The NEW Team Habits: A Guide to the New School Rules

Leading teams in a rapidly changing world

To achieve their ambitious goals, it is essential that education leaders build effective teams. Many leaders want to shift the way their teams collaborate, make decisions, and learn together, but struggle to make lasting change. Written for leaders who want to improve their teams, this guide is a follow-up to the best-seller, The NEW School Rules, a framework for transitioning to a more responsive, innovative organization. The NEW Team Habits goes further, providing battle-tested practices the authors have used with hundreds of leadership teams to build better team habits.

Readers will find
• a five step learning cycle for building team habits
• videos, readings, and other resources to build knowledge
• engaging team activities to drive learning 

With tools leaders and teams can use right away, this guide provides the inspiration, steps, tools, and activities you need to improving your team habits for learning, meetings, and projects.

    Anthony Kim is a nationally recognized leader in education technology, school design, and personalized learning. As founder and CEO of Education Elements, he has been involved in helping hundreds of schools change the way they think about teaching and learning. As the author of “The Personalized Learning Playbook, Why the Time Is Now”, Anthony has influenced many educators. He has contributed to many publications on new school models including “Lessons Learned from Blended Programs: Experiences and Recommendations from the Field”. Anthony is a nationally recognized speaker on personalized learning and his work has been referenced by the Christensen Institute, iNACOL, EdSurge, CompetencyWorks, EdWeek, District Administrator, and numerous other research reports.  

    Anthony also founded Provost Systems, which provided online learning solutions to school districts. Provost Systems was acquired by EdisonLearning, where he served as Executive Vice President of Online. Anthony is passionate helping school district can become more nimble, understanding what motivates adult learners, and designing schools that plan for the needs of our future. 

Outside of education, Anthony is passionate about triathlons and learning about people who overcome remarkable challenges. He is a San Francisco native and continues to live there with his wife Angela and rescued dogs. 

Keara Mascareñaz is the Managing Partner, Organizational Design at Education Elements. She focuses on organizational design and how to build and scale a culture of innovation in large systems. Keara leads work in in change management, leadership development, school design, and strategic planning. Keara is the toolkit creator for The NEW School Rules: 6 Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools. 

Keara has supported system-wide change at more than 500 district and school partners and has led projects for rural, urban, and suburban schools and districts, including dozens of Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenge schools and regions, Gates Next Generations Systems Initiative grantees, and Race to the Top district winners. She has been a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator at TinyCon, iNACOL, District Administration Leadership Institute, Blended and Personalized Learning Conference, Personalized Learning Summit, and hundreds of districts around the country.

Keara began her career as a third grade teacher on the Navajo Reservation. She worked as a college coach, history teacher, operations manager, and curriculum designer; and through this work, she learned how to effectively communicate about and engage folks in the work of large-scale change. Keara was selected as one of twenty fellows in the national Pahara NextGen Network that focuses on developing leaders who will change the future of education. Keara grew up in rural, southern Oregon and currently lives in Denver with her husband.

Kawai Lai is a designer, facilitator, and strategy consultant helping organizations make the abstract more concrete.  She is a co-founder of VizLit, an organization with the mission to unlock the visual minds of students and educators. Formerly, she served as the Vice President of Innovation at the National Association of Independent Schools, a non-profit serving over 1,800 schools and 730K students across the country and abroad.  In her role, she helped schools reimagine education, build capacity to innovate, and share stories of authentic progress. Kawai was a founding team member of Education Elements, an ed tech startup working with the most forward-thinking public school districts and charters across the country to personalize learning.  Prior to a career in education, Kawai spent a decade in consulting and technology, implementing large scale technology systems with Deloitte, working in different industries including healthcare, biotech, and aerospace. She has an MBA from Haas, UC Berkeley and a BS in mechanical engineering from Southern Methodist University.