System turbulence, needed green dye, innovating innovation, and #pedagogicalmasterplanning

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Are you learning as fast as the world is changing? In this insightful HBR article, Bill Taylor wrote:

In a world that never stops changing, great leaders never stop learning.

Eddie Obeng made this passionately visual in his TED talk – “Smart failure for a fast-changing world.”

Obeng provided a picture of injecting green dye into a pipe of faster and faster moving water until the turbulence created can actually be seen. Then, he graphed what happens when the pace of change outstrips the rate at which we learn.

What we call “schools” exist in this world of ever-quickening change. What “green dye” are you using in your school so that the pace and nature of change is more visible…more tangible and discernible?

When I was a school principal, a support I provided for nearly a decade, I thought the best green dye I could inject was providing time for faculty to be together – a meta-goal advocated for in Carrie Leana’s “The Missing Link in School Reform.” Together, we implemented and improved on a few practices:

  • Peer visits – we committed to at least two peer visits a year. Many practitioners, especially those who really strived to improve, made sure that they exceeded the minimum.
  • PLCs – learning from 25 years of research and practice in public schools, we built a system that created job-embedded R&D time for faculty. In the model we created, participating faculty spent four 55-minute periods a week together so that they could do things akin to what David Creelman described when writing about the architect Christopher Alexander as Eishen campus near Tokyo was designed and built. Just like Alexander employed a short-cycle, iterative-prototype mix of design-and-construction so that architecture could inform building and building could inform architecture, the PLCs together designed instruction and assessment, built the constructive lessons with student-learners, and debriefed how to improve the design for the next phase of building.

The infrastructure contained some additional parts and pieces, and this infrastructure facilitated learning at a rate and pace that more closely matches the rate and pace of change that we are experiencing in schools – from technology, globalization, and knowledge about the brain, just to name a few influencers.

My best work, which I did not do alone – I had tons of collaborative help, was simply to make it easier for faculty to work together. Individual learning remained important, too, of course, but the traditional silo-ing traits of school were broken down so that necessary and essential co-laboring and co-learning could occur more often than at sporadic lunches or happenstance encounters in the faculty lounge. The get-togethers were made intentional, purposeful, and systemic.

My next arc of learning and educational support finds me at Unboundary, a transformation design studio. As Polly LaBarre is calling in “Help Us Innovate the Innovation Process,” we are working to design and prototype something currently called “pedagogical master planning.” Essentially, we are deconstructing the campus-master-planning process, and we are re-imagining it as a metaphor or framework to architect and engineer a strategic-design method for systematizing and enhancing the core purpose and radial functions of a learning/teaching community. It’s a next generation of strategic planning. Like Christopher Alexander’s methods with Eishen, pedagogical master planning will involve a short-cycle, iterative-prototype, dynamic responsiveness. Like the PLC’s ethos and structure, pedagogical master planning will systematize the parts and pieces of the whole – not to make the system rigid or slow-moving in complexity, but to respect, leverage, and amplify the interrelated and integrated nature of real systems.

At a time when change continues to quicken, we must design learning systems that can keep pace – or even outpace – the rate of change in the world. Master planning for such learning systems will necessitate a series of shifts from strategic planning to strategic design…design that serves as a green dye to make the intersections of change and learning visible, harness-able, and enhanceable.

The wonders of better communication…

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This week, I’ve come across two great pieces about better communication.

In the first, Simon Sinek shares how Nike’s Phil Knight puts his company’s WHY into words.

And in the second, Melissa Marshall encourages scientists to talk nerdy to her:

Networks, Peer Progressives, School 3.0, and Future Perfect #IDreamASchool #School3pt0

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Imagine a web of collaboration.

A growing number of us have started to think that the core principles that govern the design of the Net could be applied to solve different kinds of problems.

The world is full of problems that can be solved with peer networks.

– from Steven Johnson’s video on Future Perfect

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School 3.0 is likely to look more like the peer networks that Steven Johnson describes in his video summary of his book Future Perfect. By even using the word “school,” however, I imagine that I have unintentionally conjured up old movies in certain readers’ minds. But when I say “school,” I actually mean something newly designed and significantly different.

  • School 3.0 has “students” working on a curriculum composed of, or at least more balanced toward, real-world challenges and problem-finding-problem-solving.
  • School 3.0 creates partnerships among 1) student-learners and faculty-facilitators, 2) businesses, and 3) non-profit, social-innovation organizations and NGOs, and potentially 4) governments. In fact, this could be the “peer network” of the future…the future that I believe Johnson is describing. By linking, yoking, and amassing such networks, we could achieve the social equivalent of Newton’s F=ma.
  • School 3.0 utilizes peer networking to amplify the group-smart of the “school,” newly defined with a broader understanding, and it flattens the industrial-age hierarchies and silos that tend to separate context and power.

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Many thanks to Jonathan Martin for reviewing Steven Johnson’s book Future Perfect. I have not yet read the book, but thanks to my network of co-learners and co-leaders, I have been linked to the possibilities exposed by my peer progressives.

Related posts on It’s About Learning:

 

 

PROCESS POST: Seeing the pedagogical master plans on a pin-board. #PedagogicalMasterPlanning

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Why has campus master planning developed as a field of work?

  • Is it because we put such high value on land use, and we realize the scarcity-of-land dilemma…so we want to plan and plan and plan most carefully before we commit land and resources to construction?
  • Is it because campus master planning makes thinking visible? By constructing campus master plans, we can better visualize the way that academic centers, athletic complexes, art studios and theaters, and green spaces relate and complement and supplement each other?
  • Is it because the construction of buildings and hardscapes and landscapes seem so relatively permanent that we want to make sure that the engineering systems of plumbing, electrical, air, etc. are well-conceived so that we minimize future issues of wishing that we had put “that there and this here?”
  • Is it because we recognize the wisdom of soliciting input from the wider community about our use and intents with space and architecture?
  • [Fill in your good thinking and hypothesizing here…]

In Melanie Kahl’s October 1st MindShift article, “Recasting Teachers and Students as Designers,” Kahl wrote:

The design field covers the gamut of industries in art and science of making ideas, mindsets, and methodologies tangible. (emphasis added)

In my mind’s eye, I can see comparable graphics and imagery for pedagogical master planning. I can see bubble diagrams that relate a methodology like project-based learning to various assessment-feedback systems. I can see these in my mind – moving from hazy, grey images to sharper, clearer pictures – just like I can see on a campus master plan how the academic center and athletic facilities relate to each other. I can see how a school technology plan “fits” or doesn’t with the school’s move to integrating the Maker Movement into it’s STEM-STEAM-STREAM plans – just like I can see on a campus master plan how the systemic, infrastructure engineering schema optimize the flow of water and gas to the various buildings on campus.

What if we pursued design-based planning in the pedagogical and instructional domains at the level of detail constituted on campus master plans? What if we thought of standards, assessment, curriculum, pedagogy and instruction, professional development, and learning environments as the integrated and interrelated sub-systems that they are?

  • Would we value the systemic construction of minds and hearts to a more comparable degree to that of buildings, hardscapes, and landscapes?
  • Would we be more able to make our thinking visible and reveal such epiphanies as “our assessment model is misaligned with our plan to move to more challenge-based learning?” Would we realize that our selection of tech tools and furniture is not optimized with our habits-of-the-mind philosophies?
  • Would we re-think the design of the “school day” appreciating that faculty would HAVE TO HAVE TIME to collaborate on the overall scope and sequence of wisdom-and-understanding formation amongst our student learners? Would we re-imagine the flow of the “school day” to optimize what we are learning about the brain and neuroscience? Would we re-consider our existing definitions of what constitutes a “classroom?”
  • Would we enhance and improve the partnerships and teams we could have with parents, businesses, NGOs, and other people and organizations of the surrounding community…because our children’s educations are THAT important?
  • [Fill in your good thinking and hypothesizing here…]

Yes, I can see it in my mind’s eye – a beautiful set of detailed, designed, customized plans that SHOW VISIBLY the intersections and surrounds of standards, assessment, curriculum, pedagogy and instruction, professional learning, and learning environments. And I believe we are going to figure out how to create and optimize such plans at Unboundary. Then, we could place such plans on a pin-board wall and work to make certain that the construction phases, blueprints, engineering schema, and contracting notes are well-understood by the entire team – in this case…students, parents, faculty, business and social innovation partners, administrators, alumni, receiving colleges and universities, etc.

I can see it plainly. Can you?

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