This week, our host Justin Reich released his new book, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. To celebrate the launch and dig into the themes of the book, we’re releasing a series of conversations with innovative educators. In this episode, we’re joined by Erik Burmeister, an award-winning teacher, principal, and superintendent who worked as a highly impactful educator in California for over 20 years before launching his strategic consulting firm, Solutionary Advisors. We talk with Erik about his experiences leading change using design and innovation principles.
This week, our host Justin Reich released his new book, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools. To celebrate the launch and dig into the themes of the book, we’re releasing a series of conversations with innovative educators.
In this episode, we’re joined by Erik Burmeister, an award-winning teacher, principal, and superintendent who worked as a highly impactful educator in California for over 20 years before launching his strategic consulting firm, Solutionary Advisors. We talk with Erik about his experiences leading change using design and innovation principles.
Resources and Links
Pre-Order Justin Reich’s new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools
Learn more about Erik Burmeister’s work at Solutionary Advisors
Watch our documentary film We Have to Do Something Different
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/iterate-erikburmeister/transcript
Credits
Host Justin Reich
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley
Follow TeachLab on Twitter and YouTube
Follow our host Justin Reich on Twitter
Justin Reich: From the MIT studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. I'm Justin Reich. Today on the show we have Erik Burmeister. He's an award-winning teacher, principal, superintendent for California for over 20 years before he recently launched his own strategic consulting firm, Solutionary Advisors. Erik is well-known for leading change in complicated environments using design and innovation principles, and he is a colleague who I've worked with on a number of projects over the years. Erik, thank you so much for joining us.
Erik Burmeister: Thank you so much for having me, Justin. It's true honor to be with you on this stage and to have the opportunity to connect and share stories.
Justin Reich: We worked together when you were a middle school principal. Was that our first engagement?
Erik Burmeister: That's correct.
Justin Reich: What year was that, do you think?
Erik Burmeister: Oh gosh. I want to say 2012 maybe. Certainly around that time.
Justin Reich: 2012.
Erik Burmeister: I was the principal.
Justin Reich: You were the principal-
Erik Burmeister: Yeah.
Justin Reich: ... of a middle school in Menlo Park, California.
Erik Burmeister: That's correct.
Justin Reich: And tell us a little bit about the project that you were working on that brought us together.
Erik Burmeister: Yeah. Well, at the time, you were deeply engaged in launching the EdTech Teacher Network, and-
Justin Reich: Which was a consultancy that I'd founded to help schools figure out how to integrate technology in interesting ways. Yes.
Erik Burmeister: Exactly. But we also had a shared love and interest of design thinking, and so, those two interests came together and really made for a wonderful friendship and I learned a ton from you and was able to invite you to come and be a part of some of the transformation work we were leading here in Menlo Park, California. And the work that we were doing was sort of twofold. One, we were doing a lot around technology integration. While there were a lot of districts across the country that were implementing one-to-one device programs, Silicon Valley, actually, schools were pretty far behind that. And we were the first one-to-one iPad school in all of Silicon Valley. And so, you helped us a great deal in that transition. But you also were a pivotal resource for us in our sort of re-imagining what learning was going to look like in our new efforts as a comprehensive middle school and have admired your work ever since and really appreciate that opportunity to collaborate.
Justin Reich: Why do you think Silicon Valley schools were a little slow to eat their own dog food there, or drink their own champagne is sometimes what they say? But do you have any insights as to... Because your school board were like... Like some VP of Google or something like that would likely to be-
Erik Burmeister: Yes, absolutely.
Justin Reich: I might not have the title exactly right, but...
Erik Burmeister: Well, yeah, it was pretty close. Yeah, it's interesting. It wasn't because people were against the idea. It wasn't like kids are on screens too much or anything like that. I think what it comes down to is that the efforts really got their start in regions where innovation, as far as education is concerned, was the norm. And I would say now Silicon Valley public school systems are much more innovative than they were sort of at the turn of the century in that first 10 years there of the 2000s. But I think it also comes down to, California has a really odd funding model for schools, and a lot of our school systems just didn't have the resources to be able to do it. There were a lot of pilot programs, but certainly, that sort of trusting the ability to manage it in-house was not there yet. And so, I think the aversion to the risks that were there were maybe greater in Silicon Valley, maybe because we knew what could go wrong maybe better than other folks.
Justin Reich: If you know the technology well enough, you know that it's not just a matter of buying this stuff and buying some licenses...
Erik Burmeister: Exactly, yes.
Justin Reich: It's a lot of work. I mean, that's exactly what I want to talk more with you about. But before I do that, what was your introduction to human-centered design and design thinking? Do you remember where you encountered some of these ideas first?
Erik Burmeister: Absolutely. So the short answer is the d.school at Stanford, and that's where a lot of us who were early entrants into design thinking and education got our start, so to speak. And you referred to that reality in your book. The d.school had a K12 Lab, which was a-
Justin Reich: Still does.
Erik Burmeister: ... project of-
Justin Reich: Still running.
Erik Burmeister: It still does. It still is and being led very ably by the people there. But that really got my start and our district start in design thinking. And beyond where I got it, I just want to tell a little story because I think it speaks to what design thinking felt like for me. I really resonated with what you had to share in your book about people thinking that design thinking was an ephemeral passing fad that was going to see its day and then move on. And that actually hasn't been the case, at least where design thinking is used as a management principle for change and innovation. But when I came to design thinking, I had just recently been named State Principal of the Year at a school in San Jose where I was a principal for a number of years and got recruited by Menlo Park to come up and sort of reopen or relaunch their comprehensive middle school with a whole new way of going about thinking and doing.
And I was really excited for the opportunity. It was a wonderful experience to sort of be in the backyard of design thinking, at least as its application was related to the private sector. And we had one of the early relationships with the K12 Lab at the design school, and I remember going to my first event there at the d.school, and I likened it to, we went through the whole day and I sort of had this moment where I wasn't ready to leave and people were sort of milling about. And I called some of the facilitators over and I said, "This has kind of been a transformational experience for me because this is how I thought about the world in education. But I feel like I've been a fish walking on land for 15 years of my career in education, and all of a sudden somebody just introduced me to water, and I dive in and I feel like, holy cow, this is what I've needed to the language and the mindsets that I've needed to explain how I want to go about the work of innovation in schools and why it's been so difficult."
And so for me, I like to share that story because it wasn't just, oh, yay, I got my ticket to go to the d.school and have this experience. But it was really why that experience was so powerful and how it felt to me as somebody who'd been in education at that time for a number of years as a teacher, as a vice principal, as a principal, and had always felt like I was pushing a rope uphill. And design thinking, the processes and the mindsets gave me a language, gave me an understanding, gave me a community around which I could think about bringing in stakeholders and having a totally different orientation to problems.
Justin Reich: So you've probably had to do... I'm going to ask you a question which I bet you've had to do a number of times over your career. So you are at an induction day where you've got the new faculty who are coming into your middle school, or the new faculty who are coming into your district where a superintendent, they probably somewhere on their interview with you or with your colleagues as it gets more established, understood that they're going to be... They'll teach Spanish or whatever, but they're going to be doing stuff with design thinking. How would you introduce, these are the basic most important ideas of design thinking, to new teachers who are coming into your community?
Erik Burmeister: Great question. Specifically talking about induction, I want to touch upon that specifically because I think that's a really critical space for school leaders and system leaders to have influence. And when I became superintendent at the school district, I had been assistant superintendent prior to that and a principal in the school district. But when I became superintendent, I said I want to stay very involved in new teacher orientation because this was my one shot to really set the stage for how we wanted people to think. And we didn't necessarily start with design thinking. Anybody who applied to Menlo Park City School District, they knew that's what they were getting into.
But where we started was we sent them all a book, and it was Liz Wiseman's book, Rookie Smarts. And the reason that we did that, and I believe they still do it today, is that we wanted our teachers to understand that no matter how many years of experience they had, no matter whether they went to such and such university or whether they had 20 years of experience or no experience, whether they were coming from a highly respected institution or not, it didn't matter. What mattered was we wanted their perspective.
And really, design thinking is about getting out of the seat of a stakeholder and putting on your designer hat. And we wanted people to know that in doing so, what they brought to the table as new to Menlo Park City School District's employees, was just as, if not more valuable, than what the folks who had been in the organization for years were bringing to the table. And so, I think, for us, it wasn't an introduction to the process of design thinking as much as it was an introduction to who matters and that perspectives are valued, asked for, and constantly reflected upon.
Justin Reich: So you are sharing these values of inclusion, and then if a teacher did come up to you and say like, "Wait, I don't exactly get this design thinking is [inaudible 00:11:02] things." What are your three or four sentences to explain what that is?
Erik Burmeister: So I think for us, we had, within our leadership team, we had operating principles, and one of them was user orientation. And so, anybody who's going to talk about human-centered design, we'll focus primarily first, I would think, on the human part of it. And human-centered design is really about valuing the perspectives, particularly of the user, the client, the customer, above things like in a school systems context, like the bus schedule, or the budgets-
Justin Reich: The givens.
Erik Burmeister: ... or board politics. The givens, right? Or what we call-
Justin Reich: That we want to start with, what are the problems experienced by the people day-to-day living in this community?
Erik Burmeister: Exactly. Exactly.
Justin Reich: Not start with, well, we have to do X.
Erik Burmeister: Exactly. And so, the human part, the user orientation is key to understanding design mindsets and principles, at least as it related to how we applied it in the Menlo Park City School District. The other thing that I would say is it starts with possibility, not constraints. And so, I have often said that people get promoted in education if they have very low tolerances for risk. Now, that isn't as true anymore, but certainly traditionally, if you were really, really good at managing risk, you got promoted to positions like superintendent, which is part of the reasons why I thought I would never find myself in a superintendent's office, as the superintendent, at least. If I was going to be in the superintendent's office, it was because I was doing something wrong because I wasn't attentive to risk near as much as other people were. But fortunately, I found a school board and a community in Menlo Park, California, that was not only not averse to risk but actually embraced it.
And so for me, what we tell young people who are, or not even young people, just new people to our system, is we want you to experiment. We want you to not worry about the consequences. Let us as system administrators worry about that for you. But ask questions, pursue new opportunities. This is a really important part of who we are as a school system and risk will manage itself out in the process, but if we start with possibility instead of constraint, we're going to be able to go a lot further.
And then last is write directly related to your book. Iterate, iterate, iterate. It's about taking information that you're getting in real-time. It's not waiting for some formal evaluation tool to tell you something that you already know. It's about taking in the data that it's constantly being thrown at you, feeling confident that you're able to process and analyze that data, and then feel empowered to do something about it. And so, iteration, first of all, is a perfect title for your book, a perfect concept upon which your book, I think, breathes life into stories like Menlo Park City School Districts and certainly my experience as a superintendent and a principal, and I just hope people will read it because I feel like if I was ever going to write a book, which I don't know that I ever will, but I feel in some ways I don't have to write it anymore because you've written it [inaudible 00:14:43]
Justin Reich: This one's covered. Well, I mean, Erik, your comments about opportunity and constraint, they're almost verbatim a section that's in the book there. Same thing that-
Erik Burmeister: Exactly.
Justin Reich: Educators are really good at finding constraints, and it's not a bad thing to know the constraints of the system. However, it can often be a good idea to sort of shut those down for a little bit and open up the possibilities and start there in sort of an optimistic frame. I want to tell you a story because I have a very distinct memory of one of the first interactions that I had with your middle school team. You can tell me if you were here, but I don't think you were.
Erik Burmeister: Okay.
Justin Reich: I think I was in a room full of educators from lots of different backgrounds who were on a kind of technology integration team. There was maybe a vice principal in the room, but it was not like, okay, I'm meeting with the principal and the tech director and a department head. It was like, this is a pretty new math teacher and this is a science person. And this was a counseling person, and there's an IT person there, but a very kind of cross-functional, collaborative group. They've gotten a whole bunch of tablet computers in the system, they're fired up to try new things.
And one of the first questions that I asked them was, "How do you expect...", I don't remember exactly how I said it because now we're a decade plus ago. "How do you expect kids learning to be different because of the work that you're doing now? How do you expect young people in Menlo Park to be different at the end of this eighth grade than they would've been at the previous eighth grade?" And that question was met by a long period of silence. That proved to be a stumper. And someone finally bravely raised their hand and they said, "I think we're going to be able to do some really great formative assessment with these iPads."
And this is one of those moments when you're in a kind of teaching coaching role where you're like, "I'm going to validate this not correct answer." Actually, tablets are pretty cool for formative assessment because young folks won't remember this, but in 2009, 2010, if you wanted to use a computer with kids, you were signing up for three minutes of boot-up and login. It was like, walk across the room, get the machine, put it on your desk, have the Windows chime, have things run for a little while. So it was kind of magical when some of these first tablets showed up and you just put on, and I don't know, maybe there's a passcode in there, but you just get right into it pretty darn fast. And the other thing, you can just slide it under your seat, slide it under your desk afterwards.
But I said to this teacher, "That is a great thing to do, but that's not quite the answer to my question that I was asking here. That's a good teaching strategy that you might use, but what are the learning goals that you have for your students?" And it turned out that that, like it was with almost every group that I worked with, was a place that needed a lot of work and conversation, particularly around issues of technology.
For whatever reason, when people buy new technology, they're so consumed with batteries and power cords and charging and login and cracked screens and insurance and all those other things that it's really hard to keep track of the idea that the only reason we might buy these things is because kids would be different, otherwise we should pick something else to do. But I wonder if that moment resonates with you, the sort of challenge of being like, we're going to do new things, we're going to invent all these new practices, and at moments we're going to lose track of learning and we're going to have to be really disciplined about constantly bringing that back in.
Erik Burmeister: Absolutely. Yeah. No, not only does it resonate for me, but I think it still happens today. I think what we're talking about is we're talking about a fundamental transformation in the role of teacher in all of this. And so, a hundred to 150 years of learning does not get undone in a year. We have had this posture towards learning as educators for quite some time, and let's be honest, it's been relatively effective at replicating the factory model that it was created to replicate. And so, it continues to be, even more than a decade later from when you and I worked together so closely, to be that constant challenge.
And not only does it resonate with me in terms of what our experience was back then, but it resonates with me for our experience now, and I think, in my consultancy, I have a lot of demand around AI, as I'm sure you in the university world also do as well. And I think where we look to technology initially, and this was true then and it's true now, is we start with efficiency. Where can technology provide us efficient solutions to sort of the daily operations of our job? And we saw that to be true when we talk about the SAMR framework as a way to looking at how learning changes with a device. Are we just substituting or are we really recreating learning in really exciting and powerful ways?
The same is true for AI, is that right now a lot of teacher focus, a lot of system-wide focus is on, if anything, if they're not just running scared, is on where it can create efficiency. And actually, I think that's a really safe, comfortable place to begin. And honestly, it was a safe and comfortable place for teachers to begin when they first got iPads in every kid's hands and in their own hands.
Justin Reich: It was a safe and comfortable place to begin in 1984 when Judith Sandholtz launched the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow project-
Erik Burmeister: Exactly.
Justin Reich: ... putting Apple IIe computers into schools. It is one of the most consistent findings that when we ask, when teachers get access to new technologies, they do similar kinds of things that they were doing before. And if they want them to do different things, they need to have the support and time and coaching and the defense you talked about of we're going to take care of the consequences, but here's some genuine meaningful space to conduct some experiments.
Erik Burmeister: Hundred percent.
Justin Reich: And it sounds like a big part of what's happened in Menlo Park over the last decade is making sure that educators not only feel like they have some permission to conduct those experiments, but they have some skills around that. And that's what design thinking is really all about-
Erik Burmeister: Absolutely.
Justin Reich: ... that you don't have to just be the fish walking on land, but you can be like, hey, look, there are some people who've thought for a long time about what are some characteristics of good experiments that lead to continuous improvement.
Erik Burmeister: Yeah. And that really is where I think a lot of our energies can be spent is first asking the question, like you asked us 12 years ago, sitting in that conference room. But I think it's also, as leaders, it's about creating conditions, and to some degree incentives, for people who are willing to be on the bleeding edge. I know that your listeners to your podcast can't see me, but you can see me as we record this, and you can see my bookshelf next to me. And one of the important books that I have here is something that most people won't read. And to be honest, I haven't even read all the way through this giant [inaudible 00:22:27]
Justin Reich: The Diffusion of Innovations.
Erik Burmeister: The Diffusion of Innovations by-
Justin Reich: Fifth Edition.
Erik Burmeister: Fifth Edition by Everett Rogers, and his research is mostly focused on technology implementation and integration.
Justin Reich: Almost everyone has seen some version of his adopter curve.
Erik Burmeister: Exactly.
Justin Reich: Innovators, early adopters, late majority [inaudible 00:22:45]
Erik Burmeister: But the adopter curve... Exactly. And so, when I talk about creating conditions and creating incentives, I talk about that particularly in the context of early adopters, is that we as design thinkers and leaders of spaces where we want design mindset to win the day, we have to create the conditions necessary for early adopters to feel safe, secure, and excited about going beyond just those substitution roles, that technology, or an idea, any idea that comes to us might have. And so, I believe that our role as leaders is not necessarily to go in and expect everybody to know exactly what to do, but to really make sure that those people who are willing to take some risks are given a safe, comforting, and encouraging space to do that, and that they feel empowered that there aren't going to be negative consequences.
And I would say in education, one of the primary negative consequences is what is my boss going to think, and what are the parents going to think, right? Followed very closely by what are my colleagues going to think. And so, we have to create spaces where teachers, especially, know that iterating in their classroom and trying new ideas and experiencing and discovering as educators, as professional, is not only something that's safe to do in our spaces, but expected, that teachers are empowered, and in a sense are rewarded for it. Not that the later majority folks who come on board are held back or held accountable for not.
Because what I have seen time and time again, and I have zero exceptions of this in my own experience in 25 years of educational leadership, is everybody comes around. I mean, everybody is in education for the right reasons. I've never met a teacher who's in education for the wrong reasons. I've never met a teacher who's like, "Yeah, I just got into it for my summers." Because if that's why you got into it-
Justin Reich: It's too hard.
Erik Burmeister: ... let me tell you, yeah, it's way too difficult. So everybody is in there for the right reasons. The thing is, we have to make it safe for those people who are willing to take risks early on when there's a whole lot of unknown, feel safe and empowered to be able to do so.
Justin Reich: Do you have any favorite concrete specifics, any particular sort of resource allocations or policies or tricks that were up your sleeve for helping your faculty know that you mean business about that?
Erik Burmeister: Well, I mean, I think first and foremost is positive reinforcement, giving the opportunities or giving those teachers, those staff, those leaders who are innovating, that are trying new things, a little bit of time in the spotlight, not in a way that says this person is better than their colleague, but saying like, hey, look at what so-and-so is learning. Look at the experiences that their students are having or their school site is having as a result of this person's willingness to think outside the box. So I would say giving kudos, whether it's in the district newsletter, having your public information officer highlight that information, whether it's connecting them to outside news agencies that are interested in looking at this stuff. Our local newspapers love stories about teachers who are trying new things in their classroom, and what better way to-
Justin Reich: Yeah, the ma of content must be filled. Although, I'll also say to you-
Erik Burmeister: Exactly.
Justin Reich: ... I interviewed a lot of teachers who were doing interesting things with technology between 2007 and 2011, and I think I was shocked at the time about how many of them... Even private praise from school leaders mattered enormously to them.
Erik Burmeister: Oh, a hundred percent, yes. And I was going to say, in addition to that public praise, they need private praise as well. They need to know that you as the leader are supporting the work that they do. The next thing is that I think that when I talk about creating safe spaces and creating incentives, one of the things that we did, and I want to say Menlo Park was and remains one of the best superintendency's anybody can have. It's an incredibly supportive community. When I first got recruited to go there, the job description literally said, "We want someone who wants to change the world." And I was like, "Who says that?"
Justin Reich: Who says that?
Erik Burmeister: But I don't want people to believe that this was easy. It was not. There's a lot of constraints, particularly in a wealthy community that has high expectations where the whole adage of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, can always reign supreme. There certainly were challenges that we had, but one of the things that we did when we met some of those challenges was we realized we had to create a safe environment for those early adopters to try new things. And people needed to see that. When I said, like, "Hey, I want to create a safe incentivized place for people to try new things", I had to back it up.
And so, what we did was we created an innovation zone. So when you talk about what sort of ideas do I have up my sleeve, it's like create a space where people know that there are some resources, that there will be an answer that is more often than not yes, and that there will be training and support, and that there will be somebody that they can go to to get help. And so, we basically created a position, it was a TOSA teacher on special assignment position of innovation and technology, around innovation and technology, and we let her run that show and people opted in to participating in this zone of innovation.
And basically, we gave a few, I wouldn't even say, we gave sort of the boundaries of the sandbox, but it was a very wide sandbox, and we just started to say, okay, what kind of learning do you want to do and how do you want to do it? And what's interesting is, as I read your book, so many scenarios popped in my mind of how we're sort of living out recommendations of your book in real ways within the zone of innovation. And I would say that creating that space with intentional resource and support is a really great way to start innovation happening in your school.
Justin Reich: Yeah, you have to have some kind of R&D budget, and that budget is time, it's support. No, I have the same experience, Erik, but of the opposite way of hearing these stories and being like, oh, that's what I talk about on page 14, or whatever it is.
Erik Burmeister: Exactly, yes.
Justin Reich: That this stuff works in the real world. Okay, so you and I meet a decade ago. You've told us now about how you are introduced to these ideas. You introduce them to your colleagues, you're bringing in new tools, the school board's asking you to change the world. You're empowering teachers to be able to try new things. None of this is easy. None of this is perfect. Your students aren't magically turning into perfectly educated children, but you're just doing lots of things a little bit more right one year than you were the previous year.
And then you are superintendent during COVID, and it's a time of disaster, of tragedy, of suffering. It's really hard for teachers, for students, for families, for staff. And you all decide to embark very early in September of 2020 in trying to be one of the first districts, the first district in California to open some school spaces for in-person learning. Can you tell us a little bit about how your proficiency with design thinking helped, as a community, helped you get ready for that challenge and how you did that together?
Erik Burmeister: Absolutely. Yeah. So I have always said that more powerful than design processes are design mindsets. And so, from very early on in our experience with design thinking, we as an institution, as an organization, really tried to adopt the mindsets of design. And we tried to lead in a way that reinforced that prior to COVID happening. But then when COVID happened, very organically, we started to fall into the habits of mind that we had created over the course of the 10 years previous. And it wasn't something that we honestly sort of said like, okay, this challenge calls for design superhero, right? This honestly was just, we are going to operate how we always know how to operate. And it wasn't until we started to see that the conversations we were having, the way we were having them, and the results that we were having was so different from school districts around us and across the country that we realized what's the difference, right?
Not only were people asking us, but we were wondering too, we were scratching our heads, like, why is it that we are at this point in the process when other people aren't? And when we reflected, we went back to, it's because we've been spending the last 10 years focusing on a yes before mindset, having user orientation, iterating, starting with possibility thinking rather than constraints, that kind of thing, and being human-centered. And what we knew and what was clear to everybody was our kids were dying in virtual spaces. Not all of them, but many of them were dying in virtual spaces. And you have to understand, as arguably the leader in technology integration in the K8 space, our school district is a preschool through eighth-grade school district that feeds into a comprehensive high school district. So we're only dealing with preschool through middle school-aged kids in our district. Our kindergartners were trying to learn how to read on a screen, and try as we might, and as ready as any school district in the nation was for this, it was not ideal, right?
Justin Reich: Yeah. You knew enough to be like, yeah, this is not going to have the outcomes that we want.
Erik Burmeister: Oh yeah, we didn't... Yeah, exactly. And fortunately, we had a board that even though it wasn't the same board that hired me 10 years prior, board after board has been totally aligned with this idea where in Menlo Park City School District, we are going to be focused on what's best for students. And so, with that user orientation, it wasn't ever a question of, is it safe to come back? Is it not safe to come back? What does the health director think? Or whatever. All that was important, and we tracked that information, but from the very beginning, as soon as we learned that this kind of learning was not conducive to what our students and even our staff needed, it really wasn't ever a question of if we can get back to school in person, what are we going to do to do it, not are we going to do. We were going to do it.
And it goes back to the fact that we knew that that was what was best for kids. Now, we also knew that some parents and some staff and some kids wouldn't come back even if it was the best kind of learning, but we needed to be prepared. And so that's what we did. And one of the first steps we took that I think really made it possible because we didn't go into our separate corners and try to protect our individual interests as staff, as parents, as the larger, broader community, administrators, the board, that kind of thing. What we did as early on is we brought what inevitably became a design team together. That's what we do. That's how we know how to solve problems.
And everybody was represented in there, but they weren't represented in there as stakeholders. They were represented in there as designers from a certain perspective or vantage point. So yes, we had union leaders in there, including the union president, who was probably the most supportive of the process in doing this because he knew and his colleagues knew that his voice at the table as a designer of whatever solution we were going to come up with was just as important and valued in the design journey.
Justin Reich: What did one of the first of those design meetings look like? Did you do it on Zoom? Did you do it in person?
Erik Burmeister: So in February, one of the natures of being in Menlo Park City School District, for folks who don't know, Menlo Park is just north of Palo Alto, where Stanford is located, Stanford University is located. It is arguably the center of gravity for venture capital, but it is also the stepsister to Palo Alto, which is the center of gravity of all other kinds of things, including medical research.
Justin Reich: There's a lot of science going on at Stanford.
Erik Burmeister: There's a lot of science going on around us.
Justin Reich: They have a few dollars there to do this kind of thing.
Erik Burmeister: They have a few dollars and a few experts, and many of those experts happen to have school-aged children. And many of those school-aged children happen to go to schools in Menlo Park. And yet, we are also extraordinarily diverse income-wise, background-wise, language-wise. And so, we were serving all kinds of folks, including a whole host of families who are in service, whose families are in service industries, who were being significantly impacted, who didn't have the ability to work from home like everybody else, and so forth. So that's just a little background on our community. But because we had access to, I mean, literally, the people who were on the cutting edge of this issue called COVID, it was an advantage for us to get access to information quickly. And so, we knew in February that something was coming, and I had a board member who was very connected to folks who knew we needed to have a plan.
And so, before schools even shut down, when it was just a conversation of what we might want to do, we had this design team, we called it our COVID Response Team, or I think at the time, I think it's Pandemic Response Team. It was called Coronavirus Response Team, and then it ended up being Pandemic Response Team. So our Pandemic Response Team met in person probably a week and a half before school started to shut down. And I basically said from the beginning, "I need all of your help and all of your input is extraordinarily important, but we have to remember that who we are serving here, we are serving students. And no matter what we do and how we respond, we're going to be transparent in our communication. We won't always agree, but we will always come together and have the hard conversations."
And that's what we did. And it started before schools shut down. Interestingly enough, we were the first district in the Bay Area to announce that we were closing down, and we were the first ones to open back up. And a lot of it had to do with our access to information and our mindsets of make decisions quickly. One of the mindsets of design thinking is a bias towards action. And we absolutely had a bias towards action, which means we were the first to shut down and the first to reopen.
Justin Reich: I bet there are a lot of folks who led schools during this period that wished they started those conversations as early as you did, because I think with a [inaudible 00:38:58] of those conversations in February of 2020 and March of 2020, just getting into them is really different than trying to get into them in July, in August, as each-
Erik Burmeister: Hundred percent.
Justin Reich: ... as each week, as each month of the pandemic went on, people had lots of opinions that hardened, and of course, it got politicized and polarized, and there's something about, but actually, if you sort of start before any of that and are just, here is the problem, here are all the facts that we could find, let's start talking together about the best possible solutions, things came about. So in September of 2020, you ended up opening some of your kindergarten and first grade classrooms. They were outdoors, or how did it work? Did you get everybody in or...?
Erik Burmeister: Well, in September of 2020, we didn't get everybody in. We went slow to go fast, even though we were going so much faster than everybody else. But Justin, I want to say, what you just said about hardened perspectives, and everybody's sort of... You didn't say this, but everybody's sort of in their corners around how they feel about this and where their comfort level is in terms of response. I think one of the things that really helped, I don't think, I know, one of the things that really put us in a position to be able to open to in-person learning in 2020 was something that we did in July and August of that year. And it was something that, yes, it was foresight, but the only reason we had that foresight was because of our posture towards design thinking and our posture towards design mindsets to begin with.
So we as an organism are regularly thinking about our user's experience, and we knew in thinking about our user's experience that people are not a monolith and that not everybody, even if we could all agree that learning, the best learning was not happening online, that it was in-person, we would get so many different answers in terms of, okay, so what's the response to that? And so, what we knew is if we go into this school year with a school calendar frozen in time, a teacher assignments frozen in time, bell schedules frozen in time, bus schedules, all of those things frozen in time-
Justin Reich: You're going to guess a series of wrong answers. The world will change around you.
Erik Burmeister: Exactly. And we're not going to have any ability to iterate, right? It's going to be, so much of a school year is defined by those decisions that you make in June, July, and August. And so, what we said is, we know that our users are not a monolith, and some are going to want to come back and some are not. And we also know that our ability to iterate post August 24th or whenever school started was going to be significantly limited. So we had to create what I would refer to as an iteration space or an iteration runway for us to be able to respond in the moment to what the data was telling us.
And so, what we did is we had the presence of mind, that same teacher on special assignment who ran our innovation zone, I went to her and I said, four weeks before school started, I said, "The only way we're going to be able to get open in-person as quickly as possible is if we have an option for staff, parents, and students who will not be ready to come back when it's possible for us to come back. I have no idea what those conditions will be. I have no idea what timeline it will be, but I know that if I have to have everybody agree, then I am screwed out the gate, right?" And so, I said to her, "Would you open a virtual school and run it for the rest of the school year?"
And she said yes, thank God. And we were able to, within four weeks, basically put up not only a school, but a choice to our community. And we called it the merry-go-round or the rollercoaster. And the merry-go-round was if you like to anticipate, if you are afraid, if you have health complications, if you need to take care of family members at home, if childcare is an issue, whatever your issue is, it doesn't matter. It's legitimate, it's valued, and it's valid. But we want you to pick this merry-go-round and we will have a robust experience for you for the rest of the school year.
But those of you who want the opportunity to come back when it is safe enough by the standards of the county and the state to come back, then you choose the rollercoaster, the ups and downs, the not knowing that going up the hill and not knowing what's on the bottom of the hill, all of that stuff. But I can't promise you, once you make your decision, that you're going to be able to easily switch between the two. So it's either the merry-go-round or the rollercoaster, but everybody's invited to the amusement park. And that happened because one, we were oriented towards our users, and two, we knew that we needed an iteration runway, an ability to iterate through the process because schools are notoriously hardwired after the first day of school.
Justin Reich: Yeah. We put a lot of things in place right at the beginning that make it hard to change. Joel Metta and I, that summer, did a report called Imagining September, where we encouraged school districts to put out tent poll ideas. Schools around the country were putting out these really long lists of checklists. And I was like, "I don't think anybody's going to read checklists. Checklists are long and kind of boring." And what you did was give people two big metaphors with which to get a sense of how they might be able to engage with schooling that year. Now, what are the problems that you're taking on these days? You've got some folks who are working on AI, you've got some folks who are... What other kinds of questions are schools and districts coming at you with?
Erik Burmeister: That's a great question. Yeah, so AI, I think, is top of mind for everybody because the work that I do is at the intersection of youth-serving nonprofits, education, and Edtech. AI is something that I get a lot of requests and questions around, and specifically related to AI, I would say that one of the interesting... How the journey towards AI is analogous to the one-to-one iPad journey is that a lot of people are going to need to come at it sort of at safe, sort of like how is this going to augment my efficiency in life. But I'm also really, really excited about the opportunities around design and creation that AI is really going to help. And here's the thing. Our students, they're already doing it. They are already engaged. I have a 13-year-old, a nine-year-old, and an adult son who's grown and flown, but I can tell you, it's already a part of their vernacular, their way of life, their way of being. They know how to do it.
And it's really up to us as learning scientists and as learning coaches and as learning designers to figure out how to get comfortable with it. Yes, absolutely, it has to be safe. But there very quickly we are going to see experiences where AI is being used to create new and different experiences of learning and being in a learning space. Some other areas, obviously, I think where equity and achievement meet, where access is a huge issue, access as it relates to AI is a huge issue. You even talk about it in your book, like access to design principles and where it meets equity, and it's like, design is great, but if the people you're designing for and the designers in the room aren't representative of who's going to be impacted by whatever you design, then in and of itself, it's a terrible process and it's broken from the get-go.
And so, design justice, learning justice, all of these aspects of diversity and equity are top of mind. And then I think the future of work, particularly as technology advancement is happening so quickly, is super hot button issue, but very closely connected to the future of work is, well, if the future of work is changing so dramatically and traditional school has been set up to serve a more traditional view of work, then how does school change? And we all know that, like it or not, schools are not good at change. They're not quick to change, and yet, there is some danger in changing too quickly. Bettina Love just came out with a new book or is coming out with a new book, and I, unfortunately, don't remember the title, but it's talking about sort of the damage that the school reform movement has done to kids of color, right? And so, that-
Justin Reich: Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children.
Erik Burmeister: Yes, thank you. Exactly. And thank you for doing that. And shout out to Bettina Love for her really thoughtful and hard-to-take, but really needing-to-say editorial on school reform movements of the past. We all have to do and can do better. School reform, school innovation, that needs to be something that we don't do to kids and communities, but we engage people in the work as both designers of their own destiny, but also the people for whom design is happening, an audience of design. And so, there are great organizations just here in the Bay Area. The Bay Ed Fund has recently gotten an influx of money to do some really great work at Bottoms Up design work, which I'm really excited about. And so, I would say sort of where design school innovation and equity and outcomes come together is-
Justin Reich: That's where you want to be.
Erik Burmeister: That's where I want to be. It's where we all should be, quite honestly.
Justin Reich: Erik Burmeister is a former teacher, principal, superintendent in California. He runs a strategic consulting firm, Solutionary Advisors. Erik, thanks for doing an early read of Iterate, and thanks for joining us today on TeachLab.
Erik Burmeister: It is my pleasure. I can't wait to share the book with all my friends, and great job on it, Justin.
Justin Reich: I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. Special thanks to our guest, Erik Burmeister. To learn more about Erik's work, check out the links in our show notes. In the meantime, we've got some great resources out there for educators. My new book, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools, is out now. You can learn more at iteratebook.com. That's all one word, iteratebook.com. And you can register for a free online course in October about innovation in schools. Sign up at iteratebook.com. And check out our documentary film, We Have to Do Something Different: Teachers on the Journey Towards More Equitable Schools, at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can request a copy of the film or schedule a screening at your school. You can find links to all this stuff in our show notes. If you like what you hear on TeachLab, be sure to leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. The sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe. Until next time.