Our Wildwood, Summer 2021, Volume 46

LOOKING AHEAD Future of Education

Preparing Students for the Future

by Susan Olsen and Marc Frankel, Board of Trustees

Two years ago, with Wildwood’s 50th anniversary on the horizon, the Board of

of discovery. We envisioned an event that would bring together Wildwood stakeholders for a day of conversation and design ideation, with Grant there to provide context and inspiration to push us in our thinking and instill us with the confidence to do such novel and important work. When the pandemic forced us to rethink, we lamented the chance to be in person but welcomed the way our thinking would be enlarged and advanced by this living experiment. A portion of the future, which had felt very abstract and far away, had arrived. What would we do with it? It’s in this spirit that we began to ask in earnest: What do students need for their futures? What is the future of education and how do we help students thrive in it? To start, faculty and parents engaged around these questions instance, is working better than they thought and should continue five to 10 years from now? What have they learned about teaching during this time? About learning? What do we still need to figure out? Using the information we collected, Landis Green and Grant created six Design Teams made up of trustees, parents, faculty, staff, alumni, and current students. Each team would explore the fundamental question—how can in light of this long period of distributed learning. What, for

Wildwood is a pathbreaking school. Founded 50 years ago on the firmest progressive principles, Wildwood looked like no other school in Los Angeles. When it expertly scaled up to include an upper school 30 years later, it remained true to the progressive model—student-centric, always out front with innovation, actively seeking reform. Wildwood is more than simply relevant in the conversation about educational change; it helps steer it. But what comes next? How does Wildwood stay at the helm? All independent schools write strategic plans, but under the leadership of former Chair Joel Brand and current Chair Andrew Solmssen, the Wildwood Board of Trustees sought a wholly different approach to strategizing. Focused on creating an “evergreen” set of strategies—a dynamic framework rather than a list of rigid goals—we wanted to understand how we could ready Wildwood for the breathtaking changes the future promises. With so many issues to consider— financial, geographic, demographic, challenges to social justice, pedagogic—we knew that the work was going to take time and would engage the wisdom and expertise of our entire community. In early 2019, we hired Grant Lichtman, a prominent thought leader in education transformation, to guide us through a process

Trustees asked two of its members, Marc Frankel, a consultant on governance and strategy for private, independent schools, and Susan Olsen, a career educator, to lead a task force on the future of education.

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