Do we structure school in such a way that we truly promote and achieve that intricate balance between: 1) wanting to know and to understand and 2) keeping perspective that we have to be wrong quite a bit in order to gain deep knowledge and understanding?
By the time you are 9 years old, you have already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits, and, second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes. We learn these really bad lessons really well. And a lot of us…deal with them by just becoming perfect little A students…perfectionists…overachievers. – Kathryn Schulz, On being wrong TED Talk, near 7:00 mark, March 2011 (emphasis added)
Is the secret to great success never to be wrong? Of course not! I cannot imagine that even one teacher of children (or adults, for that matter) truly believes that we define “the successful” as those people who always get the right answer, or even as those who tend to get the right answer. Or do we? How do we view our “A students” versus our “C students? Perhaps I have my head in the sand. I don’t think so, though. Yet, I wonder if we people who help to structure the workings of school are ensuring that the fundamental pillars of school reflect this basic principle:
I thought this one thing was going to happen, and then something else happened instead. – Kathryn Schulz quoting Ira Glass of This American Life, On being wrong TED Talk, near 14:00 mark, March 2011
Do we overly penalize learners for their mistakes? Does the traditional, typical school currency – grades – serve best those at the core of the instructional-learning exchange? Do we allow for “returns” to be made after a transaction, or are “all sales final?” Do we allow for enough “do overs,” prototypes, iterative attempts, and second chances? Do we model our classrooms and learning spaces on the real-life tendency for all of us humans to be great mistake makers as we risk to know and to understand our world? Do we facilitate learners growing from “white belts” to “black belts” by awarding them with an average – “a grey belt?” As educators, do we understand the 10,000 hour theory? Are our scope and sequences reflectively cognizant of the 10,000 hour theory? Do we tend to sort and label, or do we tend to recognize that mistakes come with regret that should be embraced if we hope to grow from our errors?
If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or loose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets…the point it to not hate ourselves for having them….We need to learn to love the flawed imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly; it reminds us that we know we can do better. – Kathryn Schulz, Don’t regret regret TED Talk, near 16:00 mark, November 2011
An Intro at the Conclusion
This morning, I had planned to work on my resume. It needs some updating, and I need a job, so I thought this morning would provide me a good opportunity to revise and edit my curriculum vitae. As I awoke from sleep, I even seemed to have some revision ideas on my mind. But then another thing happened instead.
As I sat to enjoy those first sips of morning coffee, I decided to check my Feeddler app – my way of organizing and reading my Google RSS Reader. In the queue was a new TED talk from Kathryn Schulz, the “wrongologist.” I love her work, so I thought I would watch her latest published talk while waking up with my coffee. Then, I would get to “work” on my resume. But then another thing happened instead. I was reminded of this powerful blog post by friend, colleague, and former student Peyten Dobbs. And I remembered the This American Life episode that I listened to during my Saturday afternoon walk with my dog Lucy.
I felt I had important threads dangling loosely in the wind of my thinking. I wondered if writing a bit would help me ground and weave some of those threads together. I puzzled over Peyten’s feelings expressed in her blog post, and I empathized about my own similar feelings from being a perfectionist-bent student of old.
So…do I now have all of these mysteries about grades and being wrong “all figured out?” No. But I am further down the path than I was when I awoke. Do I have revisions completed for my resume? No. If I were to need to “turn in” my resume to a teacher for grading, I fear I would receive an F or an incomplete. Yet, I engaged in some lifelong learning this morning about the nature of being wrong, the nature of regrets, and the structure of schools. I learned. But for that I will receive no formal grade. I may later regret that I don’t have a revised copy of my resume ready on Sunday, December 4. That’s okay. My regrets remind me that I can do better. And I tend to engage in super efforts to learn and grow and get better. Where does that go on my resume?
This morning began like most mornings for me. I rise early so that I can read and write, mostly about educational ideas related to the future of schools and schools of the future. I began this practice years ago because I wanted to enhance my own knowledge and understanding so that I might better serve others on this dynamic path of school transformation in the 21st century. My formula is easy: maintain deep curiosity and make strong connections. The catalyst for the reaction, though, demands constant commitment and daily practice. Like I tell my two sons, ages seven and four, “If you want to get better at anything, you must practice.”
So, by 5:30 a.m., the time at which I am drafting this post, I already have two more hours of learning practice under my belt. I have made a field of mental Velcro so that I can be ready for connections of curiosity throughout the day. This Velcro is made of numerous “curiosity-connection hooks and loops” formed by the countless curiosities and connections pursued by others. I am indebted to others for sharing openly. For you see, my morning routine utilizes Kindle, Twitter, Google Reader, and the blog-o-sphere to connect me to curiosities and connections from vast numbers of amateur and professional educators around the world. Every morning, I am fortunate enough to enter the greatest faculty lounge on the planet wearing David Letterman’s Velcro suit!
Today, I feel Velcro-ly grateful for curiosity and connection practice!
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Bo Adams (@boadams1) is a learner first and foremost. Currently, he is the principal learner at The Westminster Schools Junior High School. The photo shows his older son’s recent artwork as he, too, pursues curiosity and connections.
When we wiselytear down the walls that we can intentionally and unintentionally erect to surround our thinking and understanding, then we can grow our neural and cardio networks in ways that nourish our heads and our hearts. Axons, dendrites, and heartstrings flourish. When we make our mental garden wall-less, we can do amazing things with others…like construct a network of gardens that grow miraculously behind walls all over a city and a world.
What are we reaping and sowing today with our decisions? What walls are we tearing down? What open gardens are we growing? How might we spread our roots and our shoots?
Plant a seed. Provide water and open up to let the light in. Help grow those seeds planted by others. And let others in to fertilize the seeds that you are planting.
“Birds of a feather flock together.” How is it that various flocks of birds fly together in non-linear formation? How exactly do they communicate with each other to cut and cross paths in synchronized patterns? Is there a captain or a conductor or a coordinator? Do zigzagging birds rotate those roles of captain, conductor, or coordinator, like geese flying in a more linear V alternate as leads and followers? What exactly provides the connective tissue that molds together the mass of modulated majesty?
How could we “school people” learn to mimic the great flocks of birds that swarm together in tight, rhythmic formation? Biomimicry may be the way of the future, especially if we hope to innovate in the sustainable manner in which natural organisms innovate in response to their surrounding, environmental changes. In schools, we would do well to investigate and study the lines of flight that reveal a more organic pattern of collaborative learning.
Chapter 1 – Lines of Flight
Mary Ann Reilly, with her blog Between the By-Road and the Main Road, has me thinking a lot about birds. More specifically, Reilly has me contemplating lines of flight. In her post entitled “Reimagining Learning as Lines of Flight,” Reilly cites several definitions – better thought of here as contemplations or meanderings – for the term “lines of flight.”
Martin Wood and Sally Brown (2009) write: “A line of flight is essentially a movement of creativity, a practical act or a way of living that wards off or inhibits the formation of ‘centres’ and stable powers in favor of continuous variation and free action.” from here (Reilly, “Reimagining Learning as Lines of Flight,” n. pag.)
Then, Reilly switches to a second meandering and explains with a humongous string of comma-connected items that a line of flight is something like a tracer as “learners traverse and abandon, producing maps of their learning as they move.” (Reilly, “Reimagining Learning as Lines of Flight,” n. pag.) Certainly because of Reilly’s magnificent images that accompany her text, I am able to imagine more accurately the hypothetically traced path of a flying bird – serving as metaphor for the complex flight pattern of our typical, non-linear learning. I can see the hatch-work of tangled mess that really is no mess at all. In the section #6 of this post – “Reimagining Learning as Lines of Flight” – Reilly provides Maria Tamboukou’s diagram of “nomadic trajectories,” which further support the visualization of a line of flight for some winged creature such as a darting starling or meandering martin or frenetic finch – analogously representing the lines of flight we humans take as we move through a day, a week, and a month of interconnected, “messy” thinking and learning. What a gloriously beautiful tangle those lines of flight can be.
Then, in a follow-up post entitled “Exploring Lines of Flight at School (and Not),” Reilly states, “Lines of flight represent the creative impulses we compose while thinking and doing that offer a seemingly novel way to disrupt concepts cast as dualities.” (Reilly, “Exploring Lines of Flight at School (and Not),” n. pag.) Lines later, Reilly poses some traversal questions – the kind of inquiries that make you cross back in your thinking multiple times…the kind that create complex lines of flight:
How do we attend to the creative impulses of learners that occur outside the domain of the school and challenge binary ways of knowing—ways we might well be situating as truth?
What types of environmental and pedagogical considerations might be necessary in order to leverage/cull/come to know such thinking?
How might we ‘carefully’ come to know and invite in (if possible) these lines of flight within the classroom and/or the ‘sanctioned’ learning?
How often do we stop and acknowledge how little we know about our learners’ learning lives beyond our purview?
How might lines of flight de/colonize classrooms?
How do lines of flight engender inquiry as opposed to categorization?
All knowing is constructed. How do lines of flight offer us a method to reduce our binary ways of knowing that may overpopulate a classroom?
Because of the visual organization of Reilly’s blog, these stirring questions seem almost to grow – to rise in flight – out of a foundational image produced by Reilly, and the image captures the real essence of our foolishness that learning is in any way bound by the four walls of a classroom – proverbial or real. If we are not mindful, our classroom thinking can trend toward thinking inside a box – literally and figuratively – as we categorize thinking into neatly bundled packages called math, science, English, and history. But are we really doing all we can to catalyze genuine inquiry in our young learners that we label as students? Are we encouraging the zigzags of natural lines of flight – the biomimicked version of a bird on the wind? Do we nourish questioning and integrate outside-of-class thinking, or do we squelch such because we have so much to cover in 180 days?
Clearly, Justin Tarte’s line of flight is intersecting Reilly’s line of flight. In his “What do you see…?” post from November 20, among other postulates of zigzagginess, Tarte questions:
If you are assigning work to be completed outside of school, do you see the other time commitments and constraints your students may have or do you see homework as more important than family and/or interests and hobbies? If you discover that a student is passionate about something that is not related to your content, do you see it as an opportunity to connect and relate your content to his/her passion or do you see his/her passion as something that is getting in the way of his/her learning? (Tarte, n. pag.)
What wonder might emerge if we school people acted more as travel agents or air traffic controllers who coordinated various trips and travels than if we kept the planes in the hangers of our cordoned-off sections of tarmacked airports?
[Ah, my own line of flight has taken me askew. And I am mixing metaphors as I am learning what I think by watching what I write. But now I am zigzagged back across a previous tracer line…]
Throughout Reilly’s posts, though, I tended to picture a single, solitary bird flying in zigzagged lines of flight, following such a tracer path as that white lightening bolt included in the foundational image emblazoned in Reilly’s “Exploring Lines of Flight at School (and Not).” But I am more interested in FLOCKS of birds – how hundreds and thousands of birds can fly together in synchronized patterning…like those starlings on Otmoor in the YouTube video that opened this post.
Holds those thoughts for a moment. I promise to return to them, but I must tell another story…such is my zigzagging line of flight.
Chapter 2 – Innovation Strategist as Orchestra Director or Offensive Coordinator
Recently, on one of his lines of flight, Jonathan Martin (@jonathanemartin) was kind enough to tweet about a blog post that I wrote a few weeks back – “May seem roundabout, but it’s an exhilarating intersection.” Jonathan forwarded my notion that we need R&D Director of Innovation positions inside schools. A follower of Jonathan’s, @mrsdurkinmuses, agreed but argued that each of us should have that role already. Then, their dialogue of tweets turned down a path of funding contemplations. Perhaps that is where their lines of flight took them. [If you are not familiar with Twitter, the following conversation exists in reverse chronological order.]
Upon much reflection, I absolutely agree that all school leaders should willingly and enthusiastically be taking on the mantle of innovator. However, from working with a division full of innovators for the past several years, I see that we can all be like those lone starlings, martins, or finches. Even with care taken towards collaborative work habits, we school people can tend to return to our classrooms and fly our own individual flight patterns – our silo-ed lines of flight. Occasionally we might intersect; in fact, we are likely to intersect. But these intersections are often chance encounters facilitated by serendipity and chance more than by planning and intent.
What if we flew as a flock? What if we became more birds of a feather? What if schools of the future steered more purposefully toward the future of schools by coordinating the lines of innovative flight? I do not mean to create irony here. I am not calling for standardization of practice, and I am not meaning to disqualify that “continuous variation and free action” that Wood and Brown defined as the creative movement of a line of flight. However, I am wondering what we school people might be able to accomplish by way of navigating more as a flock, moving in a mass of modulated majesty. Yes, we should all play our own instruments or positions, but how are we coordinating and strategizing our play?
Would an orchestra be able to create its majestic music without the swirlings of a director or conductor? Would the music sound as melodic or sweet? Would a football team be able to function as a coordinated whole, composed of unequal parts linemen, running backs, wide receivers, and quarterback, without the expert coaching from an offensive coordinator? Would the game be as purposefully exciting? Who serves in the comparable role for a school? Who weaves together the complex lines of flight of the creative masters of education – the teachers – while employing a determined focus to research and development…along a roadmap of intentional travel? Is it the school head? Is it the principal? Is it the curriculum coordinator? The department chairs? The superintendent? Can the people mantled with those titles and responsibilities devote enough majority attention to R&D and strategic, systemic innovation?
Much is being written about innovation. To name but a few:
But, in each case, notice where that apostrophe accents. That precise punctuation calls attention to the singular possessive. What if we moved that apostrophe to the outside of the letter S, and what if we forced the plural possessive? Has the book been written that tells us of how we might fly as a flock by embracing and empowering the innovators’ conductor? The innovators’ coordinator? The innovators’ connector? The innovators’ director or strategist?
In summarizing and translating Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen with his recent post “18 Tips for Becoming Better Educational Innovation Leaders: Advice from Christensen’s Innovator’s DNA,” Jonathan Martin’s list may be the closest current thing to such a book that deals with possible macro-lines of flight for inspiring and facilitating the innovative efforts for flocks of progressive educators. Bill Ferriter also comes close to providing some serious “book chapters,” too, in his Tempered Radical posts:
However, both of my very respected colleagues, Martin and Ferriter, may still remain as in-satiated and still-curious as I am about how to actually serve as an orchestra-like conductor or an offensive-like coordinator for directing and coaching a mass of modulated majesty of ENTIRE SCHOOLS acting as FLOCKS in such synchronized innovation. Is it enough to inspire and motivate a school-full of innovating teachers and staff? Most certainly, to inspire and motivate such is a fabulous and necessary start. But it is my experience that these innovations often remain segregated by walls that separate math class from science class, as well as by those that separate English class from history class.
Like the sound waves that blend in the airspace surrounding an orchestra playing a symphony, and like the commentated, chalk-line routes that define a football team working in offensive harmony, how do we blend and harmonize the departmentalized learning that is occurring in most disciplined classrooms of specific, segregated subject matter? Schools of the future must assuredly be tearing down walls that prevent such blending and harmonizing. And when we do, we must work as educational leaders to ensure that the resulting sounds, coming from previously impermeable containers, combine in reinforcing frequencies rather than in cancelling frequencies or noisy cacophonies. We need to work to make beautiful music.
I’d like to schedule a trip to that whole-school destination! I would like to trace that line of flight! How do all of those starlings on Otmoor know to turn, gee, and haw together?! How do they conduct their coordinated flight? How do they mold into that mass of modulated majesty? How might we “school people” develop that biomimicked synergy?
On to fly…in the zeal of zigzags…as a member of the flock, not alone.
Chapter 3 – Murmurations of Symphonic Innovation
[Coming soon…as my line of flight takes me there with my flock.]
In Synergy, a non-departmentalized, non-graded, transdisciplinary, community-issues-problem-solving course, we use blogging as a means to communicate and collaborate on ideas as well as to reflect and to revise thinking.
Currently we offer our learners an Action-Traction-Reaction prompt to spur their thinking, reflection, and writing.
One of our learners offers this reflection that connects his thinking about his team’s project with the ideas from Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish:
Relating Jamie Oliver’s Prize Wish to my Project
Posted on November 17, 2011
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Jamie Oliver, a celebrity chef, wished to educate every child about food as a use of his TED prize. I’ve known about his fight against obesity and eating right since learning about his TV show in 6th grade, so this wish makes sense to me. He’s creating a
Strong, sustainable movement
to educate every child about food.
The core of this action is to create a movement. This core action could be applied to my project, because in my project we are trying to get people to clean up after themselves, and stop cutting in line. Both of those problems are just bad examples that people have seen and copied. Creating a movement would create new standards in the community for cleanliness in the lunchroom, and could reverse the bad examples in place there.
For Jamie’s wish, he wants to create an online community and also a movement. He said
The grassroots movement must also challenge corporate America to support meaningful programs that will change the culture of junk food.
I didn’t know what a grassroots movement is, so I looked it up. I came up with this. “A grassroots movement (often referenced in the context of a political movement) is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures.”
For Jamie’s project, he is relying on creating a following, that would create the foundation for his project and help spread the message. But he also would like to create traveling kitchens and a traveling food theater to make his project entertaining and interactive. From my perspective, the traction for this project is based on two components: people and interaction. This is a good formula for other projects who are looking to gain traction in a community. You draw the people in with interaction, and then rely on them to feel passionate and spread the word.
In the comment section of the article, many people were eager to partner with Jamie’s project to support and help organize his ideas. I think that the biggest way to attract reaction like this, is to be backed by TED! But the other large factor is that he’s addressing a large problem and is presenting a sound project plan. Creating this plan is an easy thing to do in Synergy to make sure our projects look attractive in the eyes of the administrators inside and outside of Westminster. If our projects only look half-baked, they won’t attract support.
“Grassroots.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 20 Nov. 2011.
[Permission to post obtained from student and student’s parent.]
Do we write to read and learn what we are thinking? Do we prototype, seek feedback, and revise? How do we connect our thinking to the ideas of others?
