Byron's Babbles

I’m so sad to be sitting at the airport because I hate leaving Harvard University. I always learn so much from my friends at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As always, my thinking as stretched, what I thought I knew challenged, and new creative and innovative ideas developed. As Dr. Mandy Savitz-Romer said last Sunday, “You may not leave here with complete closure, but with new questions.” That is learning at its best! My description for my learning this week is that I have been “coached up!”

Today’s learning was just as great as the rest of the week. I loved doing a case study on a partnership with the Nike Innovation Fund for improving Oregon student success. Dr. Monica Higgins did a great job of facilitating the case study and I learned a great deal about scaling the impact of public private partnerships. This learning was followed up by a great session by Dr. Irvin Scott on story telling and its importance to teaching and leadership.

As I have done all week in Thriving Students, Developing & Supporting Our Students: Future Identity Versus No Future Identity, and Changing The Narrative For Our Students, I compiled a top 20 list of the things I learned today. Here is my list:

1. It’s not just if we do partnerships, it’s how we do partnerships.
2. Partnerships should match the core values or mission of the partners.
3. Partnerships are great ways for industry to understand education and for education to understand industry.
4. It is very important to analyze both sides of all partnerships.
5. Partnerships are a psychological contract.
   1. Everything’s not always explicit (context, risks, et cetera).
   2. In partnerships everything is not always spelled out.
6. Move partnerships from individual to individual to organization to organization. This plays to sustainability.
7. Open communication is key to partnerships, even when things go wrong.
8. Agenda items versus surface level just for show.
9. Eliminate hidden targets in partnerships
10. Partnerships need an exit strategy so the innovation can be sustained without the partner.
11. Partnerships should be mutually beneficial, with beneficial up for debate.
12. In partnerships:
    1. Make implicit explicit
    2. Have clarity of roles and limitations
    3. Have flexibility built in
    4. Have mutual goals, timelines, and milestones
13. Is the voice of the student heard in the partnership?
14. You never want to scale until you know you have something that works.
15. Need to decide to scale deep or scale out.
16. Everyone has a story of how they got where they are. What is your trajectory?
17. We need to be warm demanders for our students.
18. We need to give an academic press to our students.
19. You can’t lead if you don’t read.
20. Why story/narrative in leadership?
    1. Stories are fundamentally human…
    2. Stories build connection…critical for leaders…
    3. Stories bring data alive…
    4. Stories capture what is possible…