sleep with twins these days, give me a break—so from their perspective, they had a very different job to be done, which is they saw themselves as artists blending together the right mix of hair coloring to get you that perfect hair color. And this took the guesswork out of it and violated their sense of their job to be done. And so they weren't interested in buying this device at all. And so the lesson from this—there's many—but one lesson from this is that in a system with multiple stakeholders that have to adopt and use a solution, you have to do all of their jobs to be done if you want to do any of their jobs to be done. And it's a critical thing we miss in education routinely, where we forget that besides students, there are teachers, administrators, boards of education, superintendents, parents, groups, community groups. And we have to understand their jobs to be done to get innovation to go through. It's one of the reasons it's so tricky to innovate in this sector. But in particular with teachers, we think there are clear ways to think about this, to design experiences that really motivate them and get them excited about these new designs to deliver on student jobs to be done. And we're drawing from this work is a really important article or body of research that was first published in 1968 by a guy named Frederick Herzberg, and it was about what fundamentally motivated employees.

Herzberg's big findings have unfortunately been almost completely ignored in the education field in designing experiences for teachers, and almost completely ignored by ed reformers in their attempts to set up systems to so-called motivate teachers—because they've totally misunderstood how motivation works. Herzberg's big, big finding was that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction do not exist on one continuum. It is possible to be both happy and dissatisfied in your job at the same time. So instead, there's one continuum with satisfied on one end, and the opposite of it is the absence of satisfaction. And there's another continuum with dissatisfied on one end, and the opposite of that is not satisfaction, but instead the absence of dissatisfaction. And what he found was that to make sure people were not dissatisfied with their jobs, that you had to address hygiene factors—things like how you felt about working with your boss, work schedules, things like that, basic work-life issues within the workplace itself. But to motivate people—that is what determined whether you were actually happy and satisfied and excited to come to work every single day. And those motivators, in order of their importance, were: achievement, recognition for the work, the work itself, responsibility, the opportunities to advance, and the opportunities for growth. And along these dimensions, we don't do a heck of a great job of motivating teachers. But blended learning schools around the world right now are rethinking: how do we integrate motivation with this so we can get teachers' jobs to be done so they can get students' jobs to be done? And so some of the things that we're seeing across the field are: extending the reach of great teachers to give them more responsibility and opportunities for recognition—Public Impact has done some great work on this area—specialization, team teaching, awards for achievement, and in effect micro-credentials as you master different skills of teaching, and granting more authority to teachers to make important decisions in the lives of students.

Now, after we've designed this teaching experience, this is finally when we start to come to the technology. You see how late in the process this is. It's not about the technology—the technology is an enabler. We have to get the experiences right, and then we put this technology in to allow us to do it at scale. This is when we're going to pick the content, think through the hardware needs—we need broadband—the facility infrastructure that we need, and so forth. Now, for time's sake, I'm not going to get into the details of this—you'll have to read the book. But I'm going to give you a quick overview, which is that as you're thinking about it, basically systems exist on a continuum between interdependent systems that are deeply integrated with each other and therefore maximize performance, contrasting with more modular systems—systems that can plug and play, mix and match, best-of-breed components—where there's a trade-off on raw performance, but it enables much more customization. And as you think through content, technology, and facilities, we think this is a really useful framework to think through these different decisions.

So for content, we basically see that there's four basic options. The first strategy is the most integrated of all, which is a DIY—do-it-yourself—strategy, which is to integrate backward and build the content yourself. Now, this may not be raw performance in terms of instructional design or something like that, but in terms of integrating with your particular standards, scope, and sequence, this is the most reliable way to do it outside of outside vendors that have to cater to lots of different needs. Now, there are huge trade-offs on this: it's expensive to keep content up to date, it's not easy to keep up with the latest technologies and opportunities for instructional design and findings on that. It's not easy, but that's one choice. A second one is to go with one outside provider—it's simpler in terms of cost often, but obviously there's limits in terms of customization, which is why we're seeing a lot of people work with multiple proprietary providers so that they get more customization. But the integration is not as good, and so we're hearing from the field lots of complaints between data integration and translating what do these different reports from different software mean for our students—it's challenging to integrate these things together. My colleague Julia Freeland, with Alex Hernandez, did an excellent report really bringing this to light over the summer. And then the fourth choice that we think will become increasingly popular in the longer run—but it's not quite here yet—is these facilitated network or platforms by which people start to write their content to the platform with the assessments embedded, which will give a lot more customization and resolve these data integration issues in the longer run, but are not quite there yet. So these are sort of the range of options. There's a whole bunch of other considerations when picking software—we list 12 in the book. I'm not going to go over these all right now, just call out a couple of them. One is: really think through what are the content needs based out of the student experiences and teaching experiences you've designed. Do you need a full course, or do you need supplemental content? How many hours of content do you actually need? Start to think through that. Think through compatibility issues with the technology that you're going to be bringing in as well. And that's where the technology comes in: do you need a one-to-one environment, or can you get by with two students or three students for every computer? Some of the most successful blended learning programs do.

And from there we can start to think about the facilities, and this exists on an integrated and modular continuum as well. And the big question that we'd like you to ask is: what's the best use of brick-and-mortar space? Increasingly, it's not clear that it's just a classroom to maintain order, but a place that provides safety, cleanliness, it's inspiring, it's available and flexible for these customized pathways. And we're seeing some exciting breakthroughs across the field right now, really rethinking architecture. Some people will hack their existing spaces to break free of the traditional egg-crate classroom structure of schools, that is very interdependent and limits customization. And some people are moving toward whole new buildings that do this from the get-go. So Summit Public Schools—courtesy of Susan Metcalf—this is a picture of what their learning environment looks like. It's much more open, modular, looks like a modern-day workforce. Intrinsic Schools in Chicago has just opened up with their new building. You can see some pictures of this as we tour through it. It is a much more inviting space for students—breakout rooms where they can work together. It doesn't look anything like a school or classroom. It's light, it's airy, there's opportunities for learning. And you can see that it looks very different. And what's more, it's actually far more cost-effective than traditional school-building design. On an instructional square-foot basis, it is far lower than the traditional schools that Chicago Public Schools has built over the last decade. So there's huge opportunities here if we start to reimagine what the use of space should look like.

Now, after we've gone through these design exercises, it's time to put this really to the test and get really practical and actually choose the instructional model that we'll actually be doing. And in the book we have a rubric there, which will be available on our website as well for free, just to help you go through all of these different questions around student, teacher, content, technology, facilities. Ask yourself a lot of questions about the problem you're solving and the team that you're deploying to figure out what's the right model for what you're trying to do. It's our observation that while some people are still inventing new instructional models in the blended learning space, increasingly that's rarer and rarer. And instead, people are basically using the same models over and over again and then tweaking and customizing or combining them for their circumstances. So whether it's a station rotation, or a lab rotation, or a flex model, or a flipped classroom—this is where you actually put that instructional model together and start to put the time that you will use for each activity and figure out how you're actually going to operationalize this design.

Now it's time to implement, and one of the things that we dedicate an entire chapter to in the book is shaping the culture. Because it's our observation that if you have a good culture, blended learning will accelerate it and make it great. But if you have a bad culture in place, blended learning will also accelerate that and make it even worse. And so it's really important to think through the habits, the practices, the processes, and priorities that you want students and teachers to take as they're working through their day. As problems arise, how do they solve them in repeatable ways that create a great culture of success around this learning? We spend some time defining what culture is—because it's a pretty vague term—and thinking through how do you actually practice that ahead of time, anticipating all the things that might arise so you can really nail this and get it right for students. Now it's time to actually put it into practice, and a big thing we talk about is: have some humility as you go into this final stage. Don't think that the solution you've come up with on paper is going to survive implementation with students. I'm almost certain that the first time you teach a novel lesson in social studies class, it never goes the way you thought it would the first time. Have that same humility with the design. And so we say: go through a discovery-driven planning process that reduces the risk of innovation with students, so that we avoid expensive failure in terms of student time and cost to the budget. What we say is: fail fast so you do not have a spectacular failure. What that means is identifying and prioritizing all the assumptions you're making that have to prove true to realize that SMART ring cry—that goal—that you've set for yourself, and then start to test and learn about which of those assumptions is right and not as you start to build closer and closer to launch. And keep iterating, adjusting, until you've really figured out what works, and then go full bore and really double down on that investment in putting this model out for students. We walk through this four-part process in the book to try to make this far easier for educators, so that we are not making these big risks in the community and we could have far more successes for students.

So I think we stand at really the precipice of an opportunity to take this amazing work that all of you are doing across this field, in this country, in other countries around the world, and take the online and blended learning and drive it so that every single child can realize success in the future. And all I want to do is, as I stand here now as a father with twin girls, is just thank you for all that you're doing to make the lives of students around the world far better. Because there's not a more important job in today's society as we head toward more and more complicated problems, more and more questions about what will employment, what will the future look like—the job that all of you are doing to shape that future of education, to shape the futures of every single child in your midst—is amazing. And I thank you so much for the opportunity to be part of this community and to continue that journey with you toward that student-centered future. Thank you so much.