Dr. Beth Holland, EdD in Entrepreneurial Leadership in Education | Research & Measurement Partner at The Learning Accelerator

In this episode, we discuss what prompted Beth to move from the education technology space to pursue her doctorate in entrepreneurial leadership in education, how her doctoral training prepared her for success in the non-profit sector, and the different ways she influences education systems and policy as a research and measurement partner at The Learning Accelerator.

Hosted by Brooklyn Arroyo

To connect with Beth and to learn more about her story, visit her page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

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Brooklyn Arroyo

Hello. I'm co-host Brooklyn Arroyo and this is 100 alumni voices podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're joined by Beth Holland, EdD in entrepreneurial leadership within education. Hello, Beth, how are you today? 

Beth Holland

I'm good. How are you? Thanks for having me.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Yeah, of course. I'm really excited to work with you and and see what where the conversation goes. So, let's just start off with I've never heard of Entrepreneurial leadership within education. So, would you like to explain a little bit of what that looks like?

Beth Holland

So, the program is inside the School of Education. It's an education doctorate program. So, we were doing an applied dissertation and the entrepreneurial leadership and Ed program was really focused on what do we need to be able to do to think about leadership in new entrepreneurial ways. So, we took a lot of courses in, like, actually in entrepreneurial leadership in turn-around leadership. Really focused on what can we do throughout the sector and throughout the system to help be driving education forwards? So, we took some policy classes, some business classes, our Ed classes, but it was a real interdisciplinary program.

Brooklyn Arroyo

OK, OK. And so how did you find before going into that program yourself interested in that work? Or did you sort of happen across it by accident?

Beth Holland

That's a great question. I had been working in the education technology space for years. So, I had been a tech director in a school and then I was working as a professional learning consultant with a startup. So, I was very much in this like startup mode and tech space. We were moving really quickly and I hit a point before I applied where I found myself starting to say, like I don't know what I don't know. But people would say like, oh, we're investing in you know thousands of dollars’ worth of devices. How do we know if it works? Or what do we need to do at a policy level to be driving education forward? And through all of those conversations, I actually spoke to my advisor from my Master’s program, which I had done in technology innovation and education, and said, you know, I really wish I had this degree where I could keep the ed tech focus. I could also learn a little bit more about business. I could dig into policy. You know how do I create this interdisciplinary degree? And he said, funny you should mention that. Why don't you look at the program that’s at Hopkins, and so that was how I found the entrepreneurial leadership and Ed program just because I was trying to figure out how do I pull all these pieces together and that was the one that emerged as a really strong option.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, it sort of just was the perfect fit for you, even despite it's not necessarily specific program or space of studying and how multifaceted it was. So now within you know post-EdD, did you step away from academia? Did you step back into the world that you were previously? How did that look for you?

Beth Holland

So, I really wasn't certain when I finished up my degree if I wanted to go into academia or if I wanted to stay outside of it. So, what I ended up doing was, and I don't know if I advise this, but I took a postdoc at a university which put me straight into the university space and I took a part time job with a nonprofit. So, I was working as the digital equity project director for the consortium of school networking, which is a nonprofit that kept me in the edtech space but put me in more of a leadership role where I was really focused on the policy and the research issues that where I was super interested in from a digital equity perspective. And I then spent the year working in a university setting and I got about 8 months into it and said, like university isn't moving fast enough for me. Like I'm a start-up person. I move really quickly and this is not, this wasn't really for me. And one of the pieces I find really important, especially in education, is how do we bridge like the research practice gap? You know so much research happens and then it gets stored away in academic journals, you know, and it's written for academics. And that's not the language that teachers and leaders are speaking, and so I really liked the position in the nonprofit because I was working alongside leaders. I still was very much connected to the reality on the ground. And so that's when I decided, you know, at the end of the postdoc to go into the nonprofit space and not the academic space.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, what advice would you have you you mentioned briefly, you didn't know if you recommended this pathway, but what advice do you have for those who are in similar fields of education and sort of multifaceted fields that you think would really benefit them post-EdD, post-doctoral experience? To have a glimpse of that academia so you can sort of see what that would like for you or or what does that, what, what, what are your thoughts there?

Beth Holland

I mean, I learned a lot working as a TA for my advisor, so that was also a helpful piece. So, while I was a student, I was getting a sense of that. Some really good advice I got was publish early. So, how can you start thinking about publishing while you're still a student, whether it's part of your dissertation or some aspect of it? And then, I mean, I think the biggest skill, and this is something I'm always looking for now that I'm in a position where I'm hiring new people is, really think about how are you going to communicate about research to the broader sector, to the broader field, and not just in the academic space, because that's a skill, especially in education, that's really valued. And to understand you know what does it look like when it's not, I guess this is another piece, it start thinking about how do you embrace the mess, because research in the wild, when you're not in a lab setting, I mean 1000 things go wrong. I spent half of my morning untangling a couple of projects that we're working on where you know with real life people and things happen. You know, we we had a plan. The plan's not working. We're adapting. So, any opportunity to start thinking about how to work directly in a sector that you want to target, you know internships, projects that you can tie to some of your dissertation work or research, I think that's it's really helpful.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, you stepped into the more nonprofit world and and and that's what you're currently working in now, right? 

Beth Holland

Right. 

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, do you feel that your academic experience within this program really prepared you for this? Or did it fall short in some areas to step into this sort of world?

Beth Holland

So, I think the first thing that was really helpful was being in an EdD program versus a PhD program, because we did dissertation like in our dissertation research in the field. And so, by the time I graduated, I knew how to run a needs assessment. I knew how to design a program and measure it. I knew how to work with stakeholders. I knew how to go out and find resources and a lot of those skills are what's really important moving into the nonprofit space. I think a big piece too is I learned the rules of research and now I know how to break them and where I can break them. So, when we have to make a trade off or we have to meet the needs of a client, I can say that I know where I want to bend and where I don't, and what's really important. And it's also let me understand how do I adapt the process I learned so that it's more collaborative. We do a lot of codesign of research with the partners that we're working with, so it isn't us coming in and saying these are our research questions and we're going to do this research to you. Instead, it's very much we're going to come in and design this with you and we're going to help you figure out what is it that you really want to learn and then how can we help you learn it?

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely so day-to-day within the work that you're doing now, what does that sort of look like? You briefly mentioned untangling some projects. So, what does your day-to-day look?

Beth Holland

Oh, I don't know if I have a day today. So, I mean, I work for a very small national nonprofit. We were virtual before the pandemic. Right now, I'm working across I think 5 separate projects. Some of them I'm playing a supporting role to my colleagues who are running programs. So, I'm working and I have a colleague who's also a Hopkins grad, fantastic researcher, and so the I should say we, so we provide internal measurement support and we have our own projects with external stakeholders. So, we're designing studies with them. So, this morning I was, you know, finalizing an informed consent form and building out a survey while shifting gears to work on a proposal for another project. And then we're doing some strategic planning right now, so I've bounced between all of those. We're designing some new measurement tools to support an internal project, but every day is a little different. There's I spend a lot of time in meetings. We do a lot of work synchronously with colleagues and with clients helping them to build out their capacity. So, I think that's one of the pieces is exciting is there's always something new and there's always something to try and figure out.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely each day is a new day. And so, within your projects is there more long-term payoff and do you see your fruits of your labor almost immediately? How does that look for you and what were some of the experiences that you did have, if any, where you were able to see some of the fruits of your labor or successes of your projects?

Beth Holland

So, our projects run across various time frames. I just wrapped up at the end of last year I had inherited a project from my predecessor in the organization, but we wrapped up a five-year research practice partnership with the districts in California, Lindsay Unified, and at the end of it to see just like the volume of work that we were able to produce and the ways that as we produced interim reports, we were able to help them make immediate adjustments and improvements. So, a lot of work around their personalized professional learning program. What's really exciting right now is we help them do the evaluation of the first year of their teacher residency program. And so, the findings from that I think this is our biggest piece of what we do as an organization at the Learning Accelerator is it's not just that we reported back to Lindsey and said here's what we found. These are all the ways that you were successful, but we spent a lot of time communicating it to the field, saying here's how any school might start to think about implementing this kind of program and these are the real lessons that we've learned that are successful that could be successful across contexts, especially given you know, teacher shortages. So, there's those, like immediate push them out into the field and there's the immediate impacts on to the organization. I did some work with another district where the immediate impact was just building the capacity of the district research team. You know, we were in a partnership where it wasn't about us doing all of the analysis and everything, but us coaching that team through how to do it so that they could then do more work in the future. And so now we're talking about, OK, we we're able to do a study of learning acceleration after the pandemic. Now we want to do a study looking at the Virtual Academy and how we can make improvements there. So sometimes it's that capacity, sometimes it's from the results. Some of our work is developing new tools and resources for the field. And so, there is an immediate like hey we built this thing and now you can use it too and then getting the feedback from people who take it. So, it comes in lots of different directions.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, within education I both of my parents are within education, so they went to school and they became teachers. And I think that oftentimes there's a misconception about what education looks like. And then within the systemic and logistical side, people just don't really know what that looks like at all. So, is there anything that you think that the people may not realize works this way within education? I don't think that people understand that it's really a more in-depth process than it actually is. So, could you shed some light on on how more intricate those systems are then I think people think?

Beth Holland

So, we as an organization, we like to say that we're working on the leaping edge. So not quite that, like totally at their leading edge set of like really innovative school models. But we're working a lot alongside districts that are saying, you know, we've done things sort of the same way, and now we want to make a shift and how do we do that? And so, we're in support of that because again, as an organization, we have a vision that we say you know every child from an equity perspective, every child should have an equitable, effective, and engaging education. And to do that, we believe that it should be focused on the whole child, right? So, both academic, cognitive, non-cognitive, extracurricular, career technical, it should be like mastery based, right? So, we're thinking about learning not as seat time, that is like actually learning everything and that it really needs to be personalized. And so how are we making sure that we're personalizing to students’ aptitudes, skills, cultures, identities, languages. And we're working with districts that say we, we understand that and now we want to understand how do we implement the instructional practices. And it's just as important, how do we think about the system conditions that like the ecology that is around every classroom? Because you can have great instructional practices. And if the policies contradict them, then it's never going to come to scale, right? Or if the materials aren't available or if the technology infrastructure isn't there. And so, we're taking this ecological perspective to say, how can we understand the system? Because as you said, you know there's some misconceptions like, oh, anyone could just pick up a book and teach. And it's like, well, hold on because we need to understand everything about our kids and we need to think about whether or not what we're using supports the instruction that we want to do. And, you know, we really embrace that complexity. And so, it's the way we communicate it to the field like we have our resources and guidance side and on that side, you know you can search by instructional practice. You can search by system condition and we try to make those strategies really transparent by working with districts and capturing their stories, communicating that back out and then helping again to help the sector learn faster and to learn more effectively about what's possible if we think about these practices and conditions.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Right. And so, within your experience, do you feel that you have seen progress in these areas of districts viewing the student as an entirety of a person and viewing the environments for what they really are? And it's not just some person teaching a kid how to say the alphabet. And do you think that there is some positive growth within the past five, ten years of education?

Beth Holland

There's, you know, there's always growth and I think one of the things to remember is and I can't give the correct number off my head, but you know, there's hundreds of thousands of schools in this country, you know, and there's thousands and thousands of districts and particularly right now, there's a definite regionalization that's happening and there's different layers and types of education that are happening in different places. I think there's always progress, you know, in the EdD program, we read Larry Cuban and David Tyax book is like a seminal text about tinkering toward Utopia. And it was written in ‘95 and it could have been written yesterday. And they talked about how change is both like linear and incremental as well as cyclical. So sometimes you know you're asking me about 5 to 10 years, and I'm like, I've been in this field for over 20, and I can tell you that there were conversations that happened 20 years ago that are popping up again today and they're acting like it's brand-new. And it's like well things have changed a little bit, but we're just having the same conversation. And honestly the perfect one right now is all the talk about artificial intelligence. We're going to have ChatGPT and it's going to change this and change that. And a few of us have been scratching our heads and we're like, wow, you know, there was AI in early 2000. And there were conversations about that. And it's just that, you know, there was this little incremental change and now we've cycled right back around to some things. And so, there's always going to be change and it's always happening in different places and then it's just a question of I think it it becomes a question of scale and we can have the best intentioned teachers, but we also have to have the conditions that support them so that they can actually enact the practices that we we know from research and that we know are super valuable to kids.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And and all of society really, I think that they would agree that progress is usually cyclical and and not necessarily linear in the vast majority of settings. So, I think that another question that is important to ask you because you are on the more systemic and logistical side of things, what would you say to those who are thinking of or have already left education for the idea that the the systems aren’t working and that the supports aren't there? And what would you say to to some of those people?

Beth Holland

I think that's a very broad question. I mean, I think that's why. Let's break this down and be more specific because I'm not a fan of, like, big generalizations. You know, right now there is, there is a challenge. Let's talk about teachers. There's a challenge where the last report I read like roughly 60% of the people of the teachers surveyed said they wanted to leave the profession. Now that is also a regionalized challenge where it's happening more in some states than other states. So, then we need to ask the question of again, what are the system conditions that are leading to that? And you know there's questions right now around like censorship in the classroom and what can teachers say or not say or political pressure, parent pressure or demands because of testing. There's so much again, there's a lot of nuance in this. And you know, if we have a teacher who's left the classroom, it could be because attributed to any of those factors. It could be attributed to something entirely different. I, you know, I left the classroom because I hit a point where I said I I can make a difference with my kids and I can make a difference in this small setting, but I want to make a difference in a bigger setting. And so, that was just a different change. I have a colleague who was closer to the sector and is now working for an Ed tech company, and by making that shift thinks that, you know, she might be able to influence things at the product level. And so, she's doing great work over there. There's we we would have to deconstruct a lot of things. I don't think I give you a general answer.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Well, even that answer in itself was was really insightful I think to. A lot of people, I think just wonder why there is such a a wave of wanting to leave the industry of education in general. And I think that you answered it in itself that it is a complicated issue and that there's a lot going on and within the reasoning behind that, and it's also very personal. So so, for you, you briefly mentioned about how you shifted away from the classroom and into this bigger wider stretching space of, you know, systemic logistical impact. And so, for you, if there is one, what would the next phase look like for you career wise?

Beth Holland

That is an interesting one. So, I'm in a position right now I'm very excited about where I am because I'm building a team, we're expanding our team. We're looking at expanding our reach and starting to think about how can we really take on a role where as a research and measurement team, we can help the sector as a whole start to tackle interesting questions and learn more effectively and efficiently, and so that in itself is a challenge that I believe is going to keep me busy for a while. So, I'm not sure what the next spot might be after that because I have a very messy complex challenge. It's not going to be answered right away. And so, we're right now thinking about, what are the big questions that the sector is trying to answer and how can we help the sector to answer them?

Brooklyn Arroyo

And like you mentioned before, every day is a new day. So, sort of like you're progressing even within the work you're doing now. It's not necessarily going to be a promotional thing. You're constantly working through it and constantly growing in your career.

Beth Holland

Yeah, I mean there's a lot to do and I think you know it's taking on bigger challenges, taking on bigger projects, working with bigger teams.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, within this podcast we asked all of our interviewees the same final question to sort of grand finale, sign it off. And so that question is what inspires you right now?

Beth Holland

What inspires me right now? I think we were having this conversation as an organization and I think deep down what I've always held and what's always kept me in the education space is in its most simple form, like, it's not the kids’ fault. You know, I think about kids, right? Like they are at the mercy of their contacts. They're at the mercy of their surroundings. They don't necessarily choose the school they go to or the neighborhood they grow up in. And so, what always inspires me is how could I try to make sure that every single kid could have an education that would allow them to meet their full potential? I think that's the big that's my big focus is like it always comes down to like what can we do to help kids do better? Or to not to do better. How can we make kids learning and lives better? Yeah, it just takes lots of shapes and forms, but that's that's what it is.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And that's life, and we're all different people and individuals, but we we're all equally as inspiring as the the next. So, I really appreciate it, and I found our conversation extremely insightful today. So, thank you for coming on to the Phutures Podcast.

Beth Holland

Thanks for having me.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And I hope to speak with you again.