Category Archives: Random Reflections

What I learned from skateboarding at age 41 and 11/12…

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I learned so much from this TED talk – “Rodney Mullen: Pop an ollie and innovate!” – and I have no intention to literally pop an ollie. But I can think of 1,000 ways that Mullen’s lessons apply to schools and school change. Here’s just one…

Context informs content.

Mullen also provided incredible wisdom about creating for the sake of creating and contributing to one’s peers and to one’s community…not for earning the championship (read – highest grade, as I was listening). In fact, after winning 35 of 36 competitions that he entered in his 11-year pro career, he shared that the loss at the end really allowed him to create most joyfully.

Out of the grind and out to grind.

It’s about the intrinsic. It’s about learning.

PROCESS POST: Is flipping the classroom just a step on a prototyping path?

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Much is written about “flipping the classroom” – the practice of moving teacher lectures, videos, etc. to time at home, and moving interactive work to the school day. This reversal flips the age-old routine of lecturing in class and doing work at home. With the transformations to school that I imagine and for which I advocate, I wonder if flipping the classroom is just a step on a prototyping path.

I am not knocking the practice of flipping the classroom! I think it is a step in a right direction. But I think it is only a step. I do not see it as an ultimate destination.

So many people write about flipping the classroom, and I myself have only really studied the trend – I have not truly flipped the classrooms with which I participate. In the past two to three years, I actually tried to move away from any teacher-assigned homework, except that which the student learners feel (with some coaching) is essential to moving their curiosity and project work forward. You might say I failed to implement this change fully, but I was trying to move in a right direction myself.

Here are just two, interesting, and recent, reads on flipping the classroom:

  1. Jonathan Martin’s great book-review post, “‘Flip Your Classroom’: the new book from Bergmann and Sams,” which includes some additional, link resources at the end of the post.
  2. Anatomy of a Khan-troversy, by Francesca Duffy, which I clicked to as I was reading Education Week‘s “Teaching Now.”

So, where do I think we are headed, if flipping the classroom is just a step on a prototyping path? What might the ultimate destination look like? Or at least another step, or steps, further down the path…

  • More self-curated learning for students: I think the lectures and videos assigned to students to watch at home are examples of “curated learning.” School people paying attention to the transitions in education understand that school used to be the fundamental repository of knowledge and information for young people. School, in the physical sense, is no longer such a monopoly holder. People have far greater access to information, now, so we are moving our curated learning from the classrooms into greater alignment with other means with which people obtain their self-curated information. This seems a logical step. I think Khan is such curation. I think TED is such curation. I think Chicago Ideas Week videos and the Do Lectures videos are such curation. Podcasts and iTunes U are such curation. But when are we going to trust young learners to curate their own instruction and learning, based on their passions, project-pursuits, and personal interests? I’m not sure yet that I think we should move entirely to such self-curation, largely because I think scaffolding, coaching, and advice from expert curators are important, too. But I believe we are out of balance – I think we need to trust students more to read what they want to read, to watch what they want to watch, to discover what they find curious. [And I know the cynics will jump quickly to the worst-case scenarios, but that kind of thinking paralyzes the majority because of the “sins” of a small number of explorers. And for those we can offer great adult sherpas and mentors, right?!]
  • A reclaiming of the home and a different model for a school year: While I may not align perfectly with Alfie Kohn, I do think he makes some excellent points about homework. I believe that flipping the classroom – curating video lectures for students to watch at home – assumes to a great degree that the school day is not enough time in 24 hours for students to learn. So school “invades” the home. Yet, there are things that I desire for my sons to learn that aren’t necessary assigned from a school teacher. I want my boys to play in the neighborhood, to romp in the creek, to throw the ball for the dog, to read a book of their choice, to draw a picture, to eat a longer dinner with my wife and me, to sit and do nothing but talk and visit. I am finding that each year of school brings far fewer minutes for these invaluable lessons. Homework gets in the way much of the time. And I cannot make it all up – all that “lost ground” – on the weekends. Like most things – eating, exercising, etc., – we are better off engaging some each and every day…not cramming more in later. And I want my boys to sleep. Whatever happened to the 8-8-8 thinking? Eight hours to work, eight hours to recreate with family, and eight hours to sleep. [And I don’t mean a rigid conforming to such a formula – just a model for better balance.] If we think “school” is essential for more hours of the day – enough to send homework or flipped, curated lectures home – then why don’t we lengthen the school year and separate ourselves from the agricultural framework of the school year? It’s just a question! I am a huge lover of camp, summer break, trips to the beach, etc. Those do not have to go away or perish with a 200 or 220 or 250 day school year. When people react so negatively to that suggestion, I think it is largely because they have only one movie in their mind about what “school” could be. But school could be so much more…ironically by being so much less.
  • I’ve run out of time on my “process post” guidelines that I set for myself (self-curated and respectful of other things I need to do), but I was going to write a really awesome paragraph here about the real-life, project-based, integrated system that the school day could be. But you who read here have read a lot of that from me already. If the school day were more compelling, more engaging, and more immersive…then students would choose to self-curate their learning at home, or they would take a much needed break and enjoy a balance of time with friends and family, pursuing equally important learning.

Being curious about the past, present, and future of our species…and, of course, what this means for “school”

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On one of my morning walks this week, I listened to a How Stuff Works: Stuff You Should Know podcast about time travel. I was struck by the sci-fi idea of altering the future by traveling to the past. [Brief aside…I don’t really think such is possible. But I was amazed that the idea popped back into my head when I watched a TED talk today: Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species?]

Enriquez weaves together a number of historical-scientific developments and innovations that have serious implications for our future as a species. Of course, such makes me think about the evolution of schooling and education. I wondered if we should be fast-prototyping education so that we can prevent what Enriquez presents, or if we should do so to accelerate what Enriquez predicts, or if we just resign ourselves that school is school and somebody else will figure all this stuff out.

PROCESS POST: Adaptive Leaders, Orchestrating Conflict, and Developing Experiments…School DNA Evolution

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The job of leadership is to orchestrate the conflict that arises in those discussions and develop experiments to find out how to push the frontier forward in an evolutionary way.

These words came from Ron Heifetz in an interview with David Creelman for the Creelman Research Library on thought leaders. The entire article (2009 vol. 2.5) is worth a read for all leaders. For school leaders embracing the changing landscapes of schools and education, I thought the piece was a #MustRead. [Hat tip to Tod Martin for sharing it with me.]

While I might spend hours examining the components of the article and Heifitz’s book that sparked the interview (The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, co-authored by Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky), what struck me most at this time is the idea of ORCHESTRATING CONFLICT and DEVELOPING EXPERIMENTS. And I use the singular intentionally because I think the two parts are an essential pair of one, complex idea.

As educational leaders and school administrators, how are we orchestrating conflict and developing experiments? What a glorious verb “orchestrating” is. I picture a faculty as an orchestra (and I have pondered before if a principal is a conductor or principal violinist). With the current practice of subdividing a faculty into sections – English, math, science, etc. – like we subdivide an orchestra into instrumental sections, I hope we are orchestrating playing from the same sheets of music. I hope we are not merely gathered together in our orchestral round playing disjointedly from different sheets of music titled, “English,” “math,” “science,” etc. For these are just notes and lines from a symphony which is our world, not separate pieces altogether. But now, in this changing environment of education, it is no longer enough for leaders to orchestrate a faculty playing from the same sheets of music. Now, we must orchestrate conflict, too…so that we  might create new music and innovative ways of playing.

In the interview, Heifitz talked of zooming in and zooming out so that “one moves between high levels of abstraction and low levels of concrete action to discover where people start disagreeing.” Then, Heifitz explained that one would “identify the parties who have a stake in that situation and bring the tough questions to the centre of their attention.” Mind you, these are questions that don’t have easily discernible, textbook answers. These are questions for which the leader does not have current capacity to address. Such is the nature of adaptive leadership. “Adaptive context is a situation that demands a response outside your current toolkit or repertoire; it consists of a gap between aspirations and operational capacity that cannot be closed by the expertise and procedures currently in place.” Where will education and schooling be in 2020? 2030? 2050? Because we don’t know what education might look like in 3-5 years, we will need more and more adaptive leadership to orchestrate and navigate this evolution, revolution, or re-evolution. And we will need teams.

So, we must gather a room – an orchestra – that is smarter than any one person in the room. In a room full of people, the room is the smartest one in the room, right? (David Weinberger, Too Big to Know) From the orchestration of conflict, we must design, prototype, and implement experiments in the schoolhouse. We need R&D labs in schools. Of course, many schools have them, but very few are more than loosely organized, if organized at all. We must put forth these experiments so that we can learn by doing and grow developmentally from our experiments and iterative prototypes. In my opinion, a wave of the future for schooling will involve organizing and orchestrating these experiments more deliberately (and communicating clearly about these efforts with various constituencies including parents, alums, other schools, etc.).

As it stands, existing schools are likely to have schools within their school. Depending on the collection of teachers that a student has, one can experience a very different school than another student – even at the same school. So there is something like a startup within a school, if the school has a collection of teachers who are innovating practice and taking risks and implementing experiments. But are these players harmonizing together to create systemic change and coordinated enhancement? Such is a job of an adaptive leader who functions as part of the team as well as an orchestrator of the gap-closing between current capacity and aspirations.

About two weeks ago, sitting by the pool, I was re-reading Creative Thinkering by Michael Michalko. While reading page 63, I scrawled the following sketch on the inside book cover:

As Michalko described  a CEO using an idea drawer to juxtapose DNA and his business organization, I could see how school innovators could change the DNA of a school – slowly, over time…if loosely organized. But I could also see how this process could be sped up, more closely matching the rate of change in the world, if the innovators were orchestrated and systemically connected with purposeful R&D efforts. Then, in the interview with Heifitz, I read:

Leaders need to accept that adaptive contexts are not simply win-win games. A lot of the organization’s DNA can be conserved but some will need to be discarded. It’s a painful process….But because there are ways of engaging people so that they tolerate and accept losses on behalf of thriving in a changing world we can be positive in facing adaptive contexts. You can do it if you are compassionate about the strains of transition you are asking people to go through. Once you recognize this then you are far more likely to be successful in helping your organization find its way toward a greater adaptability to thrive in challenging times.

How are we orchestrating conflict and developing experiments in schools and education? How are systematizing and organizing these efforts into synergistic wholes? How are we taking leadership of the DNA changes that will happen regardless of us if we don’t lead them intentionally?

_____

Creelman, David. “Ron Heifitz: Adaptive Leadership.” Creelman Research. 2009 vol. 2.5

[NOTE: In the past week, several people have asked me, “Bo, what’s a ‘process post?'” To me a process post is a place to think and not worry about getting all the pieces to fit together or all of the conventions right. It’s like a journal. I usually use a process post as I am working out some thinking in my mind. I generally set a time limit – like 30 minutes to an hour – and just write. Then, I publish what I have without feeling pressure to re-read and polish at that time. Whereas many of my posts are just waypoints on my paths of thinking, the process posts feel even rougher and more draft-y than a post not marked with “PROCESS POST.”]

Process Post: Contemplating Juxtapositions

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Juxtaposition is a powerful device. Just this morning, on my walks with Lucy, I listened to a podcast from The Moth:

Martha Manning: What Can’t Be Fixed
Posted: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:25:03 +0000
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A therapist, and her car, break down.

Martha Manning tells a beautiful story about her patient/friend Ann confronting cancer, and she juxtaposes this heartfelt tale with another story about her car and a mechanic.

My thoughts this morning were in interesting juxtaposition to the story by Martha Manning. For whatever reason, I wondered about why I have made some of the decisions that I have made in my educational career. In particular, two decisions stood out:

  1. In the summer of 1997, I decided to write a new economics curriculum for my eighth graders and to abandon the textbook that had been used for many years. [Choices, the resulting curriculum, still remains, but that is another story – it is long overdue for an abandonment and complete reinvention, in my humble opinion!] Why, in my fourth year of teaching, and only my second year at that particular school, did I decide to do such a thing? And why did my colleague who taught the other sections of Economics 8 agree to such a thing? And why did my principal trust me to do such a thing?
  2. In 2010, I led a launch of a new course called Synergy. My teaching and learning partner, Jill Gough, and I piloted a course that would refuse to be silo-ed into any one department, and the primary curriculum would be community issues problem identification and solution. And it would be heavily assessed, but non-graded. Why, at that particular point in my teaching and administration work, did I decide to do such a thing? Why did I want to break away from the departmentalized, subject-content system and experiment with a course that hypothetically would match more closely the mixed-up, complex world for which we say we are preparing students?

Juxtaposition is a powerful device. In 1997, my courtship and upcoming marriage to my wife, Anne-Brown, was juxtaposed with my decision to write Choices. In 2010 (and even years earlier during the design and creation phases), my rearing and raising of my two sons was juxtaposed with my decision to launch Synergy.

Now, in hindsight, I wonder about how those major family occurrences – those dramatically wonderful life changes – influenced my educational-career choices. In addition to being committed to research and experimentation, I think my marriage year and my childrearing drastically influenced my decisions to create Choices and Synergy. With my marriage, I believe that I identified more strongly with the parents who send their children to school. I believe that I could put myself in their shoes as life partners who were contemplating a family and what it means to be a family in this city, state, nation, and world. And, certainly with my raising of my sons, I viewed each and every student differently. In the faces of the 561 children at school, I saw the faces and hearts and minds of my own two children.

And I want more for them than the outmoded, outdated portions of school that reside in an industrial-age era. Don’t get me wrong – I love school. I believe in school. But I think school needs some significant R&D work! And I would like to be part of that team – those teams – of people who are working tirelessly to review, reset, re-imagine, re-purpose, revise and re-invent school. I want something different for my boys and for all of the children that remind me of my boys. I would love for school to be more relevant and less silo-ed. I would love for school to be less grade-oriented and more feedback and assessment oriented. I would love for school to more closely resemble the world in which we are preparing our students to live and work.

Interestingly (to me), as I sit and type, I am realizing that my 1997 decision about Choices was also juxtaposed with my contemplations about graduate school – would I study the intersections of economics and anthropology, or would I study the complexities of education? And, in 2010, juxtaposed with my decision to pilot Synergy, I was getting much more immersed in blogging and the blog-o-sphere – reading and writing fairly voraciously about what was happening in schooling and education across the planet. Those windows of insight – both those lenses of family and those lenses of my own professional learning and contemplation – made me want desperately to be more involved in the team of people “trying to build a better lightbulb.”

And so, this morning, I face another juxtaposition. Today, I begin officially at Unboundary, serving as the director of educational innovation. For the past few months, I have received some interesting reactions from people about my decision to explore education and schooling from a different perspective than that of an “active school person” teaching quintessential classrooms of students and administrating a faculty. Some have accused me of abandoning education and schooling. Others, of course, have been incredibly supportive and excited by my explorations and intended discoveries. For I do not believe I am abandoning schools or education. I do not think I am “selling out” to the corporate sector. I see that I am working on the next chapter of my education and learning book. I see that I am striving to serve as an operator at the intersection of what school has been, what school could be, and what strategic design and significance consulting can teach us about “schools” of the future.

As Martha Manning says in her story, “Some things just cannot be fixed.” Nevertheless, I am overjoyed to be working in a new type of research laboratory to experiment with the endless possibilities of what school could be. Maybe school doesn’t need fixing. Maybe school cannot be fixed. But school can learn, and school can change. In fact, that is the business of schools – learning and change. So…let’s make it so.

Here’s to the next chapter. Here’s to the juxtaposition of school, education, strategic design, and significance consulting. It’s not about fixing things. It’s about learning and serving.