Education By Design
The Education by Design podcast explores the architecture of learning environments—how schools are designed, not just operated—how culture is disrupted to make way for innovation and reaching potential.
Your host, Phil Evans is a career educator and creative. His guests bring inspirational and practical ideas into classrooms, all over the world. Join him as he engages with innovators who untangle the complexity of educational systems to align with shared values, common practices, and a common language to create powerful, human-centered learning experiences.
For any formal schooling system to have an impact, the central focus must be on learning. Let's learn together.
Dive deeper on the EduByDesign Blog: https://edubydesign.com/blog
Education By Design
S1:S7 Joshua Glazer on "Improvement by Design: Rethinking How Schools Change"
Why do so many education reforms fall short of their promise? In this powerful and wide-ranging conversation, Dr. Joshua Glazer of George Washington University unpacks what it really takes to improve schools — not through shortcuts or silver bullets, but through the slow, steady work of building coherent, community-anchored systems.
Drawing on years of research into efforts like Tennessee’s iZone and ASD, Josh helps us understand why education is both a political and professional enterprise — and why lasting change demands more than test scores or talent pipelines. It requires trust. Context. And above all, the capacity to learn over time.
This episode is an invitation to look beneath the surface of school reform, to consider what it means to design improvement intentionally, and to imagine the kind of public education that honors both the expertise of educators and the voices of the communities they serve.
Whether you're a school leader, a parent, or someone who simply believes in the power of education, this conversation will stay with you.
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And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.
Welcome to Education by Design, the podcast that explores how schools are shaping the future of education by centering on values, embracing community voices, and building systems that work for every student. I'm your host, Phil Evans. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about why, despite decades of reform efforts, our schools haven't changed in the ways that we hoped they would. We've seen waves of new curricula, new assessments, new policies, and yet so often they seem to wash over the surface without shifting the foundation. I really want to know why that is. The more time I spend listening to educators, leaders, and families, the more convinced I become that the challenge isn't just about the right tools and the right training. It goes deeper. How systems behave. How they hold on to habits. How they resist change, not out of stubbornness, but out of structure. Systems are built to do that. It's also about how professional wisdom, the kind that teachers and school leaders grow through experience... too often gets crowded out by short-term political demands, as if urgency and complexity cannot coexist. But what if they could? In this episode, my guest is someone who helps us to see complexity clearly, not as a problem to be solved, but as a reality to be addressed. Dr. Josh Glazer is a professor at George Washington University and a leading scholar in education systems and school improvement. In his research, he doesn't just examine what works, he studies how it works, where, and why. This conversation explores what it takes to build schools to improve by design and not by accident, and what it means to nurture a profession that grows stronger over time, not just one budget cycle at a time. You'll hear us talk about community, coherence, and a long arc of learning, the kind that stretches across generations. I hope that you'll begin to see the contours of approaches that treat education not as a product to be delivered, but as a shared endeavor, civic, professional, and deeply human.
Joshua Glazer:If you think about what you're trying to do and the type of changes that I, but many others, advocate as an intergenerational social movement, where we spent over a century doing it one way, where all we thought we needed to do was just get people into schools and classrooms, just access was sort of the name of the game. And then a couple of decades ago, having done a fairly good job at that, we realized that that turned out to be a bittersweet victory, sweet in that we have the vast majority of our youth in schools, but bitter in that that's no longer good enough. We need to significantly transform what happens once people are in. That's a multi-generational project. So you can almost sort of think of it as a social movement. So when you foster those connections, whether it's just somebody who comes up to you and wants to talk about assessment and curriculum and that nitty gritty, I think those type of connections, building that international community of people who are struggling with these problems, who want to talk about them, who are developing a shared language for thinking about them, In some ways, that's just as important as the actual teaching and learning going on in the classroom. It's kind of just like building the social infrastructure to support this because it's It's a grind and it's a long haul.
Phil Evans:Well, Simon Sinek, you know, I think was one of the first to start talking about like the why and pointing out that, you know, as an enterprise, Apple did a very good job of promoting their products with a why and a reason at the center. And I think that's where you're talking about that human connection and that validity of, you know, are we going through the motions of school and do we understand what it's for? And I think about, you know, your work and this relationship between politics and their education. What I think is so powerful about your work is that you're not just on the hunt to find what's wrong. You're also celebrating what works.
Joshua Glazer:Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. Because of course, there's a lot of things that we want to make better and a lot of things that need to be fixed. We just can't allow ourselves to become cynical or think that nothing's working because that's not the case. And that's not a good mindset to bring to this. Yeah, I mean, about the politics, I'll sort of share with you some of my current thinking. And, you know, most people would agree there's a strong professional component to education and, you know, with our sort of contemporary demands, what we expect schools to accomplish, educating all kids to high levels, preparing them for a sort of knowledge-based workforce is a big lift. It's a tall order. So the demands on teachers are considerable. It really does require sophisticated knowledge and skill and abilities. But there becomes this real tension between the professional part and the public part. You know, on different levels, if you think about a profession, they're actually fairly closed, insular, exclusive system. You know, you think about it, you go into a dentist's office and in some place you've never been to, they're gonna fill your cavity just like any other dentist. Or you get on a plane, you don't even know the pilot's first name or where they went to school, but you sort of think, okay, this pilot's like every other pilot. So there's some advantages to that, but those systems are not open and democratic. So I think we need to think how we can do a better job. We'll never make them sort of a perfect match, but how do we sort of arrange things so that the political side doesn't really undermine the professional side. And because there are ways that can happen. So for example, we know that even smartly designed reforms are going to take a while until they start to produce results. It's going to be a much longer process than that because you're just asking people to do things at a much different way and in some ways much more complex way than they may have done previously in their career that they were trained to. But the political clock ticks faster than the educational clock. So there can be counterproductive pressure on schools to show quick results. The IB is really a perfect example. If you have adopted IB, it's probably not really educationally productive to say, how can we use this new IB curriculum pedagogy assessment to show results in March of on a standardized test. That's not what you're doing. That's not how IB works. The payoff in the long run is much greater, much, much greater. But you have to sort of understand that you're talking about a longer process. So we can't say, oh, we should just take the politics out of education because that won't happen and it can't happen. At some level, it shouldn't happen. But we need a way to sort of how can we make the sort of political incentives a little better aligned with the educational process and sort of trajectory of reform.
Phil Evans:Yeah, it's the sticky part, isn't it? What are we looking for in those systems? What should we be investing in to try and help education to shift course so that we are able to advance our high-achieving students and regard them and their aspirations and their lofty goals as important while we are ensuring that this industrial model that we're sort of trying to escape from of masses of kids coming through is actually a valuable thing as much as we talk about that being antiquated. But how do we ensure that the learning is happening and what sort of things should we systematically have in place?
Joshua Glazer:Well, one thing is that if we don't give the public some indicators, a vision, a grander narrative to buy into and to embrace, then of course it's perfectly reasonable that they will focus exclusively on standardized measures of student
Phil Evans:learning. The things that are easy
Joshua Glazer:to measure, right? These are easy things to measure. Part, I think, of what is incumbent upon educators, education professionals, people who work in this field, is to do a better job of articulating in an accessible way, what is our vision? If you walk into one of our classrooms, what is it that you're going to see and why? And why is that valuable? What do we mean when we say kids know how to read, kids know math? We actually mean something by that. And we have to be able to talk about that, talk about being able to solve problems, being able to apply skills in sort of different ways flexibly, being critical thinkers. That's a narrative that we have to invite people into. And then we also, I think, have to do a much better job of being able to articulate how we're getting there and enable sort of people to understand that where we are now is for a reason. As I said earlier, for a long time, our goal was just to sort of get people into schools. We have not spent historically a very long time thinking about how we get all students to a pretty advanced level of understanding and learning. Historically speaking, this is a relatively new project. Our old systems are pretty entrenched, but we are actually making progress. We're not where we were.
Phil Evans:A lot's changed. Yeah.
Joshua Glazer:Just our discourse today that is sort of that we have this sort of accepted social discourse that it is our job and our responsibility to get all kids, regardless of their background, to a pretty high level of learning. is an entirely new way of thinking about the responsibility of schools. And the reason I say that is I think that provides a bit of a counterbalance, offsets to a degree that's focused exclusively on tested outcomes.
Phil Evans:What have you seen communicated about the learning momentum and the shifts towards a more learning-focused schooling environment? How would we explain to parents what they should be looking for in their schools?
Joshua Glazer:Yeah, that's a good question. I think there are a number of things. I think a pretty clear and specified vision of what we want our classrooms to look like and be able to talk about, hey, we want to see an active classroom discourse. We want to be able to sort of, this is a little bit jargon, but we need to be able to explain what it means to shift the cognitive load to students where students are actually actively engaged, working collaboratively, solving real life problems in classrooms.
Phil Evans:Like student agency, like you would see students actually being agents of their learning. That would be evidence.
Joshua Glazer:Yeah, yeah. And to say, you know, we're really trying to move away from students as sort of passive recipients sitting there, you know, copying off the blackboard. We understand now that that creates maybe a visual image, which in some ways appealing, you know, quiet classroom, kids looking attentive, but that actually is not how learning works. We understand learning to be a much more active process. We understand learning to be a much more social process of kids interacting with each other, communicating in productive ways. So I I think part of what I would say to a parent or a policymaker is let's understand what a learning-centered classroom looks like. I think that there are things that we should expect to see happening in our schools at the organizational level that are not specifically in the classroom, but that are tied together. to creating the capacity and the abilities and capabilities to actually make classrooms, like I just described, work. Because one thing that's important to understand is that it's easy to say, I want dynamic, vibrant, discourse-rich, problem-solving classrooms. Making that happen classroom after classroom, school after school is challenging. In many ways, traditional instruction is much easier than more ambitious visions of teaching and learning. What that means is we have to start to think about how do we want to organize our schools as organizations so that we can constantly be developing the capacity, the problem solving skills, the collegial relationships, so that teachers can actually enact in those type of classrooms? Because it's not easy. It's not easy.
Phil Evans:It's certainly not easy. But as schools sort of take on all of these different options for students, I think some of the way that they're organized becomes broken down and that principals who are the leaders over these communities struggle to find a way to bring their communities together with a unified vision because we haven't always got the same vision at the core of everything that we've got going on in our schools. And I think about the teachers, you know, being in the classroom and being in a faculty where, you know, my first IB school in the US, I would go to the IB meeting on a Thursday and I'd go to the faculty English meeting on a Monday. And it was almost as if I was working in two different schools. And, you know, I thought about, I think about our collaborative relationships and how slim they were. There were things we could talk about, but we were really talking about scheduling and talking about calendar things and student issues. We weren't really talking about practice. And it was hard under those circumstances. So, you know, as you're thinking about how we organize schools and what schools are taking on, do you feel like there's some things that we could be communicating better about how we provide an opportunity for students in a school where there's more cohesion?
Joshua Glazer:You said that so perfectly, I almost have nothing to add. But I totally agree. I often give this analogy to my students, which is that There is a store, a chain of stores in the United States where you can get anything in the world you want. You can get a quart of strawberries or you can get a plunger to fix your toilet or a shower curtain or a spare tire for your car. And that store is called Walmart. And whatever you want, you can go into Walmart and find. It's just likely to be mediocre because you can't have everything anywhere. at a high level. And then there's another store which has a much more curated line of products. Everything is at an extraordinarily high level, and that's the Apple store. And the point that I'm trying to make in regard to education is exactly the one that you just made, which that as schools take on more and more programs that require different skills, that as you put perfectly, have a different language, they generate a different set of experiences for teachers, different. it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to create a cohesive organization where we're all on the same page. We have a shared set of goals, a shared set of experiences, perhaps because we're using a shared set of materials. And as a result, our ability to collectively solve problems, our ability to collectively get better at the work is significantly undermined. Yes, you can have a pocket of IB in the school and perhaps a few teachers there who are doing a good job. And across the hall, you have the AP teachers who are doing perhaps a reasonably good job at doing some AP courses, you know, and so on and so forth. But first of all, you are almost entirely dependent on those individuals who happen to be there. And they will leave. I mean, you know, there is turnover in this field as there is in any field. And once those individuals leave, because you haven't really created sort of organizational school-wide systems tied to the program, tied to the curriculum, tied to the instructional vision, the capability of the school is almost entirely embedded
Phil Evans:in the
Joshua Glazer:people that happen to be there. And once they leave, All the knowledge, skill, and experience walks right out the door with them.
Phil Evans:Yes, Josh, certainly. And we often talk about leadership change and the impact that has on schools and improvement over time. But you're raising a really important point about what teachers bring to the table and that education system is what ensures that that school continues to move forward with all the different teachers that come through the faculty over time.
Joshua Glazer:So I was recently speaking to a group of principals and I was trying to drive home the difference between a high-performing school and a school which has some high-performing teachers and what the difference is. A high-performing school, even if you have some turnovers of teachers, you have embedded in that organization a philosophy, a set of practices, problem-solving processes that can withstand a degree of turnover. But if you don't have those and you're just entirely reliant on the ability of individual teachers who happen to be in that school, you don't actually have a high-performing school. You have a school with some talented individuals. But as soon as they leave, everything that's good about that school walks out the door with
Phil Evans:them. And then the legacy comes. is also gone. And what do you build on? You know, when the new teachers come in, wouldn't it be great if there was some way that everything that our school had made progress on, you know, over the years of its existence was passed on as the context for which these new innovators and practitioners evolved our practice? You know, I see curriculum being flipped over time and time again, right? The standardized test scores didn't come up for the students we're trying to reach with these tools. So let's change the curriculum again. And then the teachers don't have the time allocated or the community or the professional training. So teachers are then left to their own devices. And then we sort of end up in this cycle of, shall we perhaps call it ineffective reform. But what are some milestones that you've seen that have Yeah, a lot. I think
Joshua Glazer:that's really important because, you know, like I said earlier, we do not want to lose sight of where we need to get better and problems that we need to address, but also not forget the progress that we are making and then to understand that this is really an intergenerational effort. I think we have made some very important progress in our understanding around what I'll call the social organization of schools. How is the work organized? And you see a much more concentrated effort these days to make teaching a collective collaborative work. So for most of our history, almost all the details of teaching were worked out by each individual teacher operating basically in isolation. And that is simply an unrealistic system given the demands that we now place. No other profession expects its practitioners to come up with everything on their own. And I think schools, not every school, but many have made important innovations and real progress in trying to create a more collective and collaborative culture in which core problems of practice the dilemmas and challenges of the work of which there are many are discussed addressed and addressed in collaborative contexts is every plc a professional learning community perfect no it's not sometimes we have these bring teachers together and and it's sort of a more superficial discourse than a real deep professional one, of course that can happen. But in many cases, particularly if we compare to where we were 20 years ago, we can see a real effort to try to start to reorganize schools so that the work of teaching becomes a more collaborative endeavor. And I think that's a very important progress for our system.
Phil Evans:I'm glad you added that. I think it's the missing key. Sometimes, you know, teachers will even say, well, we don't have time to meet at all. So I think that what you've added there is a message that I hope that people really hear around the importance of collaboration and teamwork and knowing why we're collaborating. I think that your point on why collaboration sometimes feels forced is because teachers are not quite sure what we're supposed to be talking about. And that comes back to just having... common language and common practice and common agreement around what we're doing.
Joshua Glazer:There is no curriculum which will teach itself. And in some ways, the more ambitious and advanced and rigorous the curriculum, the greater the professional demands on teachers to be able to use it. In many ways, their most important contribution is that they create the context for meaningful collaboration. They create the context for developing professional capacity. They won't teach themselves. It's not a substitute for teacher expertise. It actually ups the ante on teacher expertise. But one of their sort of most important roles is that they create this common thread, this shared experience of teachers who are all going to be naturally and appropriately struggling to use it. But that struggle then can become the basis for a collaborative struggle, where we talk about the nitty gritty problems of practice that may be in a specific lesson or a specific part of lesson, really granular, but in many ways that expertise development is at a very granular level. If pediatric pulmonologists get together, they don't talk in generalities, they talk in nitty gritty details. And that has traditionally been harder or elusive for teachers in part because there hasn't been enough shared experience around which to sort of organize that collaborative discourse. But you put a program like IB in there with its specific goals, with its specific pedagogies, with its materials. And in some ways, the most powerful part of that is the potential that it creates for teachers to work collaboratively together, to develop shared expertise.
Phil Evans:And again, it's a long game, right? So teachers are really accustomed to change in education, and quite often the change isn't always focused on learning. It's often focused on increasing results. And so when an opportunity comes along to put students in a learning-rich environment, sometimes it still feels a little bit scary sometimes. And yet I think one of the most scary things, which you've pointed out, is that you're often doing this alone. You know, all of the expectation is that you in your own classroom are going to affect results. But how much better off are we if the struggle is shared when we're raising outcomes and we're shifting the focus more towards learning so students are really becoming self-regulated and confident in their learning?
Joshua Glazer:You said something that the struggle is shared. And I want to say something about the sort of psychology of our teachers and in some ways how vulnerable they are. We're asking them to do impossible work, important work, good work, but in some levels, extraordinarily difficult to the point of impossible. And under those circumstances, it would be very easy for our teachers to have a sense of failure. And there's a terrific sociologist who wrote a groundbreaking book and his name is Dan Lordy. And that book was published 50 years ago and it's called School Teacher. The book is about the organization of the teaching profession. And one of the things that Dan Lordy points out is that when the work is so individualized, each teacher owns the frustration, the setbacks, the failures on their own. The burden is individual. The problems are individual. They are mine. And I pay and teachers pay a tremendous psychological price for that. Conversely, when the effort is collaborative, that takes the burden and in some sense, the sense of a failure, disappointment off the individual and makes it about the group, which is working together to try to overcome these somewhat impossible challenges. Because think of that, we're asking for more rigorous teaching and learning, higher levels of student accomplishment, but in the outside world in which inequality is getting worse, certainly here in the United States, where just sort of, you know, basic social conditions are often extremely fragile and, you know, we know all too well that all those sort of, you know, social environmental issues go right into the classroom with kids. If we're asking teachers to do that, we really do have to be concerned about burnout. And in some ways, the most effective antidote to individual teacher burnout is turning this work into a collective enterprise where it's not me on my own, where challenges and problems are not just mine to absorb and to cope with and internalize. but something that belongs to a group of people working collaboratively.
Phil Evans:I'm loving the way that you're articulating this because teachers don't often feel seen and understood and heard. When I'm in isolation struggling, it feels so much worse. And so it's a happier situation and an advantageous situation to be in if we're all in it together and our lived experiences are regarded. The daily experiences and the impossibility of the task is understood Because teachers approach their job with a duty of care, like they want their students to be successful. And so, you know, putting them in situations where students are likely to struggle is not really doesn't sit well with
Joshua Glazer:teachers. significant changes to their practice with students who are already struggling and vulnerable to introduce ideas that are foreign. You know, we can sometimes in their foreign community have a little bit of a tendency to vilify teachers who we just think are entrenched in old ways, you know, who are reluctant or resistant to change. And I think that's quite an unfair characterization. We're asking them to take on significant risk. Risk on a personal level, feeling like I have failed. Risk, as you just put it, vis-a-vis my students who I have this ethic of care and I don't know if this is going to work. We also need to think how we're sort of going to manage that. If we want teachers to really embrace the type of changes that something like an IB program is asking them to make, we have to understand how, we can't ask them to take all the risk. It can't all be on their shoulders. That is enormously unfair. So there has to be a way to distribute that risk more equitably.
Phil Evans:So then what does it mean to reimagine education or to rethink education?
Joshua Glazer:The more... that we engage in meaningful reform, trying to make instructional changes, which I think would greatly resonate with you and your colleagues, even though it's not IB, a sort of shared philosophy around content, about what we really mean when we say kids know math and what does it actually mean to know math and have an understanding of the sort of really conceptual foundations of mathematics, whether that's at first grade or ninth grade algebra, building the capacity over time to do that. You know, one thing to understand is how complex these systems are, how deeply entrenched some of our old practices and norms are. What I was just saying earlier, the risk that we're asking our principles are. and our teachers to take to the time that it takes, and how do we sort of show progress without having unrealistic short-term expectations, and you sort of add all these things together, and you start to grasp this is a really complex, multifaceted endeavor that we're engaged in, and then you can start to understand why saying, oh, I didn't get The results I wanted from September to March, well, of course, you know, we need to think about this as, you know, keeps saying, an intergenerational undertaking.
Phil Evans:It's certainly more of a system reform rather than a reform in silos.
Joshua Glazer:Yeah, yeah. You know, we're trying to turn a massive ship, which has been moving in one direction and start to point it in another direction. It's not going to pivot on a dime. So that I think is something to understand and, you know, sort of brings us back to the politics How do we make sure that we're creating political dynamics and incentives that are better aligned with the nature of the work?
Phil Evans:And as you've pointed out in the book that you co-authored, Improvement by Design, Promise for Better Schools, it's how all of these actions work systematically.
Joshua Glazer:Sure. Educational tools, curriculum, lessons plans, assessments, information systems, etc. that just because you put that in a school, they might not lead to improvement because it's all a matter of how they're used, how they're wielded in classroom context. And it says, how committed school staff were to get curriculum lessons plans, do they spend the time and effort to understand the tools and make them function? And that is really a critical point because you know, we need to understand that when we design stuff, and the stuff is very important, curriculum is very important, you know, formative assessments are very important, data systems are important, but they are important not because they directly in, you know, inextricably lead to student learning, because they create, they can create a powerful context and platform on which we can develop teacher expertise. The power is not exclusively in the lesson plan. It's in to bring teachers together to try it. to have problems with it because it didn't work for all students, to get together and share their experience and improve it.
Phil Evans:And it's that legacy piece too, Josh, isn't it? It's that if you've got that written curriculum and it might be a unit plan or a lesson plan, but that's something that I can come along as a new teacher and I can look at that and say, oh, look what this teacher did. That's really great. I can see how that would work. But I also have this in my toolkit and I'm going to bring this to the table. But let's kind of keep moving in this direction.
Joshua Glazer:We need to think about... in some sense, the interaction, if you will, between material resources, well-designed, thoughtful material resources, and the social sort of work and social and professional interactions that happen around them. The power is in the interaction between the two. I wouldn't want one without the other. That curriculum won't get the job done by itself. So we need to think about the interaction between the material and the social.
Phil Evans:And that social definitely extends well beyond the immediate school. There's so much value in that systematic approach when teachers from one school can communicate with another school in their district or their state or their country. In the IB context, I think about the multinational collective of practitioners and thought leaders that really contribute to the viability of an education model that works in the local context? Sure. So
Joshua Glazer:there's two parts here. There's one is, why is that so important? It's so important because of the extraordinary complexity, challenge, and difficulty of the work. No one teacher could possibly do this by themselves. And some people would also argue that that's too much to ask for an individual school to try to sort of take on these challenges. But can we actually sort of harness the collective experience of teachers? of schools so that this process of overcoming these challenges really does become a collaborative one. Because it's actually quite important to understand and to think through exactly as you said, the conditions under which we can sort of create these meaningful paths of communication, problem solving processes that actually encompass groups of schools. So we don't lack for sort of experience in our education system. There are tens of thousands of individual teachers in schools doing stuff, things happening, grappling with challenges every single day. Where we need to get better is in how we deliberately and strategically leverage those to generate shared expertise, build capability, and turn that experience really into improvement.
Phil Evans:And until next time, keep on learning.
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