[Guest Blog Post] The Importance of Leadership in Personalized Learning

As educators implement blended learning across the country to personalize learning and boost equity to better serve each of their students, the question of leadership looms large.

People often wonder if the growth of blended learning is inevitable, as the theory of disruptive innovation suggests is the case, does leadership actually matter?

The answer is that leadership is critical. Whenever we see a new innovation like blended learning, having a leader actively manage the project is vital so that it can be designed, implemented, and executed well. Although blended learning’s growth may be relatively certain, its success in improving the education for all students and actually personalizing learning is not. It is possible to take a surface approach to blended learning and not improve student achievement, just as it is possible to implement a new serve motion in tennis without improving your odds of winning. For the foreseeable future, leaders at schools will have to take an active role in their blended-learning programs to ensure a positive outcome.

Lessons from the success of established companies in launching disruptive innovations that operate dramatically differently from “business as usual” provide clues as to what that leader’s role should look like in the years to come. Superintendents and school leaders will likely have at least three high-level primary responsibilities.

First, leaders must must spend a significant amount of their time supporting and shepherding new, innovative learning models that do not conform to the traditional ways of teaching in a school and district. They need to allocate much of their time to these fledgling projects as opposed to day-to-day operations.

They can do this because established organizations are less dependent on the capabilities of individual people. Instead, their success is embedded in their processes as how they do things become essentially fixed over time. Because it is impossible for a superintendent or school leader to participate in making every decision that occurs in a school or district, most school systems have decision-making processes in place that work without the attention of the leadership. Witness the myriad decisions teachers make every day about everything from learning to classroom management to discipline. As a result, for those decisions that the mainstream processes and priorities were designed to make effectively—routine innovations, for example—leaders don’t typically need to lean in as much.

Dramatically new and innovative learning models, however, tend to have ill-defined strategies, processes for making decisions, and a sense of what the innovation will ultimately look like. Because these innovations are generally being designed rapidly and components of the innovation are created on the fly, make-or-break decisions arise with alarming frequency. Using the same processes as the established organization to make decisions won’t work because those processes were designed to support the priorities of the mainstream way of doing things, not the new ways for which these new blended-learning models were created. In this circumstance, leaders need to step in to manage the innovation and shelter innovative ideas from the norms of the established organization that would attempt to rein them in. In other words, if the new innovation had to follow the conventional process for teacher evaluations, procurement processes, scheduling, and more, it wouldn’t actually look all that innovative. Having leaders protect the new innovation so it has the freedom to rethink these rules and processes is critical.

The second reason leaders must be involved with the creation of the new innovation is that they need to be able to inform educators in the traditional school and classroom models about the technological and learning model innovations being developed so that those people are learning about the future and prepared to adopt from or move into those new models in the future, particularly as a district implements blended learning across the entire system. By keeping educators in traditional classrooms up to date about the emerging innovation, leaders also  make it clear that the the new innovation isn’t just a side project that will remain small; it is indeed the future for all educators and students. Leaders that visibly spend a significant amount of their attention on the fledgling innovation also signal how important it is for the district.

The third role for blended-learning leaders is more perpetual in nature. Innovation is a process, not an event. Innovating once and then declaring victory doesn’t constitute the end of the journey. Today education is moving toward blended learning to better serve students along the dimensions of personalization and equity, but there will be new innovations in the future in society and schools that are critical to keeping each in step with the other so as to prepare students for the complex and promising futures that await them. Making progress and never standing still is a hallmark of a healthy society and healthy schools, and it models the capacity for lifelong learning that we seek to instill in students. As such, school leaders should adopt a mindset of helping their schools develop a steady rhythm of innovation with corresponding processes in place.  Leaders must encourage innovation on their teams and in their schools.  They must support what is in place while constantly seeking to make it better and make it safe for others to try to find those improvements, big or small.

The success of blended-learning programs will likely turn on the quality of the leader for some time, and those roles will require leaders to lean in and be active participants in creating the learning environments of tomorrow. As a result, superintendents have an unprecedented opportunity right now to not only lead within their districts, but also lead the nation. And given that blended learning remains nascent with many questions about how it should or will look, superintendents have the chance to not only implement that future, but also quite literally to design it. It’s time to lead students and teachers to that brighter future.

Read more from Michael B.Horn:

Amidst Edtech Horror Stories, Some Blended-Learning Schools Shine