Tilling the Soil

When was the last time your school had a new initiative that actually stuck around?Your school has probably launched at least three tools in the last five years that were supposed to change everything. Most of them didn't survive two academic cycles, and the ones that did probably succeeded for reasons nobody on the leadership team planned for. This episode traces the pattern from enthusiastic August unveil to quiet March fade and asks why it keeps repeating. The answer turns out to have very little to do with the technology itself and almost everything to do with conditions: whether teachers believe a tool serves their students, whether they feel confident enough to experiment with it, and whether anyone made time for them to try. Along the way, we dig into Horace Mann's 19th-century Normal Schools and the one-size-fits-all training instinct we inherited from them, a principal who launched an iPad program without knowing what Wi-Fi was, and the research on what actually predicts whether teachers adopt new technology. The prescription is a gardening metaphor taken seriously: prepare the soil before you plant, and measure growth by confidence rather than login rates. Get full access to The School Doctor with John D'Adamo, Ph.D. at schooldoctor.substack.com/subscribe