E16-Lars Esdal, CEO Education Evolving

Lars Esdal Podcast December 15, 2025 

Today, I had a special podcast with Lars Esdal, Executive Director of Education Evolving. 

Education Evolving is offering a 5 month cohort in January that will likely be of interest to some of our NewTech High schools. If you would choose to be in this cohort, we can combine forces this Spring (NewTech and Education Evolving). Here is the one-pager document from Education Evolving that you can share with your teacher-leadership team. 

I think it is in part the same message towards student-centered, personalized learning and certainly would give us more structure for the second half of the year, as we move past the changes that have already been made for 2026-2027. 

Esdal has been working on these ideas moving from his days at New Country School in Henderson through college and then beyond in various shapes and forms with Education Evolving. I mention and remember having a tour at New Country from a young Lars Esdal when he was a high school student at that charter school. 

He mentioned the Minnesota Student Survey results that were released last week. Here is the article put out by Education Evolving summarizing the results. He also mentioned the use of a student engagement tool called Cognia that is intriguing to me as it has been one of the age-old questions of researchers, "How can we measure how well our students are engaged in our classrooms?"

His current work with EE is working on teacher-powered, site-based team schools are his current pillars to generate school level teacher-student centered schools. His description of their focus reminds me of the MEEP teams from early in my career. If you can imagine a MEEP (Minnesota Educational Effectiveness program) team in every school; this is what Minnesota schools were set up to be governed like in the 1990's. It may be worth your time looking at the archive of this program as it existed back then? Technically, this program still exists in statute, and it is currently where the Compass program resides. However, it has evolved over and over. One way you can work on this facet of your school is to look into the Education Evolving cohort. 

One area of agreement comes later in the podcast when Lars starts to delve into the leadership side. This leadership model is very elusive. Ironically, Jay Haugen also talked about this in his podcast. In my travels, one of the things that has been consistent from school-change researchers. If you want to have "movement" in the way of innovation in large social organizations, you have to have several components. Simply, top-down needs to meet bottom-up on a great idea, implemented for a long period of time. This is a quote that I took from a Saturday morning coffee breakfast with Karen Seashore Louis, an instructor of mine at the University of Minnesota. For those of you who are very research-oriented, here is a free look at some of the significant research she has published. 

Please take a look at this Esdal Podcast!