Grant Lichtman
Introducing Grant Lichtman, Recognized Though-Leader and Guest Contributor:
Grant Lichtman is an internationally recognized thought leader in the drive to transform K-12 education. He speaks, writes, and works with fellow educators to build capacity and comfort with innovation in response to a rapidly changing world. He works with school and community teams in both public and private schools, helping them to develop their imagination of schools of the future, and their places in that future. He is the author of two books, #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education, and The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School. His upcoming book, Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education, explores the future of K-12 education in the next two decades and how we can dramatically transform education for all students despite the forces of inertia that have trapped schools in the past.
For fifteen years Grant was a senior administrator at one of the largest and oldest K-12 independent schools in California with responsibilities that included business, finance, operations, technology, development, campus construction, and global studies. Before working in education, he directed business ventures in the oil and gas industry in the former Soviet Union, South America, and the U.S. Gulf Coast. Grant graduated from Stanford University with a BS and MS in geology in 1980 and studied the deep ocean basins of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Bering Sea. He and his wife, Julie, live in Poway, California, just north of San Diego.
Since 2012, Grant has visited and worked with more than 125 schools and
thousands of teachers, administrators, and students around the country.
Grant told us that when he visits schools, it is as much to learn and
share what they are doing as to impart his own guidance. “I like
working with people more than I like just talking at them”, he said. He
is a leader in a new style of organizational vision and strategy
development for schools that is ongoing, inclusive, transparent, rooted
in the principles of design thinking, and, Grant says, “a bit messy”.
When
we talked to Grant about adding his voice to ours, he said that he left
his one-school job in 2012 “because I saw both a growing realization
that schools need to change and a gap in our abilities to make those
changes. On the one hand, we have teams of educators who know how kids
learn, but have little or no background in organizational change
management. On the other hand, we have experts in organizational change
management in the 21st century who have never spent any time in
schools. I have both of those strands in my DNA, and finally a lot of
school teams realize the urgency in shifting away from the rigid,
traditional, teacher-centric, industrial age model of learning.”
Grant
puts his thinking, writing, and work with schools into a simple
context. “Essentially, effective schools work on three levels”, Grant
told us. “There is a 30,000-foot level of ‘what is our vision; who do we
want to be; at what do we want to excel; what is our North Star?’
There is the 10,000-foot level of ‘how can we align the operating system
of our school in direct support of that vision’ and the ‘Ground Floor’
level of ‘what are we going to do with our students every day’. My
wheel house is in the upper levels of this simple matrix. Once I have
helped school/community teams to find their true North Star of
differentiated value, and to build those integrated systems in support, I
am working myself as fast as I can out of the relationship and turning
the work over to those who are experts in pedagogy, program, and
learning.”
Grant has offered to share his thinking with us from
time to time. You can see more of his work, including links to his books
and articles at www.grantlichtman.com, and follow him on Twitter @GrantLichtman and LinkedIn.