The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools across the country to shift how educators taught and students learned almost overnight. Some of those innovations — along with guidance for their broader implementation — are featured in “School Rethink 2.0: Putting Reinvention Into Practice, ” a new book from editors Frederick M. Hess, Michael B. Horn and Juliet Squire.
Published by Harvard Education Press in February 2025, “School Rethink 2.0” offers innovative approaches to educational reinvention and how educators and school and system leaders can implement them. It gathers insights and advice from nearly a dozen leaders, entrepreneurs and practitioners, including Brent Maddin, executive director of Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce™
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Register for a free webinar on April 1 to hear directly from Brent Maddin, Rick Hess and other chapter contributors of “School Rethink 2.0”.
Maddin believes the book could be influential because it centers on what Richard Elmore, an educational theorist, defined as the “instructional core:” the place at which students, teachers and content interact.
“If whatever you’re talking about doing impacts one of those three things, then you actually stand to make a difference in education,” Maddin says. “I think a lot of the chapters in the book explore different aspects of that instructional core.”
Maddin penned chapter 4 in the book, focusing on the importance of redesigning the way we staff schools, three fundamental shifts that take place when educators design models grounded in the elements of the Next Education Workforce and what he sees as the “secret sauce’ to strategic school staffing.
“If we want to rethink schools, one of the most important considerations would be the way that we’re bringing our adults around kids, or the way that we staff our schools. I think that the chapter provides a clear and concise overview of our work at the Next Education Workforce initiative and really describes what we mean by a team-based approach.”
For those interested in learning more about the book, register for a free webinar hosted by the American Enterprise Institute where Hess and book contributors Maddin, Larry Berger, Joel Rose and Arthur VanderVeen will answer questions and discuss challenges they’ve overcome. Learn more.
