Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools

Abstract: For 20 years, MIT Professor Justin Reich has worked in schools on all kinds of projects: transforming curriculum, integrating technology, re-engaging students, making school meaningful and relevant to young people and families. Across these experiences, every successful school improvement effort has one thing in common: they all improve one step at time. Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools is a playbook for making big, joyful changes in schools out of small, manageable steps. Iterate reflects insights about design, collaboration, and improvement from educators around the world, and from colleagues at MIT. For learning science, new technologies, and innovative theories to make a difference in the world, they have to make their way into the hands of classroom educators. Iterate offers new ideas for improving learning in classrooms, schools, or wherever you work to make learning better.

Bio: Justin is an associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at MIT and the director of the Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools and Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, and he is the host of the TeachLab Podcast. He earned his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow. He is a past Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. His writings have been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other scholarly journals and public venues. He started his career as a high school history teacher, and coach of wrestling and outdoor adventure activities.