What about a Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country of Testing?

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I wonder if U.S. educators will ever unite and pen something akin to our country’s Declaration of Independence.

From all I hear and read about educator opinion concerning the standardized-testing industry and the colonization of our classrooms with multiple-choice tests that don’t align well with the broad spectrum of learning, I wonder if we might ever declare independence. And I don’t mean “independent school” compared to “public school.” I mean educators declaring independence from the testing industry that many say they despise and see as counter-productive to preferred methods of assessment and student learning.

When our country’s historic leaders had had enough of “taxation without representation,” they declared an entire set of geographically-diverse peoples as independent from the perceived oppressors. Certainly, if those placing their John Hancocks on the D.o.I. could start the ball rolling on an entire new-country formation, educators – arguably the cohort most connected to “smarts” – could tackle the seemingly much simpler task of declaring our assessment independence.

Perhaps we could rally against the “Red Pens” like past heroes rallied against the “Red Coats.”

Or we could just remain complacent with our situation. Not many hero stories are written about the complacent and meek, though, are they?

A list for success and prosperity…wondering about what “school” could be

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How are we doing on this list of “skills and values that will be necessary for students to succeed and prosper in these turbulent and ever-changing times?” (from Pat Bassett’s conflation of six resources as cited in “An Education President for the 21st Century,” Patrick F. Bassett, Independent School, Fall, 2008)
  1. character (self-discipline, empathy, integrity, resilience, and courage);
  2. creativity and entrepreneurial spirit;
  3. real-world problem-solving (filtering, analysis, and synthesis);
  4. public speaking/communications;
  5. teaming; and
  6. leadership.

Thinking about how to show demonstrable evidence of OUTCOMES for #2, 3, 4, and 6 – for ALL students, not just those enrolled in certain electives – causes me to pause and seriously consider designing for process over product. I also wonder about those schools or other experiences that are really playing matchmaker between world issues and adolescent energy.

How do you think schools are doing on this list? What are the exemplar schools that provide great models for ways to help such development happen? What are some exemplar models from other industries and organizations?

Demonstrations of Learning for 21st-Century Schools
Patrick F. Bassett
Fall 2009

I dream a school…that designs with process over product

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As an architect, I often ask myself,what is the origin of the forms that we design? What kind of forms could we design if we wouldn’t work with references anymore? If we had no bias, if we had no preconceptions,what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience? If we could free ourselves from our education? What would these unseen forms look like? Would they surprise us? Would they intrigue us? Would they delight us? If so, then how can we go about creating something that is truly new?

Michael Hansmeyer gives a beautiful TED talk. On the concrete and literal level, his architectural forms are stunning – based on the processes of nature for cell division and generative folding. On the metaphorical level, Hansmeyer taps into a river of thinking that deserves more flow in schools and education. How can we design the forms of “school” by functionalizing process – the processes to which we want to introduce students and learners of all ages?

Imagine the forms that could result if we would design for process like we try to design for product…even more than we try to design for product. Process is the horse, product the cart.

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

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  • Nobody’s as Smart as Everybody—Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius | Management Innovation eXchange

    “Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.”

    tags: management innovation exchange Mutual Fun UnbouBrainFood #MustRead

    • Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.

    • You start to get the message Day One. At 9am on your first day of work we throw you a birthday party—with wrapped presents, cake and all kinds of fun. That morning, your family gets the “welcome wagon”—flowers, gifts and a personal note from me and Joe, delivered at home.

      Why do we give people a party when they’re leaving a company?  That’s not the time to make them feel important! How do we make people feel important the moment they join a company? The idea behind the birthday party is that you’ve arrived at a new place where you belong, you were expected, and you are important.

      Even better, when  you go to your birthday party, everyone in the room has a lot of different reasons to relate to you. New recruits fill out a “birth certificate,” which details their hobbies, travel experiences, family, schooling, pets, military service, and surprising facts—like a hobby of growing giant pumpkins or playing a particular instrument..

      • Love this idea of throwing people a party when they START at a school, not when they leave!

  • Innovation Excellence | DNA of a 21st Century Educator

    tags: innovation dna 21st century educator educator Brainfood #MustRead

  • A Crash Course in Innovation | Edutopia

    tags: innovation design design thinking edutopia Boss #MustRead schools of the future

    • At capacity, SCS will serve 900 students in grades 6-12. Teens learn alongside college role models who are preparing for careers in creative professions.
      • Great synergy possible among 6-12 teens and college students studying for careers in creative professions. Interesting model of Ken Robinson’s “not grouping by date of manufacture.”
    • HFLI model emphasizes readiness for college and careers, “but we also want students to become active agents in community redevelopment,”

  • Can Innovation Skills Be Learned? | Edutopia

    tags: Innovation edutopia Wagner #MustRead Mindset

      • Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questions and a desire to understand more deeply
      • Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that are very different from your own
      • Associative or integrative thinking
      • A bias toward action and experimentation
    • But as an educator and a parent, what I find most significant in this list is that it represents a set of skills and habits of mind that can be nurtured, taught and mentored!
    • “Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic predisposition, it is an active endeavor.
    • what you have learned to do is more essential
    • But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.
    • “Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit . . . Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged.”

  • The Creative Personality

    tags: creativity #MustRead Psychology Csikszentmihalyi

    • Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
    • Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
    • the convergent and the divergent
      • I wonder…are schools pretty good at the convergent, but relatively negligent of the divergent? If so, could this mean we are scoring a “50” in terms of educating “whole people?”
    • People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying
      • Educational transformation in ways that enhance and amplify the blurring of lines between “school” and “life” seems to be an idea worth pursuing for a lifetime!
    • Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility
    • Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”
      • This paragraph about sculpting and hard work reminds me of “Grit” from Jonah Lehrer’s talk on 99%. Great connection to Drive, Mindset, Talent Code, Element, etc.
    • Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality
    • Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted
    • Creative people are humble and proud at the same time
    • Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping
    • Creative people are both rebellious and conservative
    • In innovation, you have to play a less safe game
    • Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well
    • Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
    • Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable

  • How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity – Harvard Business Review

    tags: pixar creativity leadership Collective creativity #MustRead

    • If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.

  • The 11 Leadership Secrets You’ve Never Heard About – Forbes

    tags: leadership followers leading following Burk #MustRead

  • Cultural Change That Sticks – Harvard Business Review

    tags: change culture #MustRead

  • Experts & NewBIEs | Bloggers on Project Based Learning: The Common Core is the “what.” PBL is the “how.”

    tags: PBL commoncore CCSS #MustRead

  • Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums | Video on TED.com

    tags: innovation schools of the future TED&TEDx #MustRead

  • Between the By-Road and the Main Road: The Wide Space Between Personalized Learning and Personal Learning is Choice of Action

    tags: personalized personal learning choice action PBL schools of the future #MustRead

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In Mathematics

    tags: CCSS mathematics math PBL projects context #MustRead

    • standards stress not only procedural skill but also conceptual understanding, to make sure students are learning and absorbing the critical information they need to succeed at higher levels – rather than the current practices by which many students learn enough to get by on the next test, but forget it shortly thereafter, only to review again the following year.
    • high school standards call on students to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges
    • develop a depth of understanding and ability to apply mathematics to novel situations
    • high school standards emphasize mathematical modeling, the use of mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, understand them better, and improve decisions
    • “Modeling links classroom mathematics and statistics to everyday life, work, and decision-making. It is the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions. Quantities and their relationships in physical, economic, public policy, social and everyday situations can be modeled using mathematical and statistical methods. When making mathematical models, technology is valuable for varying assumptions, exploring consequences, and comparing predictions with data.”

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In English Language Arts

    tags: CCSS PBL Writing Projects English Language Arts #MustRead

    • range of subjects
    • Research—both short, focused projects (such as those commonly required in the workplace) and longer term in depth research —is emphasized throughout the standards but most prominently in the writing strand since a written analysis and presentation of findings is so often critical.
    • students gain, evaluate, and present increasingly complex information, ideas, and evidence through listening and speaking as well as through media.
    • Formal presentations are one important way such talk occurs, but so is the more informal discussion that takes place as students collaborate to answer questions, build understanding, and solve problems.
    • standards help prepare students for real life experience at college and in 21st century careers

  • What does it mean to be learned? | SmartBlogs SmartBlogs

    tags: learning DavidWarlick #MustRead schools of the future responsive assessment gaming

  • Colleges Awakening to the Opportunities of Data Mining – NYTimes.com

    tags: data data mining assessment predictive colleges #MustRead

  • Social and Emotional Curriculum: Sharing Your Gift | Edutopia

    tags: gift strengths brightspots happiness PBL #MustRead

    • “Happiness comes from giving, not getting . . . to get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy we must scatter it.”
      • This article on sharing your gift seems intimately connected to PBL and the future of schools to me. If classroom work was done more to share gifts, innovation, enhancements and less as just-a-completion-of-an-assignment-only-the-teacher-will-see, then the level of engagement would seem to rise dramatically. The possibility for solutions-oriented education would rise dramatically, too.
    • moving from “me” to “we.”
    • signposts that can mark the way
      • Could these also be some of the signposts for school transformation to a more 21C model?

  • 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020 | MindShift

    tags: future mindshift schools of the future obsolete #MustRead

  • 10 Things in School That Should Be Obsolete | MindShift

    tags: school design learningspaces schools of the future #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Process Post: Knowing Ourselves, Using Our Whole Brains, and Eating Wisely

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For those attuned to educational discussions, I am stating the obvious to say that schools face a multitude of change factors and a high degree of transformational influence. Perhaps because of a hard-to-recipe blend of world and environmental change, traditions and habits of schooling, and a unique situation of “client-empathy delay” (parents understandably have a movie in their minds about what “school” is), many schools face at least three fundamental issues:

  1. Organizational confusion
  2. Operational inertia
  3. Opportunity overload

[With all the alphabet soup out there, I am tempted to call these the 3 O’s! If I imagine those three O’s as intersecting fields of a Venn diagram, a school can really feel in a hole as it wrestles and struggles with all three issues simultaneously.]

To maximize future potential, I believe schools can do a better job of focusing on three inter-related and continuously evolving processes:

  1. Know who you are and who you want to become. I would be very skeptical of the builder who gathered materials and began constructing without blueprints, engineering specs, and even scale models. Yet, as a school leader, I often behaved this way. “Let’s adopt more formative assessment.” “We should be using more PBL.” “Let’s switch computer platforms.” While there is nothing wrong with those sub-decisions, they are better made in a system of wholeness and self-knowledge.
    .
    Inspired by designer Nicholas Felton, Todd Silverstein, who has started Vizify, describes a zooming out so that one can see more of the whole system. Recently, he told Fast Company, “They’re starting with the parts, and we’re starting with the whole and illustrating parts where it makes sense.” (Kessler, “Vizify Turns Your Social Network Into an Infographic about Your Life“) Regardless of your views on social media, there is much wisdom in this quote about understanding the whole in order to make the best decisions about the parts.
    .
    Do schools know who they are and who they want to become? Are they innovating the dusty practices of strategic planning to be more nimble and flexible in an ever-quickening change environment? Are schools developing processes for studying themselves in real-time – looking in the mirror every morning to comb their hair and making sure their socks match – so that they are organizationally coherent?
    .
    As intra-school practitioners develop a widening gap of proficiencies and skills, and as we innovate in loosely defined sub-tribes of a school, schools are experiencing the “school-within-a-school” effect. Two children can have drastically different school experiences based on the roster of teachers they are assigned. Of course, a certain spectrum of variation is healthy, but many schools are finding it harder and harder to describe who they are and to show a full set of blueprints for who they want to become. Schools can become schizophrenic and suffer from organizational (identity) confusion. And there are so many constituencies with whom to communicate about school identity – students, faculty, parents, alumni, board members, etc. Thoughtful and well-adapted communications schema are a must – internally, as well as externally. We need to start by knowing who we are and who we want to become. And we need to be intentional about our parts development, based on a well-designed and articulated whole.
    .
  2. Use your whole brain. On July 18, I posted “Orchestrating Conflict, Developing Experiments…and Carving Butter: Adaptive Leadership #PBL Ponderings” and an idea for using Rite-Solution’s “Mutual Fun” to create a similar idea-development exchange among faculty at a school. I first read about Rite-Solution’s “Mutual Fun” in Michael Michalko’s Creative Thinkering. At the end of last week, a colleague at Unboundary circulated “The Social Side of Strategy” by Arne Gast and Michele Zanini, and this great piece also highlights Rite-Solution’s “Mutual Fun.” Thanks to this article, I found “Nobody’s as Smart as Everybody—Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius” by Jim Lavoie at Rite-Solutions, which gives a very detailed description of the company philosophy and practice of “Mutual Fun,” complete with screenshots of the traders’ portfolio windows. My “Idea #1” on the July 18 post is just a concrete way of thinking about how to empower the greatest single resource of any school – it’s faculty. I am not wed to the specifics of “Mutual Fun” (although I LOVE the framework), but I am wed to empowering the mainstay of a school – the faculty. In my tenure as principal, I utilized PLCs to accomplish such an end, and I am a strong advocate for the PLC ethos and structure. However, I mostly want to advocate for any system that empowers teachers to co-pilot the school, and for one that tears down walls between admin and faculty, faculty and faculty, parents and faculty, etc. I am particularly interested in tearing down walls among faculty and administrators.
    .
    Often times, administrators and faculty can feel misaligned, and many schools suffer from an “us-them” among admin and teachers. Industrial-age, top-down hierarchies still dominate many school organizational charts. At Rite-Solutions, the company leaders became “social architects” in such a way that they could harness the whole brain of the organization and move more nimbly in a united team of employees. If schools really believe in their faculty, then we should give the faculty more ownership of the system. “Mutual Fun” is but one way to do so. But I can imagine a faculty that develops learning opportunities through a system like “Mutual Fun” instead of having to go through a more rigid hierarchy of course submission and approval with a disconnected admin review board or central office. I can imagine a school that moves with the flow of its faculty – a faculty who feels full ownership in the purposeful directioning of the school…a faculty who chooses to have its rafts in the same river all paddling in the same directions.
    .
  3. Only put on your plate what you can eat. Initiative overload is a common ailment among schools. At conferences around the country, speakers develop immediate empathy from their audiences by commiserating about the number of initiatives being undertaken by a school. Much of the tribal-ness seems to come from unifying against a common enemy – the “dreaded administration” that heaps on the top-down initiative buffet. But what if we used our whole brain and developed a more social-architecture approach to fulfilling the unified, co-authored visioning of a school? Then, the faculty and administration – as a coherent team – might be better able to control the portion size and number of items on the organizational plate. Communication would improve as we all became better versed in the coherent identity of the school. With greater communication, mutual understanding, and collective, distributed decision making, a school family could define better the domains in which it is going to operate and the areas that it will leave to other school families who know that they are different, serving an equally well-articulated niche of the educational spectrum. We cannot be all things to all people, and schools could niche diverse areas of expertise if we knew better who we are, how we influence and own the whole, and control the portion sizes on our responsibility plates.

[Well, I’ve run out of time on this process post.]

I would love to know your thoughts, responses, reactions, and questions. I hope you’ll share what you’re thinking. If you have a related piece of writing or recommended reading, please add to the comments. Together, we could figure this out!