This Episode will air at 5:30 pm EDT on Saturday April 16th
Strategies for Scaling to Achieve Educational Impact with Harvard Professors Monica Higgins and James Honan
This session will focus on the challenges and opportunities for scaling innovations in the education sector in a context of uncertainty, risk, and ambiguity. Our guests will provide a brief overview of their work on scaling for impact and will highlight some of the key considerations for building leadership and organizational capacities to ensure sustainability moving forward. The Covid-19 pandemic has presented leaders of education sector organizations with a number of disruptive challenges in the design and delivery of teaching and learning at all levels, from Pre-K-12 through higher education. We will discuss scaling strategies for educational leaders and organizations in both high resource and low resource settings, in the US and across the world. More about our guests below the video.
Episode Guests
Monica Higgins is a professor of Education Leadership at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been on the faculty at Harvard for over 25 years, first at Harvard Business School, where her research focused on leadership and entrepreneurship in the healthcare industry and then, for the past 15 years, at Harvard Graduate School of Education, where a lot of her work has been on leadership and organizational change in large U.S. urban K-12 contexts. Sometimes, she tells people that whereas many of her education colleagues focus on the students and the curriculum they learn, she focuses on the adults in the school building – the teachers, staff, administrators and the ways in which the work environment does or does not enable them to do their very best work. This orientation toward leading for change and, importantly, the reasons why people may or may not change fits with her background in organizational behavior and social psychology. She has always been curious about what holds people, organizations, and systems back from change and the inequities that result and get reproduced over time. For this reason, she has been actively engaged in research and teaching on ways to bring about innovation and entrepreneurial leadership in the sector and, importantly, on how to scale the excellent work of innovators and entrepreneurs for even greater social impact.
James P. Honan has served on the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) since 1991 and is a Senior Lecturer on Education. He is also a faculty member a the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at HKS, and a member of the Faculty Executive Committee of the Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) at Harvard University, He serves as Educational Co-Chair of the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) at HGSE and Faculty Chair of the Emirates Leadership Initiative Executive Education Program and Nonprofit Financial Stewardship (NFS) Online Executive Education Program at HKS. He also teaches in a number of executive education programs at HGSE, HKS, Harvard Business School and Harvard Medical School. His teaching and research focus on strategic finance in nonprofit organizations, educational entrepreneurship, and organizational performance measurement and management issues. He served previously as Associate Director of HGSE’s Programs in Professional Education and served as Institutional Research Coordinator in the Office of Budgets at Harvard University. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Marist College and the National Association of Independent Schools and has served as a consultant on strategic planning, resource allocation, governance, and performance measurement and management to numerous colleges, universities, schools, foundations, and non-profit organizations both nationally and internationally.