10 years ago, the book that Zac and I co-wrote – Building School 2.0: How to Create the Schools We Need – was released into the wild. In revisiting that book, Zac and I both find that while it was fun and challenging to essentially put everything we believed about education at the time into one book, with almost every chapter there is so much more to be said. Who could’ve guessed that a book with 95 chapters might need a little more detail for a few of them? (OK, we did even then, but over time there are definitely chapters that I wish were a whole lot longer.)

And certainly, the last 10 years have brought about profound change, in the world, in our schools, and in our lives. When the book was published, Barack Obama was president, the world felt hopeful, SLA@Beeber was in its second year, SLA Middle School hadn’t even opened yet, Zac was working at the US Department of Education, and Chris was about to start the dual role of SLA principal and head of innovation for the School District of Philadelphia.

10 years later, we are in a profoundly different political moment, there are three SLA schools, all mature enough to actually have learned something about what we were trying to do, Zac has become a father, Chris has seen both his kids graduate from SLA, and of course we’ve lived through a global pandemic.

In short, it feels like a good time for some reflection.

So, in a very 2025 kind of moment, we’re launching a podcast.

Re:Building School 2.0 is going to be our very public attempt to revisit and rethink the ideas of the book. In many cases, we have found that the last 10 years have strengthened what we believe and what we wrote 10 years ago, in other cases, we found that our ideas have evolved and matured in some ways that have changed what we’ve written. And in some cases, we might even disagree with what we wrote 10 years ago. But in every case, we found we have more to say.

You don’t have to have read the book to listen – although it’s for sale if you want to buy a copy and read along. The podcast is for anyone who has thought about schools and how we can make them better. We don’t pretend it’s easy to rethink schools, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers, but between the two of us, we’ve got 50 years of work as teachers, as administrators, as school founders, as policy people and even as writers, so we’ve got some pretty good questions to ask. And hopefully, it’ll be pretty fun to struggle with some of the “small a” answers that we’re coming to right now.

And there’ll probably be some jokes along the way.

New episodes will release every Tuesday – you can click the link or subscribe in your favorite podcast app. So we’ll hope you’ll listen along as we re-examine the ideas that mean the most to us in education, the ideas that helped to build SLA, and the ideas that we hope can provide a framing lens as we consider Re:Building School 2.0.