The Province of Elegance. @GrantLichtman #EdJourney, Episode 11

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From the concluding pages of Grant Lichtman’s The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned In School …

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.

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School Innovation Teams – Start with Outrospection #WhatIfWeekly #StudentVoice

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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.”
  • When Imagining Learning formed to help crowd source ideas for redesigning education, they began with Listening Sessions – for students.
  • When University of Missouri-Columbia freshman Ankur Singh thought to study standardized testing, he decided to take a semester off of school in order to ask those most affected – the students.

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.”

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Business, Social Entrepreneurship, and Education – Exploring Intersections and Interchanges #School3pt0

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One of the things we do at Unboundary is explore the intersections and interchanges of business, social entrepreneurship, and education. In the past few days, a number of things have crossed my path that relate to this nexus of learning innovation and significant transformation. I thought I’d share just a few of these things…

A dear friend and colleague emailed me last week (we actually stay in touch every week), and with her permission I am posting a little bit from our latest e-correspondence.

Also, I usually check out your blog from time to time. Doing so always inspires some thoughts, connections, the quiet voice I hear inside me… the one who says “teach them they are not who they think they are.” That is what I heard myself say in response to “how do we teach young people to thrive in a world of possibility?”
I really love the time in which I have lived my life. I would not want to go back but I have loved the life I have lived and look forward to the future. I do struggle with the corporate influence on education. Going way back before my time I still like what Thomas Dewey said in 1910… “The aim of a 20th century education is not the creation of a labor force but the enrichment of the individual and society by developing a child’s social power and insight.” The good news I think is that 21st century skills and education really do help to develop social power and insight.

When we spoke by phone, we agreed that education is a “both-and” issue. Education should BOTH enrich the individual and society AND create a high-quality labor force. I’m not really interested in making schools more business like – at least not like many people interpret that “corporate influence on education.” However, I am very interested in examining ALL of the ways and means that business, social entrepreneurship, and education can work together as something like sections of the same orchestra – for the benefit of learners and for the benefit of the challenges and opportunities we face in our world. I may be oversimplifying the complex, but it seems to me that we should all see ourselves as playing for the same team.

With that in mind, and with a few projects happening here at Unboundary, the following two articles are well worth reading. Both articles point to collaboration among business and education. I find the comments at the conclusion of the first article particularly interesting, and I think they provide a compelling segue into the second article.

I’m forming my own hypotheses about the future intersections and interchanges for business, social entrepreneurship, and education. By sharing these bits here in this post, I hope I can contribute just a bit to the hypotheses you might be forming.

America’s Shoddy Education System Is a Business Problem,
by Jeff Stibel  |   9:00 AM December 6, 2012

Jeff Stibel’s company is implementing a three-part plan to help address some of the issues in education. The entire HBR article and the comments are intriguing, and I found these two paragraphs particularly poignant. [HT to Frank Rauss for bringing this article to my attention.]

Our most precious natural resource is not diamonds or oil or agriculture; it is human capital. The seeds we plant grow only with education. While our program will help offset any immediate gaps with existing employees, the primary focus is on the next batch of bright and talented employees — the children who will one day bridge the talent gap for businesses across the nation.

There are many ways to tackle this problem, and it’s time that businesses focus on the ones within our control. We cannot rely solely on the government, parents or educators. This is our problem too. I am honored to say that my company is doing our small part. If other businesses follow suit or take their own novel approaches, we can solve the education and talent gap.

 

School Reform for Realists,
by by Andrea Gabor |   August 28, 2012

Andrea Gabor shares examples of Cisco, NYCDOE, iZone, Global Technology Preparatory, and Houston Petroleum Academies. She also offers some profound takeaways about “best practices” in business-education partnerships. [Another HT to Frank Rauss for making sure I didn’t miss this link in my feed reader.]

On the ground, the most effective business–education partnerships are those that foster innovative education opportunities in which both students and parents can participate, and those that create bridges between schools and the outside world, including potential employers. The following stories demonstrate some of the principles that help these partnerships work. What distinguishes them from many outright failures is the quality of collaboration. In these examples, business leaders did more than donate funds and technology; rather, schools and businesses sought to learn from one another.

Finally (at least for this post), I recommend looking at the relatively new business structure called L3Cs (L3Cs explained on Wikipedia). As I walk Lucy in the morning and as I work, I am enjoying thinking about the potential of L3Cs for the future of schools and schools of the future.

In a “3.0 school” established as an L3C, lines between the labels of “students,” “researchers,” “social innovators,” and “employees” get blurred. Perhaps in the future, L3C “schools” will actually pay salaries to young learners (instead of collecting tuitions from them) who are studying such things as cancer cures, robotic surgeries, and transportation and communications innovations in un-siloed coursework that seems a lot more like on-the-job training complete with degree credits. An L3C working to solve the planet’s energy or water issues could synergize the NGO aspect of that work with the for-profit opportunities and integrated-studies possibilities.

Last month, Unboundary participated in an exciting meet-up about L3Cs and higher education. Here’s the press release distributed by Americans for Community Development.

PRESS RELEASE

On November 14, 2012, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Americans for Community Development (ACD) hosted a conference on the groundbreaking concept of implementing the L3C business structure as a form of organization for colleges and universities, using the L3C model to create opportunity ecosystems within the higher education system.  This conference was facilitated by the Lumina Foundation and held at their headquarters in Indianapolis. This meeting was the first of its kind in history bringing together a group of professionals from within higher education, business, law and philanthropy. Over the course of the day the main topic of discussion was how to connect higher education, job creation, entrepreneurship and economic development with the L3C business model as an organizational structure for colleges and universities. This concept “reflects a totally new way of thinking about higher education and how to organize it”.  L3C institutions will be individually unique but will resemble each other in underlying structure. This is a fresh outlook on the organization of colleges and universities that create holistic environments in which institutions are giving back to the students and communities and the students and communities are giving back to the institutions therefore creating opportunity ecosystems that thrive. The very first L3C university, Rockport University L3C, was formed just prior to the conference and conference attendees were asked to contribute intellectually to its development. A large number of the attendees asked to be part of a taskforce ACD is forming to advance the concept of L3C colleges and universities. ACD thanks Bo Adams and Govantez Lowndes from Unboundary for being part of the small group we invited to participate in this ground-breaking event.