kansas school redesign

Introduction

Welcome to the Kansas School Redesign resource site. This site houses links and resources that may be helpful as your school teams investigate and explore the Four Redesign Principles.

Please direct any questions or comments about this site to Pat Bone at pbone@ksde.org.

The Redesign Process

The process utilized in Kansans Can Redesign is a strategic combination of Design Thinking and the Four Disciplines of Execution (McChesney, Huling, and Covey, 2012). These two processes are woven together in the following manner.

Design Thinking is not a linear process. Each year that you engage in Redesign, you should be working through the steps of Design Thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. While you should be able to achieve modeling/mentoring for some of your Redesign Strategies, you will need to continue working back through the stages of ‘Designing’ and ‘Implementing’ as you continuously grow and improve through the implementation of new strategies based on your student needs (as seen through data).

In addition to engaging in Design Thinking to address complex challenges, Redesign schools must also utilize the Four Disciplines of Execution (2012). These include:

1. Focus on the wildly important

2. Act on lead measures

3. Keep a compelling scoreboard

4. Create a cadence of accountability.

As you utilize the Design Thinking process to continuously improve by acting on your lead measures, you will want to make sure that you keep a compelling scoreboard and review it frequently so that you can appropriately address needs or areas of concern.

For more tips and tools, please access the Redesign Process page.

Redesign Conditions

Essential to the Redesign process is for school leaders to establish the conditions for the school’s culture to develop into a learning organization. Kools and Stoll (2016), in their work to redesign schools in Wales, UK, define learning organizations as schools that have “the capacity to change and adapt routinely to new environments and circumstances as its members, individually and together, learn their way to realizing their vision.” We believe this definition is extremely applicable to the current context in Kansas. A learning organization is built when the following constructs are intentionally developed:

• Shared Vision

• Inquiry, Innovation, and Exploration

• Collective Efficacy

• Modeling Learning Leadership

• Psychological Safety

• Learning from External Environments

The conditions of a learning organization (i.e. your culture) must be developed and supported.

In order for your organization to engage in continuous improvement, a Shared Leadership approach must be embedded in your organization. In Shared Leadership-and essential to Redesign-the organization must be flattened to allow for multiple voices to be included in the decision-making process. Shared Leadership also means embracing diverse perspectives and sharing the responsibility and accountability for vision, mission, and decisions of the organization. Thus, in order to have the right conditions for change, you must have in place a strong culture and shared leadership practices.

For more tools and resources on this topic, please go to the Redesign Conditions page.

Redesign Success Rubric

To self-check your school's redesign progress, please use the Redesign Success Rubric.