56. Thrive Book Review: Promise and Deliver

It has become popular to sneer at our education system’s factory model. 

We call for the death of schools in favor of Airbnb-like learning communities. Our SAT/ACT testing culture, our boring direct-instruction content-dumping, our mental health issues - these are easy targets.

But schools can thrive, and many are doing so. Only the job of the school, and the teacher, needs to change.

To accompany our recent interview, I wanted to write a short book review of Thrive: How Schools Will Win the Education Revolution by Grant Lichtman. Grant is a thought leader and author. He speaks, writes, and works with fellow educators to help them innovate. Educational leaders, as well as a wider array of pundits on education, need to internalize the ideas Grant lays out in his most recent book. 

For example:

How to ask your community what your value proposition should beHow to learn from what the corporate world is doingHow to make hard choices: “A strategy is choosing what not to do”How to accelerate movement by removing barriers. (Change is like a muscle)How to research, design, prototype, test, again and again, slowly then fasterHow to reveal what your new job is!How to take more riskHow to increase the innovation DNA of your school (most schools lack innovation DNA)

At Enrollhand, we often meet school leaders who feel out of touch, whose schools are stagnating. We share with them many of the concepts below, but Grant has a silver tongue and does a way better job of telling it like it is!