The First Draft of Educational Transformation

John Walter

NAME

John Walter

ROLE

Chief Development Officer

BIO

John comes to LEANLAB Education with experience as a classroom teacher and nonprofit leader. His professional interests include educational technology, media literacy, and project based learning. 

John has most recently served as the Associate Director of Collegian Media Group at Kansas State University, a 501(C)3 nonprofit organization that publishes the K-State Collegian newspaper, Royal Purple yearbook, and Manhappenin’ magazine. Prior to that, John spent five years as a high school journalism teacher and student media adviser at a national model career academy campus.

John and his students have been recognized for their award winning work at the state and national levels. John holds a B.S. in Secondary Education from Kansas State University and a M.S. in Instructional Technology from Fort Hays State University.

WHY I GRAVITATE TOWARDS THIS WORK…

I gravitate towards this work because of how important it is to elevate the voices of students and teachers in decision making processes in education.

For me, it all started during my years as a high school student and my participation on the student newspaper and debate team. Almost all of my classes were taught in a traditional model where the teachers provided direct instruction and students were expected to take in the content. My journalism and debate classes on the other hand were the only places where I felt encouraged to pursue my own interests and use my voice to create and explore. Those classes were built on project based learning experiences that had real audiences and allowed me to flex my critical thinking skills in ways that none of my other classes provided. 

When I chose to begin a career in education, I did so to provide a space for students to tell their own stories, create projects for real audiences, and lead their own classroom. Most of my high school journalism students had never been in class like mine, where I was an adviser, rather than a teacher, and students got to share the responsibility of decision making in the class. As my career progressed, I moved on to work at the university level helping college students gain real world experience using their voices to produce student media that informed the greater campus community on important issues and preserve the first draft of campus history during unprecedented times. 

I’ve always been interested in how new technologies can help transform education so I jumped at the opportunity to  join Leanlab Education. I understand how critical it is to incorporate the voice and insights of students and teachers into the development of new educational technology products. Working with Leanlab allows me to expand the impact that I have on education in ways that I believe can truly transform education for the better. It’s an opportunity to explore bold new ideas and reimagine a better future for students and teachers..


FUN FACT

I’m a huge fan of live music and spicy food!

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Grief, Pressure & Connection: A Primer on Education in a Post-Pandemic World

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While private schools saw limited interruptions, some stable, public school districts have used the catalyst of the Covid-19 pandemic to progress personalized learning initiatives and implement more experimental curricula. However, increasingly more public schools are struggling with bare necessities—extreme shortages of bus drivers, food service delivery, and substitute teachers. These operational obstacles are now bleeding over to disrupt instruction.

LEANLAB Awards $92,500 in Grants to KC Schools

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Kansas City, MO – LEANLAB Education awarded $92,500 in grants to seven area schools, as part of its inaugural Pilot Research Program, a program which connects K-12 schools with emerging technology startups to conduct research on education technology. 

“This program represents a turning point for LEANLAB,” said Katie Boody Adorno, LEANLAB Education founder and CEO. “The expertise of educators is in high demand among education startups that are looking to develop their products. We’ve developed a methodical approach to make sure teachers get paid for expertise and entrepreneurs get the research and data they need to create impactful products.”

During the first year of this new program, LEANLAB has accepted seven schools into its inaugural cohort. Currently, these schools are tackling the following critical issues in K-12 schools.

Citizens of the World Charter School and Guadalupe Centers Elementary partnered with Boddle Learning to find a way to make math assessments more engaging. They implemented Boddle’s 3D math app that teaches math concepts through a fun game?

Lee A. Tolbert Community Academy was seeking to improve academic achievement and partnered with LeverED Learning to implement a math curriculum that allows students to progress at their own pace.

George Melcher and Longfellow, two elementary schools in the Kansas City Public School district, wanted to increase social emotional learning among their students, and they partnered with ClassCraft to implement a platform that gamifies and reinforces positive behaviors.

Three schools in the Clinton County School District (Ellis Elementary, Clinton Middle, and Plattsburg High) along with Gordon Parks Elementary also wanted to increase social emotional learning, so they chose to work with Sown to Grow, a platform that empowers students to set their own goals and reflect on their growth.

These research projects are underway at all seven schools and they’re already seeing the initial results. “I was interested in being a part of the LEANLAB Pilot Research Program because I am always eager to find new innovative ways to meet my students' needs in the classroom,” said Justine Volkman, Kindergarten Teacher at Gordon Parks Elementary. “LEANLAB seeks to understand the pain point that a school is facing and works to find creative solutions for each unique problem. I have already seen powerful student responses to the technology that we have integrated into our classroom and I am hoping to continue to collect more data on my students socio-emotional development as a result of our research.”

Through this program, LEANLAB is aiming to give schools a better way to find and evaluate education technology. 

“Educators were stretched for capacity before the pandemic and now we’re asking even more of them. When it’s done right, edtech platforms work with educators to take some weight off their shoulders.”  said Stephanie Campbell, Vice President of Communications & Operations. “We want to help schools find, trial, and adopt the best technologies and give them a voice in the development of those products.”

 LEANLAB’s research team guides schools through an innovation process that starts with a deep-dive to uncover the root causes behind the school’s biggest challenges. LEANLAB then presents the school with a list of aligned solutions working to solve the problem. After the school chooses a solution, they partner with that company to design and implement a research study. 

Though this is the first year of the program, LEANLAB is already busy recruiting schools and companies for the next school year. 

“We’re excited to launch such a unique program here in Kansas City,” said Katie Boody Adorno. “We’ve coordinated an unparalleled network of innovative schools across the Kansas City region and plan to expand that network in the coming years across Missouri, creating a hub for education technology and innovation like no other in the country.”

A Year To Recommit to Racial Equity

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After George Floyd’s murder, we took a step back as an organization.

Our first move was to bear witness. There was so much frustration. People were tired. They kept seeing the same things happen and no real change occurred.

The broken record kept on spinning.

We started to see more unity among different community organizations. Latinx Education Collaborative and Brothers Liberating Our Communities created a space for men of color to process what was happening and make plans for how to move forward together. 

Jorge Holguin

Jorge Holguin

These were new, and necessary, touchpoints with the community. A space to have real talk about what’s going on. Folks from all over came together. It was something to see and be a part of.

But most of all, people were channeling their frustrations in healthy ways and educating themselves.

As an organization, I’m proud that LEANLAB stepped up the plate. We leaned into the idea that everyone has power. We deepened our practice of echoing the voices of different individuals to ensure real issues were brought to the various tables and addressed.

This work is personal for me. I grew up here—in the Northeast. A place with lots of stigma unfortunately attached to it, but lots of bright spots too.

I think about my daughter. I want her to have positive learning experiences. I want her to feel welcomed in the community. I do not want her to feel like she needs to move to have opportunities to grow.

That puts me shoulder-to-shoulder with the families we serve through LEANLAB.

I’m hopeful that we’ll use this moment of resistance to injustice to start reframing weaknesses as strengths, especially the powerful stories of resilience in our communities. But I also worry that we’ll romanticize those stories and reach for tokenistic representation.

I think about my daughter. I want her to have positive learning experiences. I want her to feel welcomed in the community. I do not want her to feel like she needs to move to have opportunities to grow.

I know we can do better than that. I’ve seen the best of us during this summer’s racial reckoning. And I’ll keep pushing along with my colleagues and community members to make it happen.

In Solidarity,

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Jorge Holguin
Manager of Community Organizing

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2021: An Imperative to Innovate

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In education, we’ve been standing at a crossroads for the last 10 months. The decisions we make now will dramatically shift the education sector--perhaps permanently.  I know you know this. Like me, you’ve been ruminating on this intuition.  For those of us working day-to-day in this sector, the weight of these decisions is real. Palpable. The tenuous footing we stood on a year ago has become even more unsteady; our entire sector is undeniably in flux. Is this what disruption feels like?

I’ve felt this with my five-year-old nephew and my sister-in-law. He’s a kindergartner at a Kansas City charter school and she’s a working mom.  He accesses the only public school he’s ever known through a screen, from a dining room chair with his Abuela’s steady support. 

Our family dinner conversations have shifted. We talk about learning management systems instead of playground gossip. Everyone wants to know, “why is it so hard to get all these apps and platforms to play nice together? My sister-in-law  talks excitedly about her ideas for product modifications to her son’s learning management system. She has no background in technology development, but still she envisions improvements. She longs for more streamlined integrations, more information about how to customize and advance her son’s love for math, and guidance on how to nurture the areas where he needs more support (reading).  

My conversations with teachers have shifted. During one-off Saturday mornings or stolen lunch breaks, teachers tell me earnestly, that for some children, the virtual environment is working better! Working remotely, teachers  have better systems to differentiate instruction and provide more personalized support. However, they also have students who are struggling; students who have fallen off the radar, are rarely logging on, or have challenging home learning environments.

”I find that I’m actually a more successful educator this year. I’m more focused, can give more targeted attention,” one teacher says, while also noting, “but if we do go back to business as usual, and the status quo... I’m not sure that I can.”

I make time to listen to teachers first-hand experiences, but I also observe their actions. Teacher unions are understandably advocating for delayed returns to school until they’re satisfied their environments are safe. They want fully-executed vaccination and testing plans, resources for proper social distancing and sanitization measures, revised distance learning plans, and enough substitutes on hand for support (CTU reopening demands).

The prolonged delays to returning full-force to the classroom may seem especially protracted, but I suspect they also speak to a deeper longing from our collective unconscious… a desire  for a paradigm shift that would affect the entire industry, then  ripple outward to all professions… a declaration that we’re not going back… not back to the way things were… we can’t.

Am I advocating for a shift to an edtech-driven universe, the demise of brick and mortar classrooms? No. Our research from the last year illuminates persistent inequities and early evidence suggests learning gaps have been exacerbated by this pandemic (PACE). There’s no question that children need safe, nurturing, developmentally appropriate places to socialize and learn, but now we need to grapple with what a more dynamic, customized and hybrid environment should look like for the long-term.  

“We’re not going back… not back to the way things were… we can’t.”

And yet here we are--in a new calendar year, either staring down the barrel or standing on the precipice. Do we return to slow, incremental change--to structures and models that have historically done little to solve for the persistent inequities, painfully illuminated by this pandemic? Or do we acknowledge where we’ve been wrong, commit to making a change, and begin placing new bets? 

What we’re musing

Can accountability be shifted away from classrooms, students and teachers, and onto systems, leaders and edtech tools?
We aren’t holding doctors and nurses single-handedly accountable for the reduction in spread of Covid-19. Instead, we are equipping them with vetted  vaccines. After months of research, clinical trials and testing to ensure the vaccines were sound, we then understood under what conditions the vaccines were most effective (they have temperature requirements, expiration dates, etc). It was then that elected leaders were responsible for leading distribution.

So, I wonder, can we transfer this idea to the education sector? 

  • What would a world look like if we had a structured system to vet and test education tools, ensuring they were based on foundational learning science and were easy to use across a variety of learning contexts (grandma’s dining room, the classroom, the community center)? 

  • What if we had a clear, evidenced-based guide to understand what conditions these solutions achieve their intended outcomes? 

  • Could we then provide system leaders with the information they need to buy best-fit solutions, while equipping educators with implementation roadmaps that tell them  how to modify instruction toward optimal outcomes (i.e. “for best results…”)? 

  • That’s what I want to test.  

I envision a  world where educators spend less time on arduous content creation. They are no longer beholden to unimaginative, unproven and clunky tools, or constrained by the heaviness of standardized tests. Instead, they are freed up to invest their time on building meaningful relationships with students and their families, developing more customized and targeted interventions and designing experiences that bring learning to life.

In this world, rather than relying on overly cumbersome and high-stakes assessments, teachers leverage assessments to inspire agile, data-driven student interventions. The accountability then, shifts. Imagine a world where we hold our state elected and appointed officials and school system leadership accountable to the expedient and equitable distribution of evidence-based, trialed solutions.

Can this be the year where we begin trying something different? We’ve loosened restrictions on standardized testing for the last year. Why not re-envision education all-together?

Conclusion

The days ahead will not be  easy. I’m reminded of the Maya Angelou quote, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” We have arrived at this moment. We now know better.  

Am I suggesting that edtech is a panacea, a one-shot vaccine? No. But I am suggesting that we are in a new age of rapidly-evolving technology. We owe it to our students and to future generations to begin developing new tools, new methods, new accountability practices and more dynamic learning environments to reach learners wherever they might be.  Now, let’s do more, better. 

A Year To Refocus on Community Wellbeing

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When things got crazy in the early days of the pandemic, we started doing daily video calls with school leaders. While convening the education community has always been a core principle for us, we knew we needed to get in the trenches on a daily basis given the gravity of the situation that was unfolding.

The goal? To help them figure things out and plan. We pressed pause on our playbook and focused on core needs. 

Over the last 8 months, we’ve listened directly to our region’s schools and families, and our nation’s education innovators. As always, we’ve held steadfast to the belief that those closest to education-- parents, students, teachers--are the experts. 

True to our core values of human-centered design and boldness, we leaned in to understand their insights to provide direct support when our communities needed it most.

Even though it was a different direction for us, we prioritized basic needs and then we looked ahead at traditional school matters. While we’re not a direct service organization, we knew we had to pivot.  We did it the LEANLAB  way: 

We used research and data.

We served as a convener for our community schools.

We looked to the greatest needs to drive our actions.

Those early calls helped us understand the dynamic needs coming up for schools. Those calls moved us toward the connectivity work for which we might not have otherwise seen the need. 

We knew our community was counting on us to shift resources and reconfigure priorities so that’s what we did. It wasn’t perfect. It was messy. We didn’t get everything right.

But we listened. We responded. We took in the data and acted on it--arm-in-arm with our partners.

As a result, thousands of Kansas City kids got connected to the internet and were able to access educational services. 

I’m someone whose entire career depends on the ability to connect and communicate. I know first-hand how crucial those skills are for our kids’ future success. I’m honored we could deliver on that promise this year.

Sincerely,

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5 ways to diversify your hiring pipeline for startups

A few months back, I put the last period at the end of my hiring project plan and felt content. I had set out to completely redesign the way we hire and felt confident I’d built a better mousetrap. In my mind, the 20 pages of tactics, process flow charts, interview questions, promotions plan and email outreach strategy were air tight. I’d researched best practices in hiring from some of the most well-known companies and thought leaders. I felt secure that the process would yield top candidates for the role. And to some extent I was right! We had some stellar candidates in our pipeline. Still — my meticulous plan fell seriously short. 

At Leanlab, we work hard to build a culture of trust. That means, when you need to be held accountable, there’s a team member at the ready to push your work to the next level and you can be confident that they have your best interest at heart. That’s why I’m grateful to my team for pushing me to more proactively design a hiring system to yield a diverse applicant pool even though the process to fix it was a little uncomfortable for me. To design a hiring system that is anti-racist — that is, one that proactively seeks to change systems and organizational structures so that power can be redistributed and shared equitably — I needed to confront and acknowledge my own bias, and then revisit the plan through an equity lens. 

It’s difficult to go back to a project that you’ve poured your heart into and admit that the original plan was lacking. It can be hard not to take feedback personally and it can be especially uncomfortable to confront your privilege. But feeling some sense of discomfort is the least anyone with a position of privilege can do for the sake of being a part of the solution to upend oppressive systems. So, with the support of my team, we set out to improve the original plan.

Here are five tactics you can put in place right now to improve your own hiring plan.

1 — Take ownership of your bias.

Who’s in charge of overseeing the hiring process for your organization? Chances are, she looks a lot like me. A 2018 Workplace Diversity Report revealed that 67 percent of HR professionals are women, and of those, nearly two-thirds of them are white. 

As a white woman, working for a non-profit dedicated to fighting for the ability for all children to have equitable access to a quality education, I often find myself reflecting on my lived experiences, my privilege, and the opportunities I unknowingly benefit from every day. But even in my workplace, it can still be easy for me to detach myself from my affluent white peers and lump myself in with the “woke” group of people out there making a difference. Even those of us who have dedicated our careers to giving back by working for mission-driven and/or philanthropic organizations, can not get complacent about our biases. (There’s a great article called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh,” that my CEO shared with me, that especially helped me think through this.) 

We all have bias. It will unwittingly influence the way we write job descriptions, the way we screen applications and the channels through which we push out information. For example, one explicit aspect of my proposed plan, which my team called attention to — was that the main places we were posting information about available roles on our team were white dominant, and the main influencers we were reaching out to were white. Which meant, their networks would probably look similar. 

Review your own distribution channels and ask yourself — what type of candidate are these channels most likely to yield? How might my bias and my lived experience, slant or distort the process?

2 — Track your pipeline 

Any good strategic planning process begins with grounding data. It’s impossible to design for change without first understanding where you are. Put systems in place to track and understand both the diversity of 1) your current team and 2) the applicant pool. 

Of course it’s not as simple as adding a “race” box to the end of your application — please don’t do that — so I recommend consulting your attorney on your process. We found that including a separate optional survey for applicants to complete, where the back-end data would be anonymous and disassociated from the applicant information was the best way for us to identify gaps in our pipeline and remain compliant. 

3 — Make hiring a team effort and get feedback

You need your whole team to take ownership and buy in to the process. Like most of the major goals of our organization, we cannot achieve them as individuals. I was silly to think that my team could swoop in at the end (by participating in group interviews) and still have a meaningful relationship with and influence over our hiring process. By design, about 85 percent of applicants would have already been passed over at that point. I needed to work harder to engage my team at the beginning of the planning process. At LEANLAB, we have a very diverse team. By leveraging each of my team members, I can broaden our reach to a diverse set of networks to drive variety in our application pool. I received powerful feedback from our team and colleagues that made me question, and retool our approach.

4 — Set a measurable goal

Once you’ve got your team on board, share your findings from your current demographics research and work together to set diversity goals that you all buy into. 

  • What does a diverse applicant pipeline look like?

  • When can we all agree that we can shut the doors to applications and move forward with the next phase of the process?

  • What does a “diverse” team look like?

  • Bonus: If you’re a non-profit like us, I challenge you to reference the communities you serve and compare that with the demographics of your team. Are they aligned? How can you improve?

Look beyond just race and consider other factors. Are you all around the same age? (Anecdotally, I see this is often the case in the startup sector.) Are you all non-disabled? What kind of colleges did you attend? Did you all go to college? After assessing where you are, you can probably easily identify some gaps on your team. Use those gaps to set a team diversity goal, and hold each-other accountable for driving towards it by pushing for an applicant pool where those populations are represented. 

5 — Put some strategy (and money) behind your outreach 

Unfortunately, not all workplace teams are as diverse as mine. And even with our diversity and through leveraging our personal networks, we are not always able to achieve the diversity we’d like to see in our pipelines. That means, we need to go outside of who we know, and our usual channels (for us, idealist, Nonprofit Connect, Startland News, Linkedin) and look for non-traditional networks to fill specific gaps on our team. Our search yielded organizations that specifically promote PhD positions to people of color and entire organizations dedicated to job applicants from the disability community. We identified leaders representing organizations that support protected classes of people and asked them to reach out to their networks and promote our available positions. I found in most cases that they were willing to do this at no cost to us. 

We also put some money behind it. Rather than “recreating the wheel,” we looked to some of our peer organizations and replicated their referral bonus programs with the goal of reaching potential applicants that we wouldn’t have traditionally found through our own networks. Individuals who refer candidates that are eventually hired for a position, receive $500 after the first 90 days of employment of the candidate. 

It’s not easy to confront where you’ve fallen short. Especially when it means addressing your own bias and privilege. But by taking some additional steps you too can put systems into place and we can work together to begin to right-size some of the endemic, problematic systems and structures that underlie our workplace communities. I’m grateful to my team, especially my CEO, Katie Boody, for the push and look forward to revisiting many of our systems and structures to build a more inclusive team and culture.