Innovation in education requires intensive strategic planning and a clear development process. A formal development process guided our inquiry and decision-making. It kept us on schedule, on task, and focused on the right issue at the right time. The six-stage process we formulated and used, called the 6i Development Process, helped us to stay on track with our vision, include community members, assess the value of possible innovations, hire leaders, and engage in ongoing dialogue about our mistakes as well as our successes.

Begin by examining the school’s organizational structure and establishing models for learning. This includes defining the learning community’s culture, project benchmarks, and success measures. In building the School of the Future, we began by creating a yardstick for measuring progress.

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Internal investigation: Honestly viewing one's strengths and weaknesses can lead to tremendous growth. We used the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) tool to help us analyze the School of the Future thoroughly and objectively, to plan more effectively, to mitigate threats and weaknesses, and to maximize opportunities and strengths.

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Identify the key community members and organizations invested in building or transforming your school, and include them in your process. Including the right participants from the right groups is essential to the success of the process and outcomes.

In Philadelphia, for example, we brought more than 50 community members into the process. The School District of Philadelphia philosophy, "If we are coming into your neighborhood, you are part of the process," proved very successful for our joint project. To ensure that the community was well represented, we created five distinct groups that provided organizational support: School Planning Team, Community Advisory Board, Curriculum Working Committee, District Planning Team, and School of the Future Advisory Board.

Although several key community members were involved in our development process from the beginning, we decided to bring the broader community into the process only at this stage. It is essential to establish a strong foundation of ideas and priorities before engaging with the wider community. When deciding whom to include in the process, it’s important to balance appropriate representation with the time you have available. The Philadelphia community respected this decision.

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The pressures to begin building a new learning environment or to implement changes in your existing one right away may seem overwhelming. You will increase your chances of success, however, if you wait to begin implementing until you have very clearly established the learning environment you seek to create. Take the time to make sure that you have gathered all the necessary ideas and to carefully measure each suggested improvement against your critical success factors. This will help to ensure that the changes you make will be effective and lasting.

For instance, our team was tempted to start building the School of the Future right away, but we held off. We held off on technology decisions until we had made instructional plans. We held off on classroom design until we had determined methodology. And, we waited to implement until we were sure that we had done everything we could to improve. No idea was too small for us to consider, no thought too outlandish.

Once everything was on the table, we carefully considered every proposed innovation, applied the five critical success factors we created in Stage 1, and determined which innovations had true educational value. If an asset could not be mapped to a success factor—and therefore aligned to a learner’s achievement—it was not adopted.

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Professional development is critical to successfully implementing your reform plan. As a first step, allow enough time to select and train leaders for your learning community. You may want to start this part of the process after construction begins or when you have your new infrastructure and curriculum plans in hand (or even sooner). The Chief Learner (principal) of the School of the Future was selected more than a year before the school opened in September 2006.

Also, follow a proven selection process for hiring effective leaders, training educators, and other staff to implement your vision, and support the ongoing professional development of all your leaders to help ensure that your education mission and vision will endure. To guide our selection of the Chief Learner at the School of the Future, to support the training of educators and other staff members, and to help ensure the ongoing development of the school’s education leaders, we worked with a professional development firm to support the creation of the Education Competency Wheel. You can explore the Education Competencies to help you select, hire, and develop your leaders.

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The process of creating relevant and sustainable innovations is never complete. Like all 21st-century learning communities, the School of the Future is constantly evolving to its context and to the changing needs of its learners. Ongoing adaptation requires a commitment to regular reflection or introspection. Although the fast pace of learning communities makes it hard to find time for reflection, the time invested looking back on processes and practices can be as fruitful as the time spent planning and implementing. Continual reflection is the only way to help ensure that you continue to meet your goals and success factors.

In working on the School of the Future, we found that, for this ongoing introspection to be effective, it is essential to make sure that you create a culture of dialogue in which all members of the learning community are encouraged to acknowledge and share their failures and successes. Fear and intimidation can hinder the honest reflection needed to continually improve. We often learn more from our mistakes and wrong turns than from our successes.

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