Chris Gabrieli’s New Harvard Course on Remixing Education

In the News | Our Blog | The Empower Team

October 23, 2023

Over the first decade at Empower Schools, we have found several ways to work with district educators and leaders to foster sustainable structural innovations to better serve students who have historically been poorly served including low-income, minoritized and first generation students. One whole branch we call Early College and Career Pathways and we have found numerous places and partners for this from our work at the Rural Schools Innovation Zone in South Texas to our work in rural settings in Colorado, Texas, California and Indiana to a blossoming of Early Colleges in our original Zone – the Springfield Empowerment Zone.

My own journey on this has both been through Empower Schools and in my role as Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education over the past eight years. I am super grateful to my many Empower allies in this as well as to the many educators, leaders and pioneers in this space, including key Empower allies, who have helped forge these new directions and in many cases made them real for students on the ground.

Now, I am going at this through my role as a Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where I will be teaching a new course focused on the “big idea” that “remixing education” can be a powerful way to move beyond the limited success we have had focusing only on “readiness.”

The course is named “Remixing Education: Innovations in Blending K12, College and Career Pathways.” I wrote a summary of the top four reasons that I feel like the legendary Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy, who would say to his team in the locker room before every game – Where else would you rather be than right here, RIGHT NOW?!?!

Reason Number 1– I think the topic on which I am teaching – Education Remixing – is one of the most exciting and important topics on which I have worked in my education policy and innovation career.

I define Education Remixing as the embedding into a traditional K12 or college pathway of an authentic learning and practice strand from a field outside of that core education pathway. I cite three examples:

Early College High School where traditionally underserved high school students take significant amounts of college courses while still in high school;
Youth Apprenticeships where high school students work as paid apprentices in companies for 2, 3 or even 4 days a week while continuing some high school studies; and
Coop Colleges where college students undertake as many as three, six-month, full-time paid coop placements in workplaces where they are fully part of the employers’ teams.

Each of these reflect education remixing that is deeply silo-crossing to gain the benefits.

I summarize the case for the idea as Why leave it to any one education system – high school or college – to determine how to define and achieve readiness and leave students the task of crossing chasms to their next stage when we can create remixes where students get to develop their battle-tested readiness and gain real traction actually doing the next phase (college or career) of their lives?

Reason Number 2 – Teaching in Harvard’s innovative Online Educational Leadership (OEL) Master’s Program is challenging and exciting.

The students are different, the medium is different but I love the challenge of reinvention and the mid-career students are invigorating,

Reason Number 3 – Putting together and executing a course is fun!

Love the adrenaline rush and opportunities to do things like pick remixed music to accompany the class! Grateful for great colleagues at Empower and allies throughout the field and across the country.

Reason Number 4 – It’s a privilege to teach the great students at HGSE.

Autonomy