Many – maybe all – schools send teachers to conferences. This practice seems important (otherwise, why do we do it, right?). It’s like collecting pollen for the hive. Curious, ambitious teachers venture out to conferences – ASCD, Learning Forward, NAIS, EduCon, SXSWedu, Solution Tree, etc. – to learn and grow. To collect pollen for the hive.
How does your school work to transform that collected pollen into honey? How do you set up and maintain your “honey production system?” How’s your honeycomb?
Do the teachers …
Tweet tidbits of learning and links to resources gathered during the conference experience?
Storify the highlights from multiple Twitter accounts active during the event?
Share blog posts about what they learned?
Create a podcast or short summary video to distribute like a radio or TV show back at the hive?
Teach demonstration lessons based on what was learned and invite others to observe?
“Dance” in order to share with the other bees where the best pollen is so that more can go to the same source and collect more?
Present at a faculty meeting or facilitate a workshop to spread the new knowledge and knowhow acquired?
Work in PLCs (professional learning communities) to transform the collected pollen into honey practices across the school?
Or does considerable pollen remain unused or underutilized once the resource is returned to the hive?
How’s your honeycomb? How are you making that honey for the nourishment of the full faculty, student body, parents, and others?
Many schools have extraordinary practices for making honey, and many teachers share the collected pollen purposefully and proactively. To do otherwise would be a terrible waste of resources and opportunity.
Elegance is not the province of heroes. It is here for all of us who want to emulate those who we respect, to practice the skills required, and to work hard at it. We must use the tools we have learned, and learn to suffer failure but not defeat.
Importantly, elegance is not the sole province of those we respect or revere, of those who share our world view, political party, or side in battle. Elegance deserves our attention not because it is good, but because it is new, creative, and efficient … in other words, because it is better. And if we don’t keep up with what is better we quickly lose the game, whatever the game may be.
A few paragraphs later …
The skills of strategy are our tools in the search for elegance wherever our passion leads us. … We, too, can overcome difficult obstacles and find or create these unique opportunities that make our lives full, achieve our objectives, and, hopefully, fill the lives of those around us. The key is not wealth or armies, not background or advanced degrees, or even necessarily raw brainpower. The keys are willingness, preparation, openness to new ideas, and the diligent application of strategy.
And, still, a paragraph later…
…creational thinking, not critical thinking, should be our ultimate goal in education. Critical thinking is a skill that allows us to steer a valuable course through a known problem. It engages a problem-solving skill set but stops short of what is possible. If problem solving and critical thinking are the goals of education, the bar is too low. Creational thinking, the use of content while branching into the unknown, leads to the possibility of truly elegant solutions. That is where the bar needs to be, particularly in light of the challenges that lie ahead of us.
In our search for elegance, maybe we create something new, or understand something old in a new way. Maybe we fill in a gap of knowledge, fit a new piece into the puzzle of human experience that has been forming for over four million years. Maybe we fail but decide to try again. Hopefully the elegant solutions that tend toward good in the world surpass those that tend toward evil. If we succeed, as scientist, engineer, peacemaker, prophet, soldier, teacher, designer, artist, parent, or just someone putting one foot in front of the other each day in a complicated world, maybe we have become someone else’s hero.
It has been my pleasure to follow along with Grant as he has visited 64 schools across the U.S. on his #EdJourney. The windows into these schools have proven to be invaluable to my own hope, imagination, confidence, and creativity. There are many heroes in the schools that Grant visited, and I am most thankful that they opened up their schools and their practices so that we all could connect and learn with each other. What we create with these new connections and insights will make all the difference in the world. Such is our province of elegance.
What follows is the twelfth and final videocast interview with Grant as he concluded his twelve-week, 64-school, cross-country #EdJourney. We recorded the interview on Friday, December 14, 2012. On that day, of course, Sandy Hook Elementary School experienced a horrid and terrible tragedy. Our hearts, minds, thoughts, and prayers are will the people and families of Sandy Creek in Newtown, CT. Grant and I decided to move forward with the interview on that day for that is what we must all commit to doing – move forward and create the elegant solutions together with our neighbors.
“Nothing you do matters until everything you do counts. That’s a tiny statement of personal existential responsibility: the obligation of those who choose to embrace their better selves fully, wholly, uncompromisingly. And the existential responsibility of business [schools], should you accept my tiny thesis, is nothing less than helping each and every one of us live it.”
“We hold up the innovators as models. Innovators are our 21st-century heroes. We encourage out-of-the-box thinking while restricting our teachers to in-the-box teaching and assessing it with in-the-box tests. We want our students to be innovative but require them to be compliant with teaching methods of the past. Yet, we still claim to be preparing kids for life.”
Education faces a design challenge. From what I know about design challenges, it seems that the best designs begin with intensive stages of immersion and discovery – putting the designers in the positions of chief empathizers.
One of the best examples I know of related to this commitment of being chief empathizers comes from Dan and Chip Heath’s book Switch. The story of Dr. Jerry Sternin harnessing the local wisdom of Vietnamese mothers who were rearing healthy children amidst a malnutrition epidemic stands out to me. Actually, the story inspires me. Dr. Sternin did not swoop in with pre-conceived notions and ready-made solutions. Instead he committed to a process of immersion and discovery to find sustainable, scalable solutions that came from within the community. He leveraged empathy to create a most-likely-to-succeed solution that honored the end users.
Countless other examples come to mind, but I’ll restrain myself and offer only a few here:
When I enrolled in a design-thinking course from IDEO and Design Thinking for Educators, we began with a mini design challenge, and step 1 was to interview someone about their morning commute. “Learn how they feel, what they wish for, what gets in their way. Your job is to ask great questions, listen, and learn. TIP: Don’t be afraid to ask ‘Why?'”
When I participated in Mount Vernon Presbyterian School’s Design Institute, before we began designing our ideal outdoor classroom, we interviewed students. We collected insights from them before we even thought about preparing solutions to our own notions of classroom design.
When Emily Pilloton asked her student designers to imagine a better chicken coop and design it, they started with observing how chickens behave. “In three days, students would get to know their feathered ‘clients’ by observing their behavior. How do they eat? ‘They like pecking out of the straw, not eating from the trough,’ noted Kerron. How do they sleep? ‘They huddle together up in the roosting box,’ said another student. After three days, our students knew far more about chicken behavior than they ever imagined or wanted.”
So, for all of the schools facing essential questions of innovation, I am wondering how you are factoring in “immersion and discovery.” How are you building empathy into the design challenges?
When I was a school principal, one of the most valuable things I ever did was to shadow a student every year. For a day, I would partner with a student – most often a sixth grader – and I would trail along beside them and pretend to be a student for a day. I was off limits as a principal because I wanted to be completely immersed in the experience. In the years that I was most committed, I would even do all of the homework assignments that night of the shadow. Often, on blogs like Connected Principals, I read of other administrators engaging in such empathy gathering. Now, I am wondering if schools should not build this process into their regular routines and habits.
Maybe schools need innovation teams. Among other jobs, these innovation teams could commit to shadowing students, interviewing students, observing school days and after-school activities, talking with parents about what family life is like at home after school, etc. I bet devoting just three days a year to such immersion and discovery would yield invaluable insights and empathies. [Why the arbitrary number of three days? Well, if it’s good enough for the chickens in Bertie County, NC, I figured it was a good starting place!]
Our school innovations might improve mightily if we designed with the students’ voices at the core – if we committed to “outrospection.”
Call it the a la carte school.
The model, now in practice or under consideration in states including Louisiana, Michigan, Arizona and Utah, allows students to build a custom curriculum by selecting from hundreds of classes offered by public institutions and private vendors.
How, then, should businesspeople who are genuinely interested in school reform take on the challenge? Start by recognizing that you have a great deal to offer education — if you can draw on the most collaborative, generative aspects of business thinking and action, following the examples of companies that promote transparency, engagement, shared accountability, continuous improvement, and organizational learning.
So…this is an interesting twist analysis of globalization – one of the major factors attributed with influencing and impacting education. How might this perspective rub up against MOOCs and other globalizing trends? How might schools actually go more local? How might we work on the interior of our networks? How might we strengthen the system?
What we’re aiming for here is not retreat, but to reset our ideas for a new age. It points up the fact of an urgent need for change at the most difficult, insider place of them all: ourselves.
I wonder… if we reconstructed school, in such a way as to be more meaningful, would the two circles in the Venn – meaningfulness and happiness – move to more overlapping area?
But for higher education to accommodate our future needs requires leadership that will pay attention to issues of access, affordability, curriculum, and pedagogy—and that will require collaboration, risk taking, and care.
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