Thank you for celebrating our collaboration @BelmontDay1927!
In 2019, I discovered EXPLO, a Norwood-based educational nonprofit inspired by those who created MIT’s winter session, that has been running summer programs for over 40 years. EXPLO has over 44k alumni, and has trained more than 10k college and graduate students to be teachers in their program. Many EXPLO alums go on to teaching or educational leadership careers.
In the last few years, so many of these summer alumni approached EXPLO for help with bringing innovation to their schools, that EXPLO decided to launch a cooperative schools network to help schools work together to identify and adopt new and useful practices. This network, called “Elevate,” includes a mix of both K-12, K-8, US and international schools. Over the next year, EXPLO aims to bring 100 schools into the network.
Last fall, Brendan Largay (Head of School at Belmont Day School) and I presented a short case study about our innovation work to a preliminary convening of EXPLO network schools, and (not surprisingly!) found the principles of Collective Genius to resonate.
Fueling an Innovation Culture
In this report, EXPLO Elevate shares a framework for creating a culture of innovation within independent schools, along with one school’s experience applying this framework. The framework, known as Collective Genius, was developed after years of research by Harvard Business School Professor Linda Hill and her colleagues. We see this as a practical and useful tool for schools seeking to enable their students to thrive in an age of increasing uncertainty and complexity.
Our report (above) is now freely available to anyone interested in reading that piece or others produced by this group of leaders eager to share best practices and struggle through common challenges. As I noted when I was interviewed regarding my work on this project:
“Our goal is to help people have a better understanding of what innovation is, and feel less frightened by the idea of doing a new and useful thing. I think a lot of executives are being held accountable for ‘innovation.’ But when you ask them what that is, they can’t answer the question. They don’t know how to describe it, or think about what metrics they would be using to evaluate themselves or others. That’s why they were telling us that having some idea about these three capabilities was incredibly helpful in terms of delegating work in a more meaningful way.”