Step 4: Finding Problems, @GrantLichtman #EdJourney, episode 6, week 5

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If there was a place along our path where my own students, year after year, wanted to stop, take a timeout, and really argue, it is right here. Our training and intuition both scream at us: “Why do I need to go looking for problems? Enough problems find me on their own!” Our educational system is firmly grounded in the concept that problem solving is the key to winning the game of life and that our daily encounters with the world provide us plenty to solve, thanks very much.

So I will tell you what I used to tell my students at this point: the central failure of our entire educational system is that we provide canned material for students to solve and expect them to return to us the correct canned answer. That is not how real problems occur that need to be solved. If we, as parents, teachers, and bosses, want our children, students, and employees to become more than robotic transponders of our historical and cultural ethos, we must teach them how to find their own problems in their own ways. Take a few more steps around this bend, and it will make sense.

So begins The Falconer chapter entitled, “Step 4: Finding Problems.” Through his #EdJourney, Grant Lichtman, author of The Falconer is engaged in his own problem finding. At this juncture of his search – the end of week 5 – Grant has identified a trend and pattern among those schools that seem to be more readily engaging the processes of educational innovation.

  1. Innovating schools appear to have a person that functions something like a C.P.F. – a chief problem finder. In many cases, of course, this person functions on a team, but the job of “Director of Innovation” (or similarly titled) possesses time and space and opportunity to engage deeply with the processes linked to The Innovator’s DNA: 1) observing, 2) questioning, 3) experimenting, 4) networking, and 5) associating.
  2. Innovating schools appear to have more balance between content-centric curriculum and context-centric curriculum. Innovating schools put students and faculty – but particularly students – in the position of problem finder. Students at innovating schools tend to have more opportunity to choose projects, propose problems they’d like to explore, participate in the “real world,” and practice the habits of mind related to problem finding. They are expected to be “directors of innovation in training.”

Innovation does not just happen. Schools curate for innovation. How are you curating for innovation at your school?

Featured posts from Grant Lichtman’s #EdJourney…in week 5:

College and university aspirations as a piece of pedagogical master planning

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Reviewing the Duke Forward website, home base for Duke’s $3.25 billion capital campaign, I was most struck by two statements:

But we cannot be satisfied with methods of teaching, or learning, that were born out of different needs and different realities. In a world where technology is reshaping the very definitions of communication, education, and knowledge, universities must adapt, preserving the best of our traditions but also transform­ing inherited approaches to education and research to meet today’s challenges.

The university of the future will be defined as much by collaboration as it is by individual accomplishment, and as much by the opportunity to engage with problems as it is by the accumulation of knowledge.Deeply con­structive partnerships across areas of expertise, between researchers and practitioners, and among students and faculty of diverse perspectives must be the norm rather than the exception.

In such an environment, the walls are low and the aspirations high, the solutions nimble and the breakthroughs profound. (emphasis added)

– from President Brodhead’s Overview

And…

Through the campaign, we’re seeking support to strengthen curricular and co-curricular programs that give students throughout Duke’s 10 schools the opportunity to develop their talents by solving real problems. (emphasis added)

– from Boundaries Not Included page

If schools declare that we work to prepare students for college and for life, then how are we studying and implementing such innovations ourselves? How are we lowering walls, crossing borders and boundaries of subject and expertise, and engaging real-life problems?

What if a content-centric curriculum and silo-ed departments and walled philosophies disadvantage student and faculty learners for the future at our doorsteps?

[Note: In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Blue Devil, undergraduate class of 1993. Duke was the only undergraduate school to which I applied because it was the only place I wanted to go since I was 7 years old. Go Duke!

Of course, I would love to see Duke’s “pedagogical master plan” for all of this – those plans with the equivalent, intricate detail of analogous architectural plans and engineering schema.]

What it smells like in the Sistine Chapel – contemplating Harris’ Trusting What You’re Told

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Are children more Marie Curie or Margaret Mead when it comes to learning? Are they little scientists who learn best by experimenting and figuring things out for themselves, or little anthropologists who need to listen, observe, and rely on what others tell them?
– Lory Hough, Why Do Kids Believe in God but Not Harry Potter?

A project at Unboundary has led me to this apparent dichotomy, and to the two representative articles below. Of course, it’s not an “either/or” issue. As with most cases of deep, complex, human learning, it’s a “both/and” resolution. Learners are both scientists and anthropologists. Dr. Harris, in fact, makes this point in the HGSE Ed. article and in his book Trusting What You’re Told. Spending twenty years in schools as a professional educator, as well as eight years as a dad, has shown me first hand that children are both scientists and anthropologists. And, I imagine, I learned that by being both a scientist and an anthropologist myself.

I believe in the both/and of this. However, I could not help remembering one of my most favorite scenes from one of my most favorite movies – Good Will Hunting. Please know that there is some strong, adult language in the five-minute YouTube clip below. But the lesson is profound.

I imagine that Will learned from the dialogue and exchange, from an adult whom he grew to trust and love. And I imagine that Will learned from the experience in which the exchange occurred…and from later actually going to “see about a girl.” Not just taking his teacher’s word for it.

Why Do Kids Believe in God but Not Harry Potter?
By Lory Hough at HGSE Ed.

Little anthropologists
By Amy at Liber-Tree.com

Lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons #Unboundary7pt0

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Some of you know that I am a stack reader. Well, some beautiful serendipity happens occasionally in my routine of stack reading. Recently, such serendipity occurred while I was exploring “illusions” and “it’s all invented.”

For my birthday, my close friend Mary Cobb gave me a copy of Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I’ve made my first, quick pass of the book, and I took a short page of hand-written notes. I put the book and the notes in a stack with Rosamund Stone Zander and Ben Zander’s The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, which another close friend – my teaching and learning partner – Jill Gough gave me in January 2011, and which I was re-reading for purposes at work.

In Illusions, Bach wrote about a return of the Messiah as a airplane pilot who spends time with another airplane pilot who provides rides to midwesterners for about $3 per 10 minutes. In the section of the book I am currently re-reading as part of the meta-stack on which I am concentrating now, the Messiah is explaining to Richard that life is a series of illusions. Skeptical of such a philosophy, Richard bucks the thinking, and the Messiah takes Richard to a movie – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“Richard?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you here?”

“It’s a good movie, Do. Sh.” Butch and Sundance, blood all over them, were talking about why they ought to go to Australia.

“Why is it good?” he said.

“It’s fun. Sh. I’ll tell you later.”

“Snap out of it. Wake up. It’s all illusions.”

I was irked. “Donald, there’s just a few minutes more and then we can talk all you want. But let me watch the movie, OK?”

He whispered intensely, dramatically. “Richard, why are you here?”

“Look, I’m here because you asked me to come in here!” I turned back and tried to watch the end.

“You didn’t have to come, you could have said no thank you.”

“I LIKE THE MOVIE…” A man in front turned to look at me for a second. “I like the movie, Don; is there anything wrong with that?”

“Nothing at all,” he said, and he didn’t say another word till it was over and we were walking again past the used-tractor lot and out into the dark toward the field and the airplanes. It would be raining, before long.

 

I thought about his odd behavior in the theatre. “You do everything for a reason, Don?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why the movie? Why did you all of a sudden want to see Sundance?”

“You asked a question.”

“Yes. Do you have an answer?”

“That is my answer. We went to the movie because you asked a question. The movie was the answer to your question.”

He was laughing at me, I knew it.

“What was my question?”

There was a long pained silence. “Your question, Richard, was that even in your brilliant times you have never been able to figure out why we are here.”

I remembered. “And the movie was my answer.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“No.”

“That was a good movie,” he said, “but the world’s best movie is still an illusion, is it not? The pictures aren’t even moving; they only appear to move. Changing light that seems to move across a flat screen set up in the dark?”

“Well yes.” I was beginning to understand.

“The other people, any people anywhere who go to any movie show, why are they there, when it is only illusions?”

“Well, it’s entertainment,” I said.

“Fun. That’s right. One.”

“Could be educational.”

“Good.” It’s always that. Learning. Two.”

And the exchange goes on, even more brilliantly.

Now, in The Art of Possibility…

Indeed, all of life comes to us in narrative form; it’s a story we tell.

 

Experiments in neuroscience have demonstrated that we reach an understanding of the world in roughly this sequence: first, our senses bring us selective information about what is out there; second, our brain constructs its own simulation of the sensations; and only then, third, do we have our first conscious experience of our milieu. The world comes into our consciousness in the form of a map already drawn, a story already told, a hypothesis, a construction of our own making.

 

It’s all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us.

And, then, as illustration, the Zanders utilized the famous nine-dot puzzle.

As you may or may not know, the puzzle asks us to join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking pen from paper.

Nine-dot puzzle, Art of Possibility, p. 13

The solution involves untethering our minds from some inferred systems constraints and drawing outside the boundaries.

Nine-dot puzzle, Art of Possibility, p. 14

And the Zanders concluded the chapter this way…

The frames our minds create define – and confine – what we perceive to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear…. you can shift the framework to one whose underlying assumptions allow for the conditions you desire.

So, if you’ve read this far…God bless you. And what’s my point?

When I talk of school and education to many people, I think they unknowingly enter the nine-dot puzzle or ask “Why are we here?” But to me, school and education – the 3.0 versions – can be solved by thinking beyond the unintended boundaries of the dots…by creating a new movie of fun and learning. School 3.0 could involve a family of sorts including business, social innovation, and education. The lines that solve that puzzle may be discovered by re-imagining the boundaries…by creating a new script for the next story.

A few more quotes from Illusions, to close…

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.

 

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.

 

A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed. It feels an impulsion…this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.

___

Works cited:

Bach, Richard. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. [New York]: Delacorte, 1977. Print.

Zander, Rosamund Stone, and Benjamin Zander. The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. New York, NY: Penguin, 2000. Print.

Unboundary 7.0

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This morning, at work, I was am a part of something very exciting. We are actively and purposefully transforming.

Cover of handout at Unboundary everyone meeting 10.9.12 9:30 a.m.

 

After almost twenty years as a professional educator based in a school, I am three months into a new venture as an educator at a transformation design firm named Unboundary. Well, technically, we are now “Unboundary 7.0.” We were Unboundary 6.5, and before I even knew of Unboundary we were Unboundary 6.0, but now we are Unboundary 7.0.

I’ve written about this version software nomenclature before. Here are two, sample posts that shed light on this methodology of being purposeful about changing, evolving, and improving as an organization.

Not too long ago, on a morning walk with Lucy (my dog), I re-listened to a podcast from Daniel Pink’s Office Hours. On the show, the guest explained that progress is achieved by a recipe of creativity + discipline. Interestingly, the guest shared that we actually have very little problem with creativity – we are humans and we are inherently creative. Where we struggle is with discipline. For a few years, I have felt drawn to Unboundary, partly because of the organization’s purposefulness about practicing the discipline of intentional transformation and continuous improvement (kaizen, in Japanese – a concept I write about often here).

Part of re-versioning ourselves is about developing a genuine clarity about who we are and what we do…

We are a strategic studio that enables organizations to transform.

 

We see transformation as purposefully designed change.

 

The need to transform can be triggered by several things – new leadership, a significant innovation, lackluster performance, or a competitive threat – but it always involves recognition of a new, greater possibility.

 

Enabling transformation is the best but often hardest work of leadership. It requires helping others to see, believe, understand and act on that greater possibility.

 

Through unique experiences helping some of the biggest and best known companies through significant periods of transformation, Unboundary has developed a unique combination of strategic thinking, communication design, and enablement workshops.

 

We’re a boutique-sized firm with well-developed methodologies but few rote processes. We work in a dedicated, immersive way with a handful of organizations, always focused on creating something significant.

 

What is our purpose?

 

Enabling organizations to act on what matters in important periods of transformation.

This is what my next chapter is all about. Education is indeed in an important period of transformation. With this team at Unboundary 7.0, and with our co-authors and partners, we will strategically design next possibilities for Education 3.0, which we believe is forming at a confluence of business, social innovation, and education.

Image in handout at Unboundary everyone meeting 10.9.12 9:30 a.m.

Such a confluence also locates where Unboundary sees ourselves…geo-transformationally. Perhaps that is something of the core that I love about these people and this place – we practice what we preach. Or, we transform ourselves to better teach. We learn by doing, and we do by learning.

Recently, Jonathan Martin asked me in an email to share more about what I do at work at Unboundary. What a fabulous suggestion and invitation. I plan to do more of that sharing and storytelling. Often we find our voice when we tell stories that feel important and intriguing. I believe I am a part of such a story.