#MustRead Shares (weekly)

  • tags: innovation design #MustRead brainfood

  • tags: leadership clarity paradox #MustRead brain food UnbouBrainFood

    • “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

        

      Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
       Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
       Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
       Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

    • Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.
    • one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”
    • What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:
    • First, use more extreme criteria.
    • Second, ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest.
    • Third, beware of the endowment effect.
    • If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less.
  • Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.

    tags: online learning online_education online education #MustRead universities

    • Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.
    • Still, there is much to be said in defense of the real-world classroom
    • Is there any intrinsic value to being bodily present in the classroom?
    • Students learn not only from engaging with ideas, but also by engaging each other.
    • Online education raises exciting possibilities for universities. MOOCs democratize educational access. But democratic education is also about habituating ourselves to encounter our fellow citizens, to disagree passionately and to tolerate disagreement. Traditional liberal arts classrooms democratize education not in quantitative terms, but in quality of access to Others.
  • According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.

    tags: education technology disruption university online education online_education #MustRead brainfood

    • According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.
    • The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online.
    • The recent surge of money into higher education startups reflects growing interest in the category.
    • Is the real money to be made, per Marc Andreessen, in eating the existing education industry? Or will it be in providing service to the industry, helping them do what they do better? In terms popularized by Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen, this is the difference between “disruptive” and “sustaining” innovation.
    • So the VC guys and the start-ups look at K-12 and higher education, which between them cost over $1 trillion per year in America, and much more around the world. They see businesses that are organized around communication between people and the exchange of information, two things that are increasingly happening over the Internet. Right now, nearly all of that communication and exchange happens on physical platforms—schools and colleges—that were built a long time ago. A huge amount of money is tied up in labor and business arrangements that depend on things staying that way. How likely are they to stay that way, in the long term? Sure, there are a ton of regulatory protections and political complications tied up in the fact that most education is funded by the taxpayer. As always, the timing would be difficult, and there is as much risk in being too early as too late.
    • To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions,
    • In less than a year, online higher education has gone from the province of downmarket for-profit colleges to being embraced by the most famous universities in the world.
    • We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.
    • Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms.
  • tags: school reform strategy business #MustRead Senge UnbouBrainFood brainfood

  • tags: climate science culture social innovation #MustRead brainfood

    • Today, there is no doubt that a scientific consensus exists on the issue  of climate change
    • And yet a social consensus on climate change does not exist
    • answers to this question can be  found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science  disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.
    • people’s opinions  on this and other complex scientific issues are based on their  prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values—all  of which are heavily influenced by their referent groups and their  individual psychology.
    • We must acknowledge  that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental  issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology
      • The debate over school change must also be over culture, world views, and ideology.
    • Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates  with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific  knowledge.
      • I wonder what the analogue is to education and the issue of school transformation? “Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific knowledge.”
    • “logic schism,”  a breakdown in debate in which opposing sides are talking about  completely different cultural issues.
  • tags: algebra STEM #MustRead

    • We can teach people the skills they need if we allow them to choose what interests them and then teach them to predict, evaluate, diagnose, etc., within their area of interest.
  • tags: School Change Big Shifts NAIS schools of the future #MustRead

  • tags: steam stem #MustRead

  • tags: culture #MustRead

  • tags: 21st 21C 21stcenturylearning brainfood #MustRead

  • tags: education brainfood UnbouBrainFood #MustRead schools of the future Change

    • although there are some encouraging signs of change, several major challenges stand out from my ongoing discussions with today’s 11-13 year olds.
    • A disconnect between the way school works and how they function outside school.
    • We are not preparing these kids for the world as it operates today.
    • Boredom with the teacher-centered learning process.
    • Shifting sources of authority.
    • new role for teachers (and parents): that of a learning facilitator and coach, rather than of an authoritative source of information.
    • Growing interest in pragmatic, job-oriented skills.
    • Unease regarding global standing.
    • Thurow argued that the most significant invention in U.S. history was the public education system established in the early days of the industrial revolution.
    • Thurow argues that this unique educational system produced a workforce that was perfectly matched — in both skills and behavior — to the burgeoning needs of the new industrial economy.
    • Students emerging from this system had both the right knowledge (reading, math) to perform the industrial jobs and the right behaviors (punctuality, focus on specific linear tasks) to form an efficient industrial workforce.
    • modeled both on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it: specialization into separate subjects, standardized curricula, conformity, batch processing — by age group. The system was designed to leverage a “lock step” approach over set periods of time and using broadcast delivery methods to prepare students effectively for known jobs.
    • our current approach to education was designed for a different age
    • we all know, most of the jobs of tomorrow will not be industrial jobs.
    • gap between the output of our educational system and the job demands of the current century is enormous — and growing wider.
    • kids intuitively recognize the gap. They’re asking for a change.
  • tags: nytimes com social media balance #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Performance-based assessment in the 21st century – two perspectives #PBA

Two of my ed-leader heroes have written about performance-based assessment, PARCC, and the future of testing…

  1. Performance Task Assessment: 10 Things for Educators to Think About, posted by Jonathan Martin

  2. What Was the Question To Which PARCC Is the Answer?, posted by Mary Ann Reilly

Cut it to your core and concentrate on clarity

Rob Evans spoke of taking things off of our plates before adding more on. Gary Hamel introduced the notion of core competencies. And Greg McKeown gave us the clarity paradox.

“the clarity paradox,” … can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success. 
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities. 
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts. 
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

– from “The Disciplined Pursuit of Less,” Harvard Business Review, August 8, 2012.

It’s a fundamental principal of design, too. Take away all that is non-essential. Reduce until you cannot reduce any more. Then, the best will remain. When I think of this principal, I think of a sculptor reducing a block of marble to the essential remains – I see something like Michelangelo’s David. In fact, now that I think of it, the content of the statue points strongly to the lesson, as well – a small boy with only a sling defeating an enormous giant.

One way in which a school can achieve systemic unity and cohesive pedagogical architecture – don’t add so much to your plate…know your core competency…maintain your clarity of purpose…strip away the stone to reveal the statue…master the sling and know your creator instead of carrying too many weapons and weighing yourself down with too much proudly worn armor.

Is departmental structure for the kids or for the adults?

Departmentalized school structure is increasingly interesting to me. During my teaching career, I have taught in a math department, a history department, and an economics sub-department. My placement in these departments was based on my own passions and “expertise” for certain subject matter.

I wonder what school would look like if we based the structure on the interests and passions of the student learners? Even for just part of the day. Oh, that might look more like clubs and athletics.

In my past two years of my teaching career, I considered myself inter-departmental because of the nature of the Synergy course that I co-facilitated. Depending on the project pursuits of the students, we could be considered a math department on some days, an English department on other days, a science department on many days, a sociology department on most days,…. And because we had multiple groups, we were all of those departments, and more, on every day.

Those most recent two years felt the most like school designed for the students’ interests, instead of just designed for my interests.

PROCESS POST: Thinking out loud about the systemic architecture of school pedagogy design

I am deeply curious about and invested in systemic learning and change in schools. Understandably, a great deal is written for and presented to teachers. Individual teachers. There are countless articles, blog posts and conference sessions about implementing different approaches and methods in class. I know that a number of teachers try and implement those suggestions, recommendations, and tested-by-others ideas. I have been one of those teachers – on the giving end, as well as on the receiving end – many times. I am all for that kind of learning and sharing.

But how does such adaptation and evolution happen on a systemic level? For an entire school, system, university, or network. Not every teacher at a given school is reading the same body of research and blog-posting. Not every teacher at a given school is attending the same conference sessions. Not every teacher at a given school is actually implementing the collectively designed enhancements that they have garnered for their pedagogical slice of the school pie.

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Today, this has really been on my mind. I began my day re-listening to a podcast of Dan Pink’s Office Hours with Gary Hamel. It was my third listen. I will need to listen a few more times before I unpack the density and richness there, but I know that it is related in powerful ways to what I am pondering here about the systemic nature of change and evolution in a school. One thing that immediately sticks out to me is Hamel’s explanation of being “prisoners of the familiar.”

So, in a single school, some teachers remain imprisoned by the familiar, while others are breaking loose to explore, discover, and innovate new practices. Doesn’t this separate a school house? Isn’t this another kind of educational achievement gap? Didn’t Abe Lincoln say that a house divided upon itself cannot stand?

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Later in the morning, I read “Five Ways to Bring Innovation Into the Classroom” by  on KQED’s Mind/Shift. It is an extraordinary read! Excellent! The article contains rich links to other articles by Mind/Shift contributors, such as Shelley Wright, Kimberly Vincent, and Susie Boss. It’s the kind of post that makes me want to sprint to a classroom so that I can try that, and that, and some of that.

And then I imagined that a sub-set of teachers is reading this article and other related articles. Which I am all for! And I imagine that many of those teachers are trying what they are learning from the post and the related links. Which I am all for!

But we are developing schools within schools…and not really “on purpose” with carefully designed blueprints for what the entire, whole system could be. Is this okay? Is this sustainable? Is this why so many new start-up schools are happening? Tribes of innovators and doers are seceding from the unions to form their own countries. And in some schools, there can be real tension at the borders.

The cycle seems to continue. Schools within schools develop. The pedagogical achievement gap widens within schools. Is this what we want? Could there be a better way? Better ways?

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During another Dan Pink Office Hours, I have also heard a caller explain a related issue this way, essentially citing Jim Collins – about 35% of the people in an organization tend to really know – at a deep, core level – what exactly the organization does. Not at a 10, 000 ft. level, but at a deep and detailed level. If that were a soccer team, then only 3-4 people on the team would know what game was being played when they stepped on the field at each practice or competition.

That does not seem like the best way to operate as a team. Isn’t a school a team? Granted, like a team, a school can have a variety of specialists, but they all should at least possess a common understanding of the game that is being played. And, in my opinion, the game cannot be as loosely defined as, “We teach children.” To me, that kind of mutual understanding about purpose is akin to “We are all playing sports.” But the team must know more specifically which particular sport it is playing. If a school is focusing on service learning, should there be more unified work around the methodologies of service learning? I think so. If a school is focusing on problem-based learning, should there be more unified work around the pedagogies of PBL? I think so.

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Recently, at a breakfast with an amazing educational leader, we discussed master plans. Many schools invest large sums of money in campus master plans. Many schools invest large sums of money in technology master plans. Many schools invest large sums of money in strategic master plans. How many schools are investing comparable sums of money in pedagogical and professional learning master plans? Are we designing the blueprints in such a way that our builders and sub-contractors all possess a common, collective understanding of what the overall house is designed to be? If we don’t invest in such planning and purposeful construction, then why are we surprised that classrooms along a hallway can appear to be drastically different in architectural, foundational structure? And, no, I do not believe in standardizing classrooms. I am not interested in cookie-cutter construction. But I do believe that a school’s pedagogical purposes should be unified in their architectural foundations. Built on common plans, then the learning spaces can be differentiated by the equivalent of interior design and style.

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A school, to some degree, ought to be a systemic whole. There are myriad ways to accomplish such unification. Exploring these myriad ways will continue to be a fundamental pursuit of mine.