Read the full transcript of Episode 38 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Dr. Jim Honan joining host Tim Fish for an in-depth conversation about the importance of strategy, accountability, and clarity of vision in the world of independent schools. Jim is a faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, senior associate director of the Advanced Leadership Institute at Harvard, and an NAIS board member.
Tim Fish: You know, as we think about designing the schools our students need, leadership and strategy are two essential parts of the system that we need to consider. And that’s where we’re going to focus our energy today.
To help us along, I am excited to welcome Dr. Jim Honan to the studio. Jim has served on the faculty at HGSE since 1991. He’s also a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy school, an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Public Leadership, and co-chair and senior associate director of the Advanced Leadership institute at Harvard University. Jim has worked for decades helping universities and nonprofit organizations around the world. And personally, you know, it’s interesting to me, because Jim is also an active member of the NAIS board and a faculty member at the Institute for New Heads. And I'll tell you, during our meetings, I often get to sit at Jim’s table, and every time I do, his perspectives and ideas and experiences always get me thinking in new ways.
Jim, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to join our conversation today.
Jim Honan: Tim, my pleasure. Looking forward to the conversation.
Tim Fish: Well, I'll tell you, it's going to be like, you know, at the board meetings, I always, I was always saying, I always try to nestle myself up next to you, because the conversations are always incredibly fascinating. So I'm sure that today will just be one of those conversations. You know, Jim, for me, I think about, you've been teaching in the Graduate School of education at Harvard since 1991.
The generations of people that you have had impact on, the lives you have touched, the mark you have made on leadership development in schools, is really amazing. I'm interested, as you think about all of that work with all of those leaders, what lessons have come through? What are the things that you would think about as key takeaways, as we think about leadership in education?
Jim Honan: Yeah, that's a great question and I appreciate the opening. So one of the great privileges of my
work here, Tim, is I teach with my teachers and my students. So this is truly an intergenerational partnership for me. That's what happens when you teach for a long time. Obviously the context for leading schools, whether they're independent schools or public schools, or even non-profit organizations, the context has changed over these decades.
And in my view, what is very interesting in our current work, my, both my current students and my current executive education participants, including the NAIS Institute for New Heads, where I've taught for many years. I think the roles are more complex in terms of the expectations of various stakeholders.
Certainly as we come through the pandemic, the context within which educational leaders do their work is much more complex than it was pre 2019. We also have resource challenges that I think are pretty fundamental, and this is certainly true in the independent school world. We'll get to this a little bit later in the conversation, but just the availability of financial resources to support what we want to accomplish in education is a much more complex proposition for people.
And the last thing I would say is the macro economic, political, social context within which educational leaders do their work. We're in complex times, and I think those are some of the dimensions of needing to think about what skills and capacities do leaders need to actually address those challenges.
Tim Fish: Yeah, so I, I'm curious, Jim, to follow up on that, like what were the skills and capacities that they needed when you began your career doing leadership development, and what are those specific new skills and capacities that you find leaders need now?
Jim Honan: Yeah, that's a good question. We, we think about this a lot. Certainly some of the leadership knowledge, skills, capacities, are more perennial. Things like having a vision, understanding the future prospects of the organization you are responsible for leading, paying attention to the people inside and outside the organization.
I think in particular for educational leaders is knowing a lot about teaching and learning. And so for me, and I have groups of these folks right now training the next generation of educational leaders, both independent schools and public schools, you need to know a lot more about teaching and learning, because that's such a rapidly changing thing. And I don't think leaders can be effective unless they can keep up with those particular trends. So be it technology, be it in this current context coming back through the COVID pandemic, what does teaching and learning look like? I think the human dimensions of finding, supporting, and retaining high quality teachers is a different kind of puzzle now.
So I always tell people, you know, pre 2019 and before, there was a high degree of risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty when you were an educational leader. That's exponentially increased in my view. So some of these rapidly changing contextual issues around teaching and learning and needing to build on the perennial skills.
That's the combination I see. And it's moving fast. I don't need to tell you that.
Tim Fish: Yeah, it sure is. You know, it makes me also think about, as you're describing it, and I'm living it every day when I talk with school heads and, and other leaders from schools, it's this idea like, you can't do it alone. There has never been, probably, a more important time to really embrace distributed leadership, working with a team. And I'm wondering what advice you have as school heads and other leaders are thinking about moving to a more distributed model.
Jim Honan: I'm sure there may have been a time, or there might be schools or nonprofit organizations where solo heroic leadership was something that was practiced. I'm sure that's true somewhere. Certainly in these times, what are we doing in terms of skills and competencies?
First of all, as you note, it's a team approach. It takes our, we use the term ensemble. At your best, you're the ensemble leader and you've got really talented skilled people around you, and your job is to bring them together. Another colleague who says the job of leaders is to help the people who are doing the jobs, identify the resources they need to do their best work.
That's a team sport. So I think, thinking beyond the role that one is in as a leader, and I should also say, leadership roles can occur at all levels in a school or an organization. So it's not just CEO, or head of school. So the team part of this, I think, is increasingly important. There's a little wrinkle there, because during the pandemic time we were conducting these ensembles on Zoom. And so lots of folks have brought on people that in some cases they've never met in person. So I'm sure you have that case as well.
So as we, as we move forward, it's that sense of connection among team members, among various people in various roles, be it teachers or staff members, et cetera. And then creating that sense of connectivity and belonging to show people there's some common purpose in the work. So sure. Call it what you will, playing well with others or understanding what the people in your organization need to do their best work and you being attuned to that. That's a team sport.
Tim Fish: That's team sport, all right. It sure is. As you know, and you and I have talked about, and you've been incredibly helpful with our thinking about how we design Strategy Lab at NAIS to, to really help schools think about their vision and strategy and sustainability. You know, all, as you think with leaders all over the place, what lessons have you learned that you can share with our listeners about strategy and innovation and thinking about the future?
Jim Honan: Indeed. So first off, just let me, with admiration, compliment you and our colleagues at NAIS. Just the fact that the Strategy Lab exists shows that NAIS is thinking about the future of education, and in my view, what it does, it provides the platform and the venue for school leadership teams, ensembles, to do this work. In and of itself, I just think that's a huge, huge and important priority, and I, I salute you and others who are resourcing that, doing that and leading those conversations.
So what are leaders supposed to do? Obviously the day-to-day work matters. I have a colleague here who reminds us some of our best work, the day-to-day work in a university, is celebrating the routines of the mundane.
Tim Fish: Hmm.
Jim Honan: Day-to-day tasks, we each need to come here every day. And it's those regular routine tasks that needs to be executed on a regular basis. Now that's part of the execution of a strategy, and I always remind people, don't forget the day-to-day routine stuff. That's terribly important.
On the other hand, then someone's tapping us on the shoulder and saying, Hey, what's happening next? How do we think about the future? And these days that word gets wrapped up in either the word innovation or some version of entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship or entrepreneurial activity. But the phrase meaning, something new and different that addresses what's happening in the future. So a couple observations on that.
My colleague, John Kotter, he reminds us that organizations need to maintain a dual operating system to do this well. You need to pay attention to the routine tasks and do them well on a regular basis. On the other hand, we need to leave room and space for innovation and keeping up with the future trends. So it's a both and. When I've talked to John, I've asked him this question before. I said, when does the innovative become routine? And at some points that's true because then we're pursuing the next level of innovation.
That's an important longer term institutionalization of innovation. And I've told a lot of my teams here, we were innovative for a while and now we're routine. Nothing wrong with that, but as we develop over a period of time, it brings it into the organization. Now, what do we do about innovation? Couple observations there. You know this better than anybody. Innovation is not free. Innovation takes financial and human capacity. Either doing something differently, above and beyond what we're doing, or something that's bolder and different than we've done before, just by the very nature of the, the definition.
And then the other part here, a caveat, and I'm incredibly sensitive to this on my various online and innovative tech teams, is I'm not a big fan of chasing bright shiny objects.
I think the caveat in the innovation space is we're not, I told my teams this, we're not just going to do this because it looks cool. That, wouldn't it be neat if we did this? It probably would be, and that would be awesome. We haven't done it before. It would be cool and neat, but on the other hand, it's not driven by some educational purpose.
So I was recently, recently had a little interview with one of our teams here, and I said, the pedagogy drives the technological innovation, not vice versa. So I'm not just going to do things on our team because we—could we do them? Absolutely. Would it be cool to do it? Sure. But unless it's driven by some pedagogical or teaching and learning purpose. That's not the kind of innovation I think we should be pursuing given choices and constrained resources. So the big puzzle there, Tim, is then the pace of that.
And some organizations are built for it. They, like, you're probably seeing this, the institutions or schools that come to the Strategy Lab obviously has, have that in their mindset, like we're interested in it and we want to do it. On the other hand, some organizations are not built for it. So the, whether it's at the board level, or the senior leadership team, or within the culture of the school, you don't have that either culture of innovation or trying new things, things of that sort.
Here's the last word. My colleagues who study innovation here, we need to be willing to take some, some risks, and to fail and to make some mistakes. My president Larry Bacow, over the many years, he has coached me. I've known him for a long time. He said, I'd like you and your team to make new mistakes. And so the idea there, in innovation, don't make the same mistake twice, cause you're supposed to learn from them. And that's not a good idea. But we think we're doing good work if we're making new mistakes
Tim Fish: New mistakes.
Jim Honan: And a new mistake would be something innovative we haven't tried before. It's a measured risk and it, he didn't say big mistakes. It's new ones, so we don't want to have the whole thing go under. But in my view, having presided over a number of teams in my great good fortune of being involved in just some incredible teaching and learning innovation, stuff I never would've imagined. And all, much of this was even pre COVID, so it just wasn't COVID driven, is that element of being willing to be bold, giving us the resources we need to try, making some new mistakes and keeping our learning going, right, so that we don't make the same mistake twice usually. So those are just some thoughts in that space. And then I, you know, I'm thoughtful about this, the innovative does at some point become routine. It never ends.
Tim Fish: It never ends.
Jim Honan: There’s always something else.
Tim Fish: Well, that's, I, you know, I have this whole mountain analogy thing, and it, for me, it's like, we're just, we're, we are communities of mountain climbers. We are always hiking. You know, we are, we live on the mountain, right. It, this is not episodic. This is not something that's done every five years, you know?
And, and Jim, I've been sort of on this quest to really think hard about this, the concept of the five year strategic plan, the way they've been done in the past, and where they've been successful and where they haven't been successful and why. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about this idea of strategy.
Cuz for me, strategy is really just the implementation of a vision in many ways. It's the things you do, the choices you make, in order to move a vision forward. And innovation should be what I call downstream of strategy. It should be connected to your strategy, not random, not chasing the bright and shiny.
And I'm wondering, this, this concept of strategy, I think sometimes we don't fully understand it. I'm thinking particularly of the work of Michael Porter at Harvard Business School around this idea about, his notion of strategy is really competing to be unique. It's about differentiating yourself.
Do you have thoughts on how we can think about strategic planning and how we can think about strategy?
Jim Honan: Yeah, it's a great question and you've been doing some good work in thinking and doing on this one. So a couple observations. One, I say within the independent school sector, let's remind ourselves, and it was my friend Andy Watson who reminded me, they're called independent schools for a reason. That they're supposed to be unique and special. It's not a one size fits all. Don't forget they're independent.
And that's important as we think about strategy, whatever the mission is of the organization, whatever its defining unique characteristics. That's what we're trying to execute a strategy on over a period of time. So I'm a big fan of the work of Henry Mintzberg, who makes a distinction between deliberate strategy and emergent strategy. So the deliberate strategy might be this classic, whether it's a one year plan, two year plan, five year plan, thinking ahead of time and articulating some sort of strategy or intended thing you want to pursue, and doing that.
On the other hand, then we leave room for emergent possibilities. And this is especially important these days, always was important, but especially so now. Can we be nimble? Can we be flexible, opportunistic, something? And so Mintzberg, it's a both and. And so whenever I teach this stuff, I, my favorite line from him, he said, when we think about planning and strategy, we have to do some thinking ahead of time and some adaptation en route.
Tim Fish: Mm-hmm.
Jim Honan: Thinking ahead of time and some adaptation. So it's a both and.
Tim Fish: It's a both and.
Jim Honan: And so now, how, what does it mean to do whatever you want to call it, strategy development? Right now in these times, as I said before, there was always a decent amount of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty in our environments. That's exponentially more vivid right now. So there's more, more risk, more uncertainty, more ambiguity.
So if that's true, then what kind of planning or strategy development processes do we go through? A little more on the emergent side. A little more nimble. The five year plan thing will probably be wrong. We are seeing places do some more scenario work where we just write three stories and see what those would look like.
One of our colleagues, Peter Scoblic, does some work, it's called Learning from the Future, and he talks about the concept of strategic foresight.
Tim Fish: Hmm.
Jim Honan: Let's practice a little, what could this look like and what are some scenarios? So that's a little shift I have seen. If you need any reminder that this traditional five year planning might not be the way to go or might not be the only way to go, I just tell people, just trot out your fiscal or academic year 19 plan and take a look at that.
Tim Fish: Take a look. How's it working? How's it working for you?
Jim Honan: Because in our teaching, and this is quite important on what we're in. Fiscal 20 was the pivot year. So the pandemic kind of really affected us mid-March of that year, including me. Fiscal 21 was one of the longest and most complex academic and fiscal years ever because we didn't have any idea what was going to happen. Vaccines and other kinds of things. Fiscal 22 continued to be sort of a transition year of schools are back, we're open, but we're this, that and the other thing. So where we're reminding people to go is downfield. And we probably just voted fiscal 24 budgets recently in a lot of organizations and schools.
But for me, the action's downfield, so 24, 25, 26. So the strategy development, it seems to me, would be in that much more uncertain, much more risky, much more ambiguous context. And the planning is just going to feel a little bit different.
Last word, it should be linked to resources. So you always say you can't spend money you don't have. Planning and innovation is also not free. So a little more back to that financial sustainability issue. We need to link the budget and the plan.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, I was thinking, I was reading some thinking from a strategist recently who was talking about, you know, the notion that strategy shall also be completely connected to your action and what you're thinking about actually doing, and that it's almost like building a house and thinking about building a house.
That as you're going through that process, you're always sort of in touch with, well, how much can I afford? How big can this house really be? What am I going to really put in it? What's it going to really look like? How am I going to, and the same with any building. And this idea that we don't, we don't design the building and then say, OK, now how would we actually build it?
We're, we're constantly, always, in a dance. The both and, as you're saying. I mean, a theme that's emerging for me in this conversation is this concept of both and, that we need to be emergent and deliberate. That we need to be managing the day-to-day, and thinking about the future. That we need to be both an individual leader, making decisions sometimes, and we need to be building a team and working with a team.
That this sort of key element of leading schools forward is this ability to be in a both and state, sometimes, right? To manage these two different modes of leadership.
Jim Honan: I think that's right. And then thinking about just positioning the organization in this particular way. We boil it down to a couple things in our teaching. It's, it's a, an argument we make, we say, on average it's a good idea to have a strategy. So do whatever you need to do to do that. We think it's really important to fund it and do it, your point on execution, and sometimes people underestimate that stuff. I always want to tip my cap to people who can execute well. And in schools, this means knowing a lot about teaching and learning, right? Well-executed all the way around. Designed well, and funded.
And then the last part, Tim, I would say is, let's remind ourselves if we have a strategy and then we fund it and do it, the back end of this is important. It should make us a better school. And we always try to connect that dot, to say, OK, we, yeah, we, we had a plan, a strategy. We funded it, we did it, but it didn't make us better. Or we're, we're not achieving our, our sort of improvement as a school. I never take my eye off the horizon. It is like, did it make us a better school?
Tim Fish: And what I love about that, Jim, is this idea of like, well, how do we know it made us a better school? What measures do we have? People often say like, this notion of emergent strategy or this notion of more agility and more nimbleness means that we're not actually putting measures in place. And I couldn't, I couldn't disagree more.
I think actually we are putting measures in place. What we're not doing, though, is pulling the planning and the measurement and all that stuff to the very front. We're allowing the emergence to come forward where we're then saying that's where we're going to go. And then we're saying, how are we going to measure and know if we actually achieved our goals or are making progress in our goals?
Jim Honan: Well, just a quick point on that. So the implementation of some of these emergent things, back to the, the concept of the innovative becoming routine. It's not to say we're just zigzagging around and doing something this year and that year, just emergence all over the place. You know this, is, educational improvement or improving a school is a long-term process, and so sure we're going to be innovative in certain ways and then, we're going to have to stick with some of these strategies over time.
The success is not overnight. And upfront saying, what would success look like and how and when could it be measured? That's the back end of this. And I would also say lastly, don't forget, it is anchored in mission. We're not just having this random thing, we don't want mission creep. We don't want emergent, bright shiny objects.
So that's interesting to do, but that doesn't further our mission. I think for boards and certainly for heads, our ultimate duty is to achieve the mission of the place, that, what is, what we've been entrusted to do with those resources. And improving it.
One last comment on that. Obviously there are processes for this in parallel. Most schools have some sort of accreditation or self-study process that allows the organization to reflect on its achievements and possibilities moving forward. So I always like to link any strategy development to any accreditation, quality control, or self-study process as well. Certainly a lot of work, and you might as well link it to the strategy work.
Tim Fish: That's right. That's right. And it, you know, it does also make me think about this idea of, you know, as we think about what quality looks like, as we think about mission, as we think about grounding our strategy and our mission, which is essential, I think sometimes for me when I talk to schools about what is your mission?
Like I, I have this little thing I do sometimes. I'm like, Hey, check in. Let's check in on that mission.
Jim Honan: I think that's right.
Tim Fish: And I think often what I find is, when people go back to the mission statement, when we say check in on the mission, everyone goes and reads the mission statement and they say, well, does that do the job for us? Is that thing, is that—?
And yes, sometimes they're like, that is our mission. Other times they're like, is that our mission? That? And so what happens is, I think sometimes schools find themselves floating without a true, clear understanding of what their mission really is, and I think that's when we can start getting into this strategy, which leads us all over the place. Because we don't, we're not connecting it to that essential element, which is that grounding mission, I think.
Jim Honan: Totally. Now back to independent schools, and this is important. As Andy Watson said, that's why we call them independent schools. So it's even more important that we articulate the mission. I've seen this in the college world. Occasionally someone will say, you know, have you ever seen a mission like this? Isn't this unique? And with deep respect, the answer is, there's like ten other places who say they're doing that. So that can't be the uniqueness.
I think there's this added expectation and burden, if you will, in independent schools, on the point you made, to really be crisp and clear about that. This is what's distinctive about us, and this is how we're going to execute on it. And we have data to show that we execute on that unique, call it what you will, mission or value proposition. When it's fuzzy, and this could be the starting point of a strategy activity and people would know, you would know that just what you said or we're fuzzy on this.
We do a little exercise where we say, OK, let's check this out here. Give a little three by five card out to a board meeting or senior leadership team, or whoever's around and said, in five words or less, can you capture the essence of our mission? We write it down, you pass the cards up front, and we look for coherence. And there's nothing more interesting than just say, let's just start reading those cards, five words or less. Here's what we think. These people around this table, who know this place, this is what they think is the essence of our mission.
Now, When there's coherence or convergence, you're like, OK, that's pretty darn awesome. There's a shared sense of that. When all of a sudden you start reading and someone says, I think you can stop, right? Don't read anymore. I already get the sense that we're all on very different pages. That becomes the early strategy conversations. Let's get that anchor set.
Tim Fish: That's right. And I, what I always say to schools at that point, do not pass go, do not collect $200, like do the, do the mission work, because the strategy work, you're not grounding in anything. It's like building a house on sand.
Jim Honan: You just start to build stuff. You say, oh, put a wall up over here. Let's build a porch. It's like, no, no, stop it. I need a house picture first. Gimme the plans.
Tim Fish: That's right. Well, Jim, one of my favorite things that you do at the Institute for New Heads is, you have led so brilliantly for so many years, the session on finance. And I've loved being there for that session and hearing you spend time with new heads, and one of the most consistent things that I hear from, from school heads and from board members and others, is this question about the long-term sustainability of independent schools.
This sort of notion, people will often say, the model's broken, the model doesn't work, this thing can't last forever. What's your sense of that? You know as much about this question as anyone, what's your sense about our future as independent schools and how we can think about sustainability?
Jim Honan: Yeah, I, I chuckle sometimes, I forget how many years I've done the Institute for New Heads, but I know I have a perfect attendance award for almost three decades now. So that's what I'm working on.
Tim Fish: Wow.
Jim Honan: Always, always, always, there has been this concern, and the word has been out there about sustainability.
This is true of private colleges as well. So a long, long time ago, I worked in the budget office here at our university, and I remember one of my early projects was lining up some multi-year analysis on tuition, financial aid, median family income, some drivers, if you will, of affordability in higher ed.
The same would be true in independent schools. And I remember at the time, this is many decades ago, people said, oh my goodness, maybe we're not going to be sustainable, or maybe the business model won't work. Well, do the math. There was a little institute or convening a long time ago of independent school leaders on financial sustainability, decades ago.
And so it never goes away. So I think the concern is always good. We should always be looking at the long term. But here's a couple observations that I think do portend to increased urgency for this. The corollary issue in independent school business models is affordability. And so this is real, and this is true of private colleges as well, and as institutions right now, you just see this in the press, colleges and universities starting to announce their tuition increases and then giving you that bottom line number of, in college, tuition, room and board. Independent schools, which is the overall tuition and fees number. Those numbers are growing and that's really important to figure out. And it's complicated. So in the sustainability of the business model of an independent school, if it's tuition and financial aid on the revenue side, maybe some endowment, maybe some fundraising, and then salaries and people and infrastructure on the expense side. It is hard to line those numbers up when you're also thinking about affordability. The optics of what this looks like.
Now, independent schools attract a relatively small share of students overall, students and families, so maybe the thing is, OK, if we can continue to attract families of some number, we will all be viable and sustainable institutions. If that's not true, then all of a sudden we have these incredible pressures on, as you said, on the business model. And what are the drivers, right? We want innovation. We want good teachers. We want to have good people. That's going to push us on the salary side. On the expense side.
Most independent schools are places. And so the other investment we need to make is what's school, less place? And if it's a boarding school, it's residence halls, things of that sort. If it's a day school, just the general infrastructure to be a, a viable independent school. And so for me, you know the answer many times is to say, let's diversify the business model. That's always been true, but I think it just requires some really thoughtful reflection and decisions on the big drivers. And at some point, the tuition will become out of control, and not affordable and not accessible to the requisite number of people, and we won't have the resources to do the financial aid discounting.
So I think those are the conversations. Worst case scenario, and sadly we see this, we see this in the higher ed world, and I, I'm sure we see elements of this in the independent school world. Being unsustainable is a possibility. And when that happens, schools or colleges close or merge. And so one of the horizon issues, and it's very serious, is when boards and senior teams of either schools or colleges see, what if we're not sustainable? What do you do after that? Closing is one possibility. And the other possibility, and it's a thing, would be mergers and collaborations. And the last thing I see in some cases where in the higher ed space is mergers and acquisitions, larger places acquiring smaller places, and I could imagine we might see a little more of that in the coming years.
Tim Fish: I think we may, and I think sometimes I think those are, those are things that can be really, really powerful and really strong. And some great things can emerge from that. And there have been examples where that's worked out really well. And I've also, one I might add to that, Jim, would be where I've seen schools think about a different model.
You know, we're going to, we're going to reimagine ourselves to be a school, instead of 400, of 165.
Jim Honan: Sure.
Tim Fish: And we're going to rebuild the expense structure and rebuild the model. And that's going to, and we can be a thriving school at 165, and that's what we're going to build to.
Jim Honan: Sure.
Tim Fish:And I think that can be a really interesting way of, of moving forward. And I think that that's, that can be OK, you know, and I think again, it comes back to that notion of what's our mission, and how are we living into that mission?
Jim Honan: I think that's right. That will require very innovative heads and boards to grapple with what you just described.
Tim Fish: Yes, it, it really will. So, you know, I also know that from our conversations, that you've done and do every day, a whole lot of online learning. And you've designed for it, you've been a true leader in this field, both with your work with Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School.
I'm curious what you think about the future of online learning, and how much is this going to become more and more the way that people learn? Should we be doing things in K-12 to help prepare students for that reality of online learning?
Jim Honan: Yeah, this is a big and a great question. My great good fortune is this is my 15th year of teaching online. And so that's well before the pandemic, and well before Zoom was a thing, so whatever the four online platforms were before Zoom, we were on them with my teams here. So it's about 15 years ago, one of my colleagues at the Kennedy School invited me and said, listen, we think you should teach online.
I'd never done it before and didn't know why I was being called in to do this. And they said, because it would be good for what you do. And so I was given resources to do my best work, and we tried. We got some stuff going. Ironically, earlier today, I just taught in that program, and we're now in our 16th year.
Tim Fish: Congratulations. Wow.
Jim Honan: Thank you. At the time, it was innovative. At the time, we were built for it, again, whatever that was, 15 years ago. So obviously the program has changed and the pedagogy changes quite a bit and we have different infrastructure and things. So the first thing I would say is it's, it's helpful, to be effective in the online space, to be built for it.
Tim Fish: Hmm.
Jim Honan: And this is well before COVID. And so in the higher ed space—and we're blessed with resources here to do that—we're built for it. And we were built for it well before COVID. In the higher ed space, you know, places like the University of Phoenix or Southern New Hampshire University or Western Governors University. These are, if you will, the big box store metaphors of online higher education. There's some elements I'm sure in K-12 that do that.
So what does it take to be built for it? First of all, it takes infrastructure. And so what we learned during the pandemic, the peak of it, is sadly, both at the higher ed and K-12 level, both independent schools and public schools. I'm sure you might have seen it as well. We saw a lot of not so good teaching and learning taking place. And that's unfortunate. Obviously the urgency of the situation pushed it, but literally we weren't built for it. And unfortunately, young people suffered in that regard. I think teachers suffered because it was really hard to do.
They were trying their best to design and execute in an online space. Maybe in some cases, never having done it before. Just, you're at home on your laptop trying to make things happen. The other part, as I said before, is the pedagogy should drive the technology, not vice versa.
And so in our world, when you're built for it, our time, as you said before, back to strategy, is, we design the house. We don't just start building stuff or turn on Zoom or let's go do stuff. We have incredible, thoughtful, pedagogical and content design up front before we do anything. We practice. We rehearse every single session. So it's designed, it's practiced and rehearsed before we go live. And then back to strategy, we execute well. So we have requisite infrastructure and staffing. I'm blessed. I have an Emmy award-winning producer. I have two incredible designers. I have, I teach in the finance area, so I have three skilled finance professionals on our team. When our team comes to play, it's been designed well, executes well, and not surprisingly, you do a good job.
The last thing I would say is this is scalable work. So we do some work at a pretty high scale. Where's the future of that? I think you'll see a differentiation. A lot of places have already gone back to, thank goodness we're back, face to face, so we don't have to do any more of that nasty Zoom stuff.
We do some hybrid work, so the both and, and we're built for that too. So nothing like a good hybrid classroom. So you can have a full classroom of in-person and a whole bunch of people out in the world on Zoom. That you need to be built for as well. So then you need a hybrid team and hybrid facilities. And then back to your other point, I'm sure this is going to be true in the work world, and certainly it'll be true in college for, then, elementary and middle or high school students is, it's a skill people will need. How to work remotely, how to work in technology, mediating, in mediated ways, and to be built for that. So I think there's a certain responsibility to our students to do this, but I think the bigger responsibility on the institutions, I think it's really important.
We shouldn't be doing it on the fly. Ask the question, what it would mean for our school to be built for high quality online teaching and learning, and do that.
Tim Fish: Such a great point. And just like we do in our schools and our in-person experiences, we ask ourselves all the time, what does it, what does it look like to be built for an in per—to be the best possible in person learning.
Jim Honan: Exactly.
Tim Fish: And, and we should be saying, if we decide we're going to play in the online space, we should be saying the same thing.
I think that's such a powerful idea.
Jim Honan: And it can be both and. I bet you're not going to stop doing the intensive in-person thing. So yes, and that's not free.
Tim Fish: That's right. That's right. And, and so I, but I think your point is well taken and, and that's what I've been so impressed by when I, when I have conversations with you about the impact you can have in this space. It's incredible. You can do incredible learning and you have to be built for it.
Jim Honan: Yeah. I mean, I, this is a part I feel really sad about Tim, and no disrespect and if, if you see badly done online, I think it's bad for the teachers. It's bad for the staff who are trying to help people, and worst of all, it's not good for the students. That makes me incredibly sad.
Tim Fish: Yes, yes. You know, and Jim, as we look out to the future, and this conversation has been incredible, as we look out, my last question is, as we look out to the future and we think about where education is headed, I'm going to ask you to kind of put your futurist hat on a little bit. And you know, I know, I've seen work that you've done with Chris Dede at Harvard and this area, and he's an incredible educational futurist.
And I'm thinking about, you know, what do you see for the future, as we think about teaching and learning, as we think about education and the schools our students need. What's your, what's your sense as a futurist on education?
Jim Honan: I would let my expert colleagues, and you and others who are much smarter than I be the futurist, but just a couple dimensions of what we see. Certainly in more recent times, especially this year, we see the emergence of some of the artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT.
How do we think about that as an educational tool? Where does it fit in how people give school assignments? Can teachers use stuff like that productively? I think something like that will take a lot more knowledge and capacity building on the part of teachers to, to understand it and know how to do that well.
That goes back to my future of teaching and learning. That's here to stay. And my friend Chris Dede writes about this all the time, so sure. On his Silver Linings podcasts are, there's over 150 episodes. I did one once, all about the future of education. People should have those conversations, but you gotta be good at these things. So that one in particular, that's going to take some capacity on the part of teachers, first of all to understand it. And then second of all, how to productively utilize it within their repertoire.
I do think as we think about the future at all levels of education, we may revisit what the purpose is. Like, what are we really trying to do anyway? And certainly during these times, we are worried about the wellbeing of young people at all levels. And so my colleagues who do work on thriving and flourishing, how do we think about that for young people? What does it mean to thrive and flourish in this world? And for me, that goes to the purpose, the core purpose of teaching and learning.
Assumedly, that's what we're trying to work on with our students for their lives, if you will. What does a good life look like? A well, you know, surrounded by some wellbeing, some happiness would be a good thing as well. What does it look like to do that work in this future time that lies ahead? So that would be one.
Certainly the macroeconomic, demographic and political challenges. We remain in complex times. Not just here in the United States, but in our world. And I think schools and teachers, and even education itself is in the political debate. So figuring out what that looks like is what's the role of parents, what will be taught, what does good outcome look like for teaching and learning? I think all of those are in play, so I know for sure is there will not be a shortage of important strategic conversations that boards and school leaders will need to engage in.
I guess my last word would be, but you need to be in them. And so any of the things that I just named, it would be irresponsible to say, oh, then maybe we don't have to do that work. That's back to this constant, that's the next level, that's the next terrain of what we're going to have to figure out in the coming years. And after that, there'll probably be more that we'll have to figure out. But that's what makes it exciting.
Tim Fish: That's what makes it exciting. Jim, that is such a great way to end, and I just want to say thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule, taking the time to share your wisdom. You've been impacting lives, as I said in the top of the hour, for generations, and I just want to say thank you.
It's been, it's been incredible getting to know you. It's been incredible calling, calling you a friend, and I look forward to more conversations in the future.
Jim Honan: Sounds great. You as well. I admire you greatly. Thank you so much, Tim. Appreciate the opportunity.