Reimagining secondary education : a turn towards the “who”

Abstract

Developing the professional capacity to successfully reimagine and transform secondary education in the U.S. to address the tectonic economic, technological and social shifts of the past 50 years will require innovative structural models of schooling as well as fundamentally new ways of attracting, hiring, organizing and developing talent. In order to keep up with the accelerating pace of change within the sector and across our society generally, our educational leaders will increasingly be called on to rapidly iterate their practice in a thoughtful and reflective manner. Building and nurturing a culture for adults that is firmly rooted in theories of adult development and growth establishes a critical foundation for successfully taking on the adaptive challenges inherent in restructuring high schools. This paper lays out the case for adopting an adult development approach as a key part of building such a culture, explores the relevance of such an approach within the context of the K-12 public education sector, and then outlines what we learned through our early work to enact such a culture within our start-up organization focused on secondary school transformation, with a specific focus on conflict management. This analysis includes implications for the author individually, for our organization, and for the sector at large.