Education is undergoing a period of dramatic evolution. The number of options families have for their children’s education is expanding at a rate never seen in human history. Schools that understand and deliver what families want and need will survive and thrive in the future; those that do not risk losing the critical mass of students they need to stay alive. This may not be the hand educators want, but it is the hand we have been dealt.

This book shows education and school community leaders:

• The real roles of strategy and innovation
• How to build and deliver on a cohesive and strong value proposition
• The big tools of strategic design
• Proven tools for bringing about organization-wide change in a department, school, or district
• New and proven ways to engage with, understand, and measure what your community wants and needs
• Ways to ignite and measure the impact of innovative projects in your school or district

PLUS, appendixes that include:

• Proven, interactive, engaging activities that you can use with your own teams
• Grant’s personal five-year archive “starter kit” list of schools, networks, conferences, and other resources where educators just like you are “doing school differently”.
• Summaries of books that you may not have read that will help your team re-imagine how schools might work now and in the future.

Education has been stuck for decades due to contrarian forces that have pushed back and forth with little net result. It turns out that WE can transform schools without permission or empowerment from the forces that have created this inertia in the first place. There are at least seven powerful, audacious levers we can press on, and all seven are successfully transforming the learning experience in schools and districts today:

• Creating Demand for Future-Leaning Schools
• School-Community Learning Laboratories
• Free, Universal Access to Knowledge
• Measuring Success and Re-tooling College Admissions
• Teacher Training for Deeper Learning
• Building Learning Around Connectivity
• Building Leadership Capacity in Our Schools

At the end of each chapter there are specific steps that all of us—teachers, parents, students, administrators, philanthropists, university and business leaders—can take to collectively turn the pioneering work of others into school transformation at scale.

Every educator wishes they had more time—to see what others are doing, share with colleagues, learn what is working and what is not. Grant Lichtman took that time: he drove his Prius around America, visiting 65 schools in 89 days to find out: What does innovation actually mean in education? How are schools successfully transforming out of the Industrial Age model of learning? What is working for others?

• New ideas about time, space, people, and school structures
• Schools becoming more dynamic, adaptable, creative, and permeable to the world
• Rising to the existential challenges facing education
• Leaving the assembly line in the past
• Ecosystems: the way ahead
• New pathways of strategy

Based on a ground-breaking seminar for high school students, one of the first books to highlight the power of “What if”… to deliver the keys of design-based problem solving and strategic thinking to both children and adults…to bring the timeless wisdom of The Art of War into the grasp of both teachers and students of all ages…weaving a fable for children with concrete steps to overcoming life’s inevitable big challenges.

• Who do I want to be?
• Finding problems before seeking answers
• Questions are the waypoints of the path of wisdom
• A system for understanding and solving problems
• What do we do when problems don’t want to be solved?
• What does falconry have to do with learning?
• Searching for “elegance”