Interviews

How to Find a School Design and Replicate It, with Ted Fujimoto

The Enrollhand Team

Sep 12, 2019 • 2 min read

“The common factor (in these school design success stories) is that you are unlocking the intrinsic motivation of a student who never had that, and was never able to tap that motivation in an environment that was safe to do so, and... that same environment is positive for the school team members, as well.” - Ted Fujimoto

Audio version:

Summary

In this episode, Ted Fujimoto, President of Landmark Consulting Group, entrepreneur, and expert in leadership development and organizational redesign, leads us to understand how to scale a school design with “fidelity.” The goal is always to achieve world-class performance. He explains the ways that system replication is not the same thing as “cloning.”

Everything Ted does is built on the pillars of trust, respect, and responsibility, and whether you are launching a school, or redesigning an organization in the fields of entertainment, music, technology, or real estate, that’s not a bad way to start. Ted is the co-founder and co-chair of the Right to Succeed Foundation. They intend to transform at least 6,000 public schools into “American Dream Schools” within the next ten years using “replicable deeper learning whole-school designs.” The key - whether you are trying to replicate a system design, or maximize the performance of one student - is in the relationships that are built.

Ted always starts by creating a “power team culture.” If you would like to see a power team culture in your school or to transform your organization into a “dream school,” this is the man to talk to. Or, in this case - to listen to.

Quotes:

09:10 “Students - in a heartbeat - can detect when something is authentic or not, and whether they are safe or not. How do you create an environment that… ensures that no matter what is happening at home for a teacher, their first interaction with a student is in the right mindset?”

14:50 “Intrinisic motivation is what drives long-term, sustained performance and engagement by students and team members.”

19:30 “The common factor (in these school design success stories) is that you are unlocking the intrinsic motivation of a student who never had that, and was never able to tap that motivation in an environment that was safe to do so, and... that same environment is positive for the school team members, as well.”

22:11 “A program or a practice cannot exist in isolation. It could be the very best thing in the world, but what is most important is that you have the ecosystem around it to support it and sustain it, and not kill it.”

26:37 “What a design network helps to do is, it articulates the design practices that if implemented with high fidelity will produce success. Secondly, it helps the school system think through how to design structures that help and support, and are not toxic to that school design.”

Here are some resources mentioned in our discussion:

New Tech High School - https://www.newtechhigh.org/

Big Picture Learning - https://www.bigpicture.org/

Prenda Schools - https://prendaschool.com/

Acton Academy - http://www.actonacademy.org/

Where to learn more about the guest:

Ted Fujimoto at Linkedin - linkedin.com/in/tedfujimoto

Landmark Consulting - consultlandmark.com

Right to Succeed - righttosucceed.org

Go All Creative - https://www.goallcreative.com/

Twitter - tedfujimoto

Twitter - RightToSucceed