From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)Creating School for Students

Purchase From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)Creating School for Every Child

Transcript

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, prior to the spring of 2020, higher ed was notorious for its glacial pace of change, but the pandemic really gave institution's permission to think differently, everything from the academic calendar to how they deliver education.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, thinking differently was true in basically every industry, as you know, Jeff, as COVID upended healthcare, retail, and of course, the entire life cycle of education, not just in higher ed, but from elementary schools all the way through higher ed. Innovation was no longer a buzzword, it was the only word. Schools needed to change quickly and, a favorite word of yours, Jeff, pivot to deliver on their core missions.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, Michael, there isn't really much from the early days of COVID that most of us would like to keep. But as a catalyst for change, I think the pandemic really put us in a mindset for accelerated experimentation. Michael, you released a new book this past summer called From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)Creating School for Every Child, and what makes From Reopen to Reinvent stand out for me is how constructive it is. You don't just talk about the need for change, you really provide educators with practical examples and roadmaps. Today, we're going to expand our look at education and dip into change in K to 12 on this episode of Future U.

Sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information, policy and institutional transformation. This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals.

Sponsor:

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Michael Horn:

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo:

And I'm Jeff Selingo. We've done this a few times in the six seasons of this podcast where one of us takes off our co-host hat and that person is really the guest. Today, it's Michael's turn to do that. Michael, your new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, not only tackles K through 12 change, but many of the concepts and recommendations and it can also be applied to much of higher ed. Let's jump in with a question I think every author gets the first time they write a book is, so why did you write this?

Michael Horn:

I love the question, Jeff, and thanks for letting me be on the hot seat today. Honestly, when the pandemic hit, Diane Tavenner, who has led Summit Public Schools for 20 years, and I started this podcast called Class Disrupted, not to two-time on you, Jeff, but just because it was more focused on K12. We were getting all these questions from parents that were like, "What the heck is going on? Why does school work this way? This makes no sense. Why does my kid have so many worksheets?" All these sorts of questions, right? All these people simultaneously were like, "We can't go back to normal. We have to do it differently when we start to come and reopen schools," and so forth.

Michael Horn:

Honestly, I got frustrated because people are returning to normal and they're abandoning changes. Yeah, there was a lot that was not ideal, obviously, about the couple years that have been interrupted by the pandemic, but I think that they can give us a gateway to really rethinking some of these fundamental precepts in K-12 education that hold students in place, hold them back. I really wanted to write a useful book that said, "Hey, here's a vision for how it can be better for each and every student and here's a pathway that you can actually implement it and create some capacity given all that districts are under right now.

Jeff Selingo:

The book starts off with this strong argument that K through 12 schools should abandon their zero-sum mindset, the notion that for every winner there's a loser, and instead move to something you call a positive-sum system, in which there the pie grows larger as individuals achieve success. You write, "A big benefit from moving to a positive-sum system is that instead of competing to be the best, as in a zero-sum game, you compete to be unique. In that this is, in fact, how much of our world operates today and education, in many ways, is sort of the anomaly."

Jeff Selingo:

But I'll note that one reason why it's such an anomaly is because education really has this scarcity mindset that there are only a certain number of seats at the top to be won, if you will. And as you know, I've long said that this is really a higher ed problem, and it's a higher ed problem in certain ways somewhat unique to the United States where we really think that the best school should only have a few seats and there's just fewer seats for so many of the top people today. Michael, can we really move to a positive-sum education system unless we tackle this question in higher ed?

Michael Horn:

Jeff, I think it's an insightful question. I mean, K12 education is fundamentally a dependent system on higher ed, and we've awfully narrowed the game of what success looks like to "getting into good colleges," right? When those colleges are selective and small, to your point, we've really created actual scarcity, not just perceived scarcity. In many ways, I think that's the beginning of that zero-sum system. I think that's all right. I think the book in that way is a call out for higher ed to change the game as well.

Michael Horn:

I mean, Joseph Aoun told us, and we've quoted it several times, that higher ed institutions are not really differentiated, and yet we all talk to high schoolers and we tell them, "Look for the college that fits you." Where is the real fit? But it's awfully hard for those high schoolers when they look at a lot of schools that look pretty freaking similar. I don't think it helps the colleges, which is part of the argument, Jeff. I think that lack of differentiation actually constrains their recruiting. It makes them play this game themselves that is getting increasingly hard in an era of demographic declines and people being skeptical about college.

Michael Horn:

I think there's this concept of distance traveled or what in K12 circles we would call value added growth or individual growth, like ASU's mission about being able to serve any learner regardless of that starting point. If we're serious about competing to be the most unique person you can be, developing people into the best versions of themselves, then I think higher ed has a ton of work to do. Your question, frankly, it's a really good push. At the same time, there are a ton of things that K12 can do to take some steps down this path.

Michael Horn:

A huge piece of that in my mind is moving to mastery-based learning or what's often called competency-based in higher ed, where we say that all students will learn and we're going to embed success in the environments for all learners, such that it's not like the zero-sum game where it's I win, you lose, but let me show like this is how I mastered this and now let me help you master it too and let's celebrate how we've started to move in these different directions. I think there are some promising signs on that, like Mastery Transcript Consortium, for example, working with a lot of colleges and universities, working with a lot of K12 schools.

Michael Horn:

They're allowing learners to create portfolios showing mastery in their unique set of things that they have done. I wonder, could it be disruptive to the college board if fewer people are taking the SAT? It's harder to get lead gen. Maybe the Mastery Transcript says like, "Hey, Rezdy, we've got the 10 best artists in the country and they can show you their portfolio. You go recruit them. Olin College, here you go, find the engineers and BAPS and the entrepreneurs," and on and on. I think K12 has an obligation to be at the table and try to change this.

Jeff Selingo:

This is exactly where I wanted to move to next. Mastery-based learning is something you do make a huge push for. Why is this so central in your mind to reform and how does it relate into higher ed? As you say, you call it mastery-based learning instead of competency-based education, which is the term used in higher ed. Are they really that different?

Michael Horn:

Upfront to say, most people in K-12 I think also call it competency-based education. The reason I reframed it is I think from a parent perspective, if you hear competency-based education, who wants to just be competent? Number one. Number two, I think it sounds wonky, whereas mastery-based, they sort of get it right as a lay person. And then third, in higher ed circles at least, competency-based education is often equated with this notion of direct assessment for prior learning.

Michael Horn:

Whereas from my perspective, I want to talk about that, but what I really want to talk about is that we're moving from this time based system to one where we're going to do whatever it takes to make sure that you master the critical knowledge, skills, competencies, ability to do things. And that success, that learning is going to be guaranteed, and therefore we're creating a more rigorous learning system. This is actually better for learning itself. It changes the mindset, Jeff, of how you serve students, right? No longer are you sitting there saying, "Hey, some of these students are going to get it. Some of these aren't. I'm sitting there evaluating which of them are," and so forth.

Michael Horn:

Instead, I'm going to put whatever resources I need to bring to bear to make sure that students are going to master the material. I'll say Western Governors University in the higher ed sector, I talk about it a lot in the book, it's a major inspiration for how to do this well, where they don't have teachers being the graders of their own students. I think higher ed actually has done some things in mastery-based learning around rigor and around industry certifications and things of that nature that K12 needs to look at as they start to think about this.

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, we haven't even gotten into the heart of some of your probably more radical recommendations, but these two ideas alone, granted they're interrelated, require some really significant shifts. K through 12 and higher ed are both under enormous pressure at the moment. How do you create that capacity to make these changes?

Michael Horn:

This is something you and I have talked about a lot on the show, Jeff, is the importance of creating a separate team that has the authority to rethink the resources, the processes, the revenue formula, the importance of autonomy is just critical in creating. The framework that I use is really adapted from Clark Gilbert. He calls it dual transformation. In other parts of the literature, it's called the ambidextrous organization. There's all sorts of names for this, right? That academics have in higher ed actually have studied and created. But the basic notion is like, hey, the core teaching and learning experience, you're going to keep doing what you do, make it better, continue to deliver that great experience.

Michael Horn:

By the way, for K12 districts, that means people are going to be coming into school board meetings and yelling at the superintendent about what they're teaching or mask mandates or all that stuff. You're taking those arrows from the public as you continue to deliver on your core offering, so to speak. But start to empower these small outside groups, just a couple educators, to create a micro school, to create a pod, to do a class very differently from how you've ever done it and start to enable them to rethink the enterprise. And then as they're successful, if they're successful, more people are going to want to join.

Michael Horn:

We often say in sports, success is the best deodorant. I think success is the best attractor in education. More people want to be part of something that starts to take these principles and put it into place.

Jeff Selingo:

One of your case studies in the book actually is drawn from higher ed on this.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, exactly. Look, Southern New Hampshire University, I think, is the textbook example for doing this well in higher ed. First, their online division in the early two thousands when Paul LeBlanc came in as president and realized, "We got to do something." He made that independent. As famously known, he moved it to a different part of the campus, right? Separate from the traditional faculty and said, "Hey, you go grow. Build very different processes for serving these adult learners who need very different supports and so forth," and they did it miraculously and now 180,000 plus students, or whatever they are, in their enrollment.

Michael Horn:

And then Paul did it again during the pandemic actually with basically the relaunch of their campus-based institution that combines competency-based learning with that coming of age experience and drastically reduces the price that students are paying. He basically said, "Hey, this team that's doing it, this is your full-time job. You do not have obligations to the traditional campus-based offering to the traditional "online offering." Your full-time job is to design, build, operate, and launch this division. Because if it's not your full-time job, the urgent and all those other things that are important on a college campus or in a K12 district are going to get in their way.

Michael Horn:

You're not going to prioritize this with the thought and care that it deserves to really recreate or really reinvent something from scratch."

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, there's so much more to dig in into this book. Let's take a brief break. And when we come back we'll tackle improving the student experience and we're also going to talk more about how to actually do innovation in higher ed. We'll be right back.

Michael Horn:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit AscendiumPhilanthropy.org.

Jeff Selingo:

This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They are workers, parents, and caregivers and neighbors, and colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.

Jeff Selingo:

Welcome back to Future U, where we're talking about Michael's new book, From Reopen to Reinvent, and its lessons for higher ed. Michael, in the book, you talk about what students want out of school, the so-called student experience. What strike me is how similar it is to what I found in my work in higher ed. You write, for example, that first, students want to do things that help them feel successful. And second, they want to do things that help them have fun with friends. Now, you put different words around it, but in higher ed I call this purpose. Why are you there?

Jeff Selingo:

You want to be successful. And belonging, we want to have fun doing it, and we want to feel like we found our community. Now, in higher ed, if you don't have both, it's very likely you're not going to persist as a student. It seems like such an easy job to be done by school to improve the student experience, but time and time again, schools really fall so short on these two jobs. Why is that?

Michael Horn:

First, I totally agree with the insight and I totally agree with the parallel. I think the one interesting thing is in K12, the purpose, why are you there, students don't often ask it because it's just assumed that they're there. The successful piece sort of remains, but they're not always so sure about the purpose one. It's much more present I think in higher ed. But in terms of the bigger question of why do they fall short in these two jobs, I think it's all how the system is built, right? The opportunities for success, for example, only occurs say in a K12 environment every few weeks when you have an exam. Often they're graded on a curve, so many students feel like a failure.

Michael Horn:

That's certainly true in higher ed as well. You think about the opportunities to have fun with friends, right? In K12 environments, they occur in extracurriculars, which tells you everything you need to know about how it's being viewed by the school, is that's the outside of school thing where you can have fun on the athletic fields or in arts environments and things of that nature. Collaboration is called cheating in school. I think a lot of times people looked at my first book, Disrupting Class, and they said, "At last! Michael has written an autobiography of his middle school years," because you get in trouble for when you disrupt class or you have fun with friends in the middle of class.

Michael Horn:

I think the way schools are designed actually systematically try to pull out the success opportunities or pull out these opportunities to have fun with friends to all the things that surround the learning experience, but are not in fact embedded in the learning experience itself. It gets back to the zero-sum versus positive-sum framing, frankly, right? That for every winner there's a loser. Well, by definition, you've built a system then that says only certain students will be successful. I actually make the argument in the book that there's a lot of schools that I suspect would say like, "No, we value each and every success of every single student."

Michael Horn:

But I would argue that as long as we're stuck in these models, these processes of a zero-sum system, this time-based learning system, it's actually impossible to truly do that. I'll just take one example that relates to higher ed, which is teachers when they recommend students for college, you know this better than I do, they have a form that they fill out in addition to the recommendation that they write. Typically, there's this question, is this student someone who is in the top 1%, the top 5%, the top 10%, the top 50%, or whatever of students you've ever taught? By definition, you are judging the student there against others and not saying every single student is successful.

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, you encourage us in the book to move beyond the notion of learning loss. Now, this is a phrase I must admit I've used a lot during the pandemic, and I've been in environments where academics will often protest its use as deficit thinking that lowers expectations for students. Now, I must admit, I was surprised that you were critical of this phrase. How should we frame what students didn't get during the pandemic?

Michael Horn:

Are you saying I'm going soft?

Jeff Selingo:

I didn't want to say that, but yeah.

Michael Horn:

Look, I'll say I've used learning loss as well because it is what it is at some level. Just calling it by another name I don't think is constructive. But I grew tired quickly of the phrase during the pandemic and during the Class Disrupted Podcast because of that deficit mindset. This is how I thought about it though. We talked about the dual transformation and importance of autonomy before. What we didn't talk about was Clark Gilbert's original theory around threat rigidity. He basically said that when a threat appears in the environment, it's really important to frame it as a threat. Because otherwise, you don't get the attention of an organization. You don't dedicate resources to tackling it.

Michael Horn:

But if you leave it in that threat framing, then top-down response results, where you're basically button down the hatches, you do this command and control response, just implementing what you have before and you don't see real innovation to tackle this threat. I think this is how I think about learning loss, which is it's really important. It was really important to frame it that way up front, because we wouldn't have gotten the unprecedented investment of federal dollars and everyone saying, "We really got to figure out how to get these students back up to speed." At the same time, if we leave it in that framing, it's incredibly demotivating to students.

Michael Horn:

We talked about earlier, students want to feel successful. Well, let's talk about how much you've lost and how much you're behind. That makes them feel like failures, which is not going to help them get back on track. And instead, it's not that I want to hide from this reality, but I think if we move to this mastery mindset where we're guaranteeing mastery, we start to build a success cycle where we say, "Hey, you are where you are on your learning journey. Let's figure out how you take that next step and be successful, and then the next step after that, and build on your mastery and the background knowledge you have acquired during this time so that we can actually accelerate your learning and really get everyone successful."

Jeff Selingo:

Let's get down to some tactics here. When I visited campuses or in the last couple of weeks when I've hosted dinners for senior college leaders in various cities, one thing I'll hear over and over again is, "We know what to do. The question is now, how do we do it?" In the book, you tell the story of the Toyota Prius, when the car maker could not use its existing functional teams and hierarchical rules of production because the hybrid, as you say, constituted a completely different architecture. So much of what we're talking about here is a completely different architecture.

Jeff Selingo:

What do colleges, universities, and schools need to do? Do they need to throw away their existing structures, which, I might add, do keep their legacy product going, or do they do something else to get this stuff done?

Michael Horn:

I mean, it goes back first to that dual transformation and Southern New Hampshire approach at first, which is don't throw away what you're doing. Because whatever you're going to launch, not every innovation you launch is going to work. You need a few shots at goal basically, like a portfolio approach. That first step I think is all about adding capacity, like we discussed. And that capacity, these new things that you are creating, have to have the freedom to rethink the resources, the processes, the revenue formula, everything. The great example of that Prius story that you just relayed is that basically when they created the Prius, the Toyota folks said they took all the people from different parts of...

Michael Horn:

The different engineers of creating their traditional cars and they said, "Bring your subject matter expertise, but not your loyalty to your department or how things have been done." Because as you're creating this, you might realize actually, "This part that I've always worked on is irrelevant to the car of the future I'm creating." In the case of the Prius, you step on the brake, it doesn't just slow down the car, it actually creates power that charges the battery and all these novel things that you would not have been able to figure out if you had loyalty to the way things have been done in your department.

Michael Horn:

That's number one for message for higher ed. The second step is then how you build out the idea once you put into action. In the book, I talk a lot about this discovery driven planning notion, which is from Rita McGrath at Columbia and Ian MacMillan at University of Pennsylvania. Basically it's the foundation for what's known as Lean Startup. But it essentially says when you're launching something that's unfamiliar and you haven't done it before, rather than just go out and do a traditional strategic plan and launch it, you should instead say, "Okay, what does it have to look like when it's fully baked for us to be excited about this?

Michael Horn:

What are all the assumptions we're making that have to prove true for that to actually occur? And then let's go test the assumptions before we implement the plan. And if the assumptions prove true, then we can actually get the vision in place." The story I actually love telling about this to K12 audiences too is actually a higher ed story, Jeff, which is when you Udacity, the MOOC provider, Sebastian Thrun founded company, they were making all this hype around lowering the cost of education and making it better and so forth. Governor Jerry Brown at California announced that we're going to partner with Udacity on...

Michael Horn:

It was a $2 billion initiative or something like that to redo the way entry level courses at San Jose State University or something like that come together. They made this huge announcement on the Capitol steps and it was going to solve all of higher ed's problems. And two years later, it was a total failure. Some of the reasons it was a failure is the students that they were serving didn't have internet connections. They didn't have computers. It's like you could have tested those assumptions before you wasted all that money in political capital. That's the first thing is focus on the tests first before you implement.

Michael Horn:

It's really the scientific method. And then the last piece, and I'll just be brief on this, is that the other piece that I tackle a lot on is what we call the tools of cooperation, which is how do you create change when people on a campus or in a school or any organization disagree on how the world works, like what leads to what results, and what the goals are for your enterprise? Basically it says there are lots of tools of leadership and management. Some of them work some of the time, none of them work all of the time. You have to figure out what situation you are in to figure out which tools are actually useful or relevant.

Michael Horn:

I'm actually going to be applying this to higher ed, Jeff, in a paper that's coming out while we're doing this podcast this fall, which is going to have case studies of transformation at Southern New Hampshire University, so how Paul LeBlanc really wielded the power of separation, I call it, with the online division, Simmons University, which we've had past president Helen Drinan on, around their efforts with 2U and online education, Yale University and the launch NUS-Singapore, the Yale Singapore partnership that they had that Rick Levin did, and Northeastern University and their climb into the rankings that you've written about as well.

Michael Horn:

I think it'll break down, but the idea is figure out which area of agreement or not you are in and then what that implies for which leadership and management tools will or will not more importantly work.

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, I don't want to leave today without talking about the role of technology and how you write about technology in this book, because we both have young kids, now, mine are about to turn 13 and 11 this fall. I don't know if I could really describe them as young anymore. We all know parenting is hard, but one thing I think we did pretty well is control technology in our house when our kids were young. And then of course, the pandemic hit and all the rules went out the window in part because they were doing remote learning on one hand and in part because it was really a way for them to make social connections with friends and family outside of our house.

Jeff Selingo:

In some ways, I think all of us parents out there saw the good role technology can play in education during the pandemic. And as you say, digital learning has arrived and it's only going to grow. How should it be used in schools? Maybe some highlights from elementary through college about how the role of technology in schools.

Michael Horn:

I like this question, Jeff also, because I think I'm often thought of as the tech person in any room I go to. I'm actually not a technology for technology's sake. And like you with our kids, who are eight years old now by the time this airs, we've been very cautious about how much tech they have at a young age and sort gradually introduce it. I think that's the thing for schools, which is not too much while you're young. Always in balance. They should be spending out time outdoors. They should be learning how to interact in the real world outside of technology. But we also need to be deliberate and teach about that balance and about digital citizenship and more.

Michael Horn:

Because as you live life, like you and I live our lives digitally. That's how we probably buy a lot of things. That's how we interact, we record over this. How will students know how to use technology well if we don't intentionally teach it? My argument is that particularly as students get older, broadband device that's connected to the internet, et cetera, I think becomes more and more table stakes. Not all of school, but for large parts of it because it's something that they have to learn how to use. It's part of their learning. They have to learn how to research and write and do all these things on and develop digital skills frankly.

Michael Horn:

Back to the thing, if you're in elementary school, maybe 30 minutes a day at most because it's good for certain things. But as you get older, I think it's a little bit more in learning to use it responsibly so you don't get this social media addicted, smartphone addicted generation that I think a lot of parents are grappling for. Just quick rules of thumb for educators though as they think about that, for teachers themselves, I think tech should do one of three things. It ought to save them time, it ought to extend their reach, or it ought to deepen their understanding of their students. If it doesn't do that, scrap it.

Michael Horn:

And more broadly, at a school level or from administrator perspective, the three things that I say it ought to do are provide feedback for students and teachers, rapid feedback so that they can improve learning and performance. Second, offer experience hard to offer in the immediate environment, so courses you may not be able to offer, or we had the president of Morehouse on this podcast and he talked about how with virtual reality he can do labs that only his students could do if they had been in MIT before. And then third, automate those manual, laborious processes to do a lot of, frankly, what you talk about in the higher ed world, which is create a more seamless student experience.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I like those rules of three. It's easy for us to remember. Now, Michael, but we can't avoid the elephant in the room. We're recording this at the end of the summer, so summer break is almost over, but you argue for year round schooling, which I think will likely make you public enemy number one in the five to 18 year old demographic, because my kids do not want to go back. But this really does make sense to educators. Can you explain why and is it time to abandon the traditional summer break in higher ed too?

Michael Horn:

Now, you're getting into the parts where I'm actually called radical. I like it. Look, I think there's a couple things to unpack, first of all. One, that historically what we call the agrarian calendar is not in fact agrarian. That students who were in farming communities in the 1800s and before, actually their breaks were in the spring when they were doing planting for farming, and in the fall when they were harvesting. They were in school in the summer and winter when you didn't really need them. Our notion of this agrarian calendar is not correct.

Michael Horn:

Students actually in urban environments, I talk about this history, they went to school year round in the 1800s, those who were enrolled. What changed was that before air conditioning, it was awfully hot in a lot of these environments. Families with means, to be frank, started escaping to the countryside, started escaping to the seashore, to the mountains and so forth for cooler weather during the school year. Educators, labor unions, and others sort of doubled down on this and made it part of what we think of as the schooling calendar. What I argue is that, first, for parents, this is actually really hard.

Michael Horn:

If you're a low income parent, you've got to figure out what to do with your child from a childcare, from a sort of productivity perspective during the summer. A lot of learning loss can happen. There's a lot of challenges for families without those means. They often don't have the social capital to know which programs to even sign up for or which camps, let alone the income means. If you're a parent though who's well off, Jeff, this is really stressful as well. You, probably like us, have the spreadsheet for the summer trying to figure out all the different mosaic of camps and summer breaks and who cares for who and who picks up when.

Michael Horn:

You have to sign up by December and who knows if your kid's even going to even that activity by June that they liked in December? There's all this stress of cramming in all this stuff. Basically what I'm ultimately suggesting is a more balanced calendar where you still have breaks, but now it's like every nine or 12 weeks you get two weeks off, which I actually think is a better deal for a lot of students and it's certainly I think a better deal for a lot of educators because it gives them more opportunities to refresh and not get burned out.

Michael Horn:

For your kids and my kids that, yes, have enjoyed their summer and me that enjoyed my summer growing up, I don't think it's eliminating these important breaks, but I think it's changing the relationship with them.

Jeff Selingo:

Of course, the entire travel industry will be pushing back against that I'm sure.

Michael Horn:

Well, that's the biggest one.

Jeff Selingo:

I think it's the biggest one, right? Here in Maryland, we had the Ocean City role and down in Virginia they had the Kings Dominion role, because it was meant to really try to protect those industries. Michael, last question as we wrap up and similar to something we asked Anya Kamenetz when she was on. It's the show about her book. How should colleges be preparing for this generation of students who are going to be going through a lot of these changes in K through 12 and then getting into a higher ed system that is maybe just different than what those students experienced in K through 12?

Michael Horn:

It's a great question, Jeff, and my take is that even as I don't want to say learning loss in the K12 schools themselves, they have to know that these students are coming not just with learning loss, but with a bunch of social, emotional, other deficits that have harmed them or hurt them in all sorts of ways, which will make them different. To be clear, they also will bring some assets that past students did not potentially around perseverance and grit and things like that of navigating difficult moments. But they're going to have some trauma, they're going to have some real loss on a variety of circumstances.

Michael Horn:

I think in some ways, the book talks about the need for K12 schools to backward integrate, to do things that they didn't think were historically part of the K12 school mission. I think higher ed institutions are going to have to do something similar, take very serious stock of how do we provide a variety of offerings that we historically perhaps have not thought was core to what we did. And yes, there's some of those that you can outsource with public-private partnerships and things of the nature like mental health.

Michael Horn:

But let's be honest, I think faculty are going to be the front line of some of these and we're going to actually have to think about how to help them or equip them with the skill sets to know how to respond to a student who maybe talks to them or doesn't talk to them with a whole range of challenges and how to get them that support that they need to be successful.

Jeff Selingo:

Michael, perhaps the most important question, where can listeners learn more about this book?

Michael Horn:

Look, if you go to the From Reopen to Reinvent website page, which is off of MichaelBHorn.com, it's on the front there, and we'll add that to the show notes, Jeff, right? We get to do that. You can find out more where to buy the book, Amazon and all those places. It's in the normal places you buy your book, but there's also a free Reopen to Reinvent bookmark, which has QR codes that link to all 29 of the videos that are used in the book, Jeff. They feature a variety of K12 schools, but also colleges and universities. Minerva's in there. Southern New Hampshire's in there. There's a bunch of videos that I hope will be helpful for our audience.

Jeff Selingo:

Well, Michael, you're as good of a guest as you are a co-host. Thank you for joining me this week on Future U. That's all we have time for, but please get this book. It's a really important book, I think, to people in higher ed as well in learning the lessons that they could apply on their campuses as well. Thank you all out there for being with us and join us next time on Future U.