Is Bigger Always Better? The Case For Starting Small With New Learning Ideas
Our Ideas series is exploring how innovation happens in education.
Anytime there's an innovation in education, often the first question anyone asks is, "Will it scale?"
Sure, you've managed to improve learning outcomes for one classroom, one school, one district. But if you can't reach 50,000 — or 5 million — students, the thinking goes, then it's not real or worthy.
Matt Candler is one person arguing the opposite. And the White House, among others, is listening.
"We get drunk on scale, quickly forgetting that all big ideas were once small," he has written. He makes an argument for a buckshot approach: scattering more money and support across larger numbers of projects at earlier stages. The focus, he says, should be on small-scale approaches: identifying problems, coming up with solutions and testing prototypes.
Making a larger number of smaller bets, Candler argues, would also allow resources to flow to a more diverse group of leaders: perhaps people with on-the-ground experience and roots in the communities they serve.
Candler puts these ideas into practice with an organization called 4.0 Schools, in New Orleans. It's a community that holds gatherings of educators, entrepreneurs and engineers who create and test ideas for the future of school. At the recent White House Summit on Next Generation High Schools, 4.0 Schools announced that it will support the creation of 1,000 "tiny schools" to quickly prototype new ideas in communities around the country.
You could say that they're taking small, big.
Candler has spent a lot of time thinking and talking about this idea of scale with another New Orleans innovator, his friend Aaron Walker.
Walker is the head of Camelback Ventures, a nonprofit organization that runs a seven-month Fellows Program offering coaching, connections and capital to underrepresented entrepreneurs. Like Candler, he focuses especially on education-related ventures.
Please describe your organizations and their missions better than I just did.
Candler: Our mission is to create a community where educators, families and students Is Bigger Always Better? The Case For Starting Small With New Learning Ideas : NPR Ed : NPR: