Start by identifying what students really need for the world they face.

“The founders of the New England Innovation Academy really thought that our educational system needed to evolve and change. It was not preparing students for our rapidly changing world where we’re looking at disruptive technologies, the end of careers as we know it, and preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet.”

— Tom Woelper

Today’s guest

Tom Woelper, a life-long educator, is the founding head of school at the New England Innovation Academy. NEIA will open the fall of 2021 as the nation's first middle grades and high school founded on the principles of human-centered design. The school was founded by a group of entrepreneurs and educators looking for a model that would foster leadership, integrity, empathy and independent thinking in their students.

Tom on why this conversation matters

“I really feel like there's such a need for a paradigmatic shift in education. This past year education has been disrupted by COVID, which in turn has opened people’s eyes and minds to a new way of doing things. We've seen incremental change in educational models over the past year, but there’s an opportunity and an openness now to accelerating things. At NEIA, we want to be an example of what education can be.

I also think that Human Centered Design is so powerful, not just as a process, but as an ethos. Human-Centered Design starts by really understanding the needs of others and includes such simple, elegant, and powerful concepts, such as empathy, a creating a sense of belonging, challenging preconceived assumptions, and really seeing, instead of thinking that you know everything. And just imagine if we really designed school, products, processes, and other things beginning there.“

How you can use this episode as personal PD

One of the points in our conversation was around standards, and whether you should teach to the standards directly or indirectly by having students focus on topics of interest in an interdisciplinary environment. Where does your school or district fall on this question?
One of the other interesting discussions focused on mission. As Tom said: “I've worked with plenty of schools where if you wrote down their mission, and put it in the middle of a table with the mission of a bunch of other schools and randomly pulled them out, you couldn’t tell one school from the from the next. And I think what happens is that sometimes schools try to be all things to all people.” Does your school or district have a mission statement – like the one above – that all stakeholders can quote in just a few sentences?

Closing thought

We are focusing on wellness, as much as anything else in our program. And through our well-being program, we are looking at developing social emotional learning skills and life skills. Our basic premise is to do well, you need to be well.