There is a particular kind of book that arrives at exactly the right moment and knows it. George Couros’s Forward, Together is one of those books. Not because it is timely in a trendy way, but because it names something that is genuinely hard to name: that how we disagree matters, and that curiosity and conviction are not opposites.
I have known George for close to twenty years. We came up together in education, both starting in schools, both trying to figure out what good leadership looked like. At some point our paths diverged in the way that happens in this work. I stayed rooted in school district leadership, and George went deep into writing and speaking. Neither path is better. They are simply different ways of trying to contribute.
What I have always appreciated about George is not that we agree on everything. We do not. Over the years we have called each other out and pushed each other’s thinking. But it has always been done with respect, with honesty and with a shared belief that we are both trying to make education better. That is the context in which I read this book, and I think it matters.
George has always had a knack for writing for the moment. The Innovator’s Mindset arrived when schools were ready for a different conversation (I wrote about it HERE in 2016). It gave educators language for something many were already feeling and invited them to think differently about learning, leadership and possibility.
But the moment this new book speaks into is a very different one.
We are not in a season of broad optimism about educational innovation, at least not in the way 2015 felt. We are in something harder. Public education is facing more suspicion, more polarization and more certainty than curiosity. In some places, especially in the United States but certainly not only there, public schools themselves have become the target rather than a shared foundation. In that context, a book subtitled Moving Schools from Conflict to Community in Contentious Times feels timely in the best possible way.
The book draws on George’s experiences as a teacher, technology facilitator, administrator and parent. It is structured around principles and stories, which is a smart choice. The principles matter, of course, but the stories are where George is at his best. That is where the book becomes more than advice. It becomes an example.
Because what stayed with me most was not the structure or even the specific ideas. It was the posture of the whole thing.
George acknowledges, genuinely and without performance, that he has been wrong. Early in the book he reflects on a moment from 2011, sitting in a leadership conference listening to a presenter argue against the use of technology in schools, even as George had been working hard to integrate it meaningfully in his own context. He does not tell that story simply to show he was ahead of the curve. He uses it to examine his own reactions, his own certainty and what that certainty may have cost him in terms of connection.
That kind of reflection is in short supply right now. And it matters.
One of the central ideas running through the book is that progress rarely comes from winning arguments. It comes from building trust, fostering connection and helping people move together. That does not mean avoiding disagreement. Healthy organizations need challenge. They need people willing to ask hard questions, resist easy answers and push on assumptions.
But there is a difference between disagreement that sharpens thinking and disagreement that hardens people. And that distinction feels especially important in this moment.
George has talked about the idea of moving education forward through understanding rather than agreement. That is worth sitting with. Understanding and agreement are not the same thing. You can hold your ground and still genuinely try to understand where someone else is coming from. That is not weakness or indecision or compromise for the sake of appearances. It is what keeps conviction from becoming useless.
At the same time, I want to name something the book also gets right: the language of listening and curiosity can sometimes become a way of avoiding hard truths or delaying necessary action. Public education does not need more timidity dressed up as nuance. There are moments when leaders need to be clear, direct, and willing to stand for something. Forward, Together is not a call to soften everything or make endless room for every perspective regardless of harm. It is a reminder that if we want change to last, people have to feel they are part of it, not simply on the receiving end of it.
Curiosity is not the absence of conviction. It is what keeps conviction from becoming useless.
This is also a reminder those of us inside public education need to hear about our own debates. We argue about curriculum, assessment, technology, pedagogy, and structures with real energy and sometimes real sharpness. Some of that is genuinely healthy and I would not want it any other way. But the people who care enough to argue about how best to serve students are not each other’s real opposition. There is plenty of pressure on public education coming from outside, from people with very little interest in whether we get the assessment model right or the homework debate resolved. Those of us who have devoted our careers to public education, whatever our disagreements about how best to do that work, are on the same side. It would help if we acted like it more often.
That is part of what makes Forward, Together land the way it does. It does not ask us to give up our convictions. It asks us to hold them in a way that leaves room for other people. And it models that rather than just prescribing it, which is probably the highest compliment I can give any book.
George has been doing this work publicly for a long time. This book feels like one of the clearest expressions of that work yet: not a guide on how to agree, but a reminder of how to move forward without dividing ourselves beyond repair.
The image at the top of this post was generated through AI. Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.
