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Kippy Smith

D4E HIVE DESIGNER

Founder, Status Grow Learning

Kippy approaches all of her work as a partnership and team effort. One of her core goals is to pursue goals that matter so she can be fully committed. Kippy began her career in education as a wilderness instructor for at-risk and adjudicated teens and has carried a profound lesson from that experience across her career. Every human wants to be successful and kind and positively impact the world around them. This lesson has also given Kippy the optimism and confidence to design and develop a new edtech tool - the Small Wins Dashboard - even though she did not have strong technical knowledge at the outset.

As a consultant and facilitator for organizations like EL Education and Teachers Guild x School Retool at IDEO, Kippy has helped design new schools, redesign existing schools, and make systemic changes to grading, from practice to policy. She has also coached dozens of school and district leaders across New England and New York to transform practice through professional learning. More recently, Kippy founded Status Grow Learning to build culture and capacity in education based on key lessons she has garnered from experience: The change process is a learning journey. Professional learning is not a workshop; it is a way of working. There must be a blueprint for the complex and necessary change schools seek. 

Kippy believes in people's potential to design for our common good creatively. Her belief in creativity has shaped her vision of leadership - a pedal-powered party boat experience in which the whole team works together to move onward while finding joy in the hard work. In addition, she is focused on the power of small wins that help people and teams keep going when working toward complex, systemic, cultural change.

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