There are at least 238 provocations for School 3.0 in “John Maeda: How art, technology, and design inform creative leaders.”
I see ideations for such things as form + content, networking diagrams for learning communities, play leading to powerful discovery, and 235 more!
What do you see?
This morning, I realized that I aspire to be a choreographer. While watching “Wayne McGregor: A choreographer’s creative process in real time,” I was moved by the emotion of possibility. Not only was I moved by the literal art and science of McGregor’s work as a master choreographer of physical dance, but I was also moved by the metaphorical force of McGregor’s message – for the translation that this work can be for teaching, school leadership, and education.
As McGregor recounted:
So this is not the type of choreography where I already have in mind what I’m going to make, where I’ve fixed the routine in my head and I’m just going to teach it to them, and these so-called empty vessels are just going to learn it. That’s not the methodology at all that we work with. But what’s important about it is how it is that they’re grasping information, how they’re taking information, how they’re using it, and how they’re thinking with it.
I’m going to start really, really simply. Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought I’d take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it, it’s quite easy to work with, and I’m going to do something very simply, where you take one idea from a body, and it happens to be my body, and translate that into somebody else’s body, so it’s a direct transfer, transformation of energy.
Likewise, our student-learners are not empty vessels to be filled. They are creative, thinking, energetic forces who can express their constructing understanding of the world…with a bit of support and guidance from a choreographer. [As I learned from Farnam Street’s “What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?,”this transfer could also be called engraving.] Student-learners can do so much more than receive, memorize, and recall for testing. They can connect, empathize, and interpret. What could be used as the stimuli? How about world issues? How about big ideas and grand challenges that we face in our schools, in our communities, in our cities, in our nations, and in our world?
School leaders could choreograph the orchestrated dance of a coordinated, collaborative faculty…working in harmonious partnership with business, government, and non-profits. We could dance together with a bit of guidance and support from our school choreographers (school in the BROAD sense).
Later in the talk, McGregor explained:
So they’re solving this problem for me, having a little — They’re constructing that phrase.They have something and they’re going to hold on to it, yeah? One way of making. That’s going to be my beginning in this world premiere.
Okay. From there I’m going to do a very different thing. So basically I’m going to make a duet. I want you to think about them as architectural objects, so what they are, are just pure lines. They’re no longer people, just pure lines, and I’m going to work with them almost as objects to think with, yeah? So what I’m thinking about is taking a few physical extensions from the body as I move, and I move them, and I do that by suggesting things to them: If, then; if, then. Okay, so here we go.
“So, they’re solving this problem for me.” Student-learners, in partnership with their teachers choreographers and collaborators from the “real-world,” could construct phrases to test and trial against a dialogue with the big ideas and grand challenges we face. Our learning architects could assist in designing “structures” that provide for such dancing with ideas and interdisciplinary problem solving. For the accompaniment – the assessment, the communications, the engineering – would have to be re-imagined to facilitate well-architected dancing and duet-ing.
And, nearer the conclusion and the unveiling of the completed dance premier, McGregor articulated:
That was the second way of working.The first one, body-to-body transfer, yeah,with an outside mental architecture that I work withthat they hold memory with for me.The second one, which is using them as objects to thinkwith their architectural objects, I do a series ofprovocations, I say, “If this happens, then that.If this, if that happens — ” I’ve got lots of methods like that,but it’s very, very quick, and this is a third method.They’re starting it already, and this is a task-based method,where they have the autonomy to makeall of the decisions for themselves.
Do I even need to translate this one? “This is a task-based method, where they have the autonomy to make all of the decisions for themselves.” Isn’t this what we all want for our student-learners? Don’t we want to choreograph in such a way that they are not vessels to be filled but the paradoxical wonders of simultaneously independent and interdependent thinkers and doers? That they have autonomy to go and make the dances themselves that will solve our school, community, city, nation, and world issues?
Yes, I aspire to be a choreographer. A choreographer of School 3.0. And I’m looking for dancers.
Power and context.
This morning, on my walk with Lucy, I re-listened to Daniel Pink’s Office Hours with Gary Hamel. I continue to return to Gary Hamel’s session for a number of reasons, some of which are:
This morning, I was most enamored with the ideas surrounding the organizational pyramid – the hierarchical org chart that defines many companies, institutions, and schools. Of course, I am primarily interested in schools.
Hamel outlined that power resides at the top of the pyramid. For this session with Hamel, power seemed to be defined as the positional ability to set organizational strategy and direction. However, context resides at the base of the pyramid. The situational and conditional parameters for employing strategy and direction – through tactics and daily actions – lives at the classroom level, not the head of school level (in my immediate world). Obviously, this dynamic creates a tension. Those at the base – those with the richest context immersion – often feel that they have very little, if any, power to enact systemic change. Those at the top – those with the power to set the organizational direction and strategy – often lack the context needed to fully understand, in a learning-by-doing kind of way, if the strategy and direction makes sense in the daily operations and actions of the workforce – with the teachers, in a school setting.
So, organizational change and transformation is easy, right? We just have to figure out the most effective ways to move power down the pyramid and/or move context up the pyramid…that is, if we don’t want to replace the pyramid altogether with some other design. How might we move power and context through the pyramid?
Of course, at a school that finds itself enmeshed in the world 1.0 hierarchical pyramid, it would take some very special and atypical leadership to disrupt the comfortable and familiar. Another thing that Hamel said that continues to stick in my mind – most leaders are not able to “depreciate their existing intellectual capital.” He earlier had indicated that “change is so hard, not because the future is unpredictable, but because it is unpalatable.”
So, I would definitely say that designing and strategizing the management structure – the power and context grid – must be a part of a school’s “pedagogical master plan.” Such is one of the primary engines that is charged to motor the entire organization. I imagine that purposeful alignment and integration must happen for the management dynamic to “fit” with the organizational progression dynamic. You simply must use the correct engine for your vehicle.
If you expect to get somewhere…pleasantly and enjoyably.
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Related post(s):
At my new company, we track our time. I imagine many companies track how time is spent. For me, in these two weeks, during an 8-9 hour day, I probably spend 3 minutes total going through the exercise of tracking my time. So, it’s easy. The software we use makes it easy. There are pre-poulated pull-down menus and sub-menus. There are wonderfully granular levels of such activity as “research.” There are text fields so that I can add commentary, too. Then, I can look at reports of how I am spending my time. Of course, my coaches can also view how I spend my time, and I totally and completely trust them to do so.
What if we teachers tracked our time like this? Recently, at lunch with a colleague, I mentioned how surprised I was to learn that I am loving my self-tracking of time. Because I have spent 20 years in schools, and because I love to integrate most of what I am learning with school life, I could imagine us teachers tracking our time. I could imagine content-oriented pull-down menus and sub-menus. I could imagine skill-oriented pull-down menus and sub-menus. I could imagine methodology and pedagogy menus and sub-menus. I could imagine running a report after two weeks and seeing for myself, “Wow. I spent 78% of my teaching time this week lecturing. Is that a good thing? How might I re-balance my methodology and approaches given my SMART goal and desired outcome for the year?”
Of course, I also imagined students tracking their time. In the spirit of making education “more pull, than push,” I would love for a student to share with me in an individual conference how he or she had spent his/her learning time during the week or two-week period. I could imagine doing this with advisees, so that I could discover with them how they are exploring their interests and spending time in their structured school-learning environments. I could imagine seeing the cross-polinations and synergies among class-content time recordings and self-directed time recordings.
In many ways, I see my time tracking as related to the tips shared in an article that a colleague sent to me about 11 secrets of leadership. My time tracking allows me to record reality in short bits, and then I can study my time to be more proactive about how I structure my days to further leadership and learning.
Time is a valuable resource. In fact, time may be the most valuable resource. I am thrilled to have a better handle on how I spend my time so that I can be purposeful, intentional, and strategic about making the most of my opportunities to create impact and to make a difference.
How are you spending your time…your time learning…your time teaching…your time working?
[Interestingly, after talking about this with my friend at lunch, he sent me a link to Lesson Note, a digital tool for tracking class activity, particularly as it relates to “lesson study,” an action research collaboration in learning communities for which I am a strong and dedicated advocate. However, the kind of time tracking that I am sharing above is very different and only distantly related to Lesson Note tracking. The type of time tracking I am discussing feels more self-initiated and self-directed. Of course, Lesson Note could be used in very positive and powerful ways, too, if a team decided to employ such a digital resource to advance their work and understanding about their teaching.]
Unboundary
(n.) strategic design studio, located in Atlanta, GA, which helps companies “define their purpose and pursue significance.” [from the Unboundary web site]
(v.) to remove limits of an area, subject, or sphere of activity [adapted from Apple’s spotlight definition of “boundary”]
In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
– Eric Hoffer
As you walk into the former Atlanta-roundhouse space that is now inhabited by Unboundary, the Eric Hoffer quote greets you near the door. This is a door, in fact, that draws me in; this is a door that greeted me daily during my sabbatical (see two of many sabbatical posts here and here); this is a door that will mark my coming and going much more frequently beginning on July 15. Through this door, Hoffer reminds me that I am, indeed, in times of profound change, and he reminds us all to be learners embracing change.
During my almost twenty years as a professional educator, and certainly during my almost nine years as a school principal, I have found myself immersed in countless discussions concerning the pace and nature of change in our world. In the most recent years, I have concentrated my efforts to be one who enables and empowers schools to maintain pace with this never-ending change, so that we might help people of all ages serve and lead in our changing world.
Joining the conversations and communities on Twitter and other world-connecting blog media, I have similarly surrounded myself with hundreds and hundreds of professional educators and others who are contemplating and implementing school change so that schools remain deeply significant in an age defined by ubiquitous access to information and learn-anytime-anywhere technology. In so many conversations, both those that happen online and those that happen face-to-face, it seems that we educators are striving to unboundary the areas typically referred to as “school” and “real-life.” During her TED talk, Kiran Bir Sethi beautifully espouses the notion of blurring the lines between school and life so that students can be infected with the “I can bug” and realize their ability to make a positive difference in our world – not when they graduate to their real life, but now, because now is their real life.
On September 19, 2011, I announced that the 2011-12 academic year would be my last as principal of The Westminster Schools Junior High School. I took a leap of true faith. Then, I began to piece together and design a potential next chapter of my educational career as something akin to an innovation strategist and synergist for 21st century school change and development. In the months of October, November, December, and January, I benefited immeasurably from the wisdom, questioning, advice, and guidance of about two dozen individuals who graciously engaged me in countless conversations about how to create a job serving as a hub to the various spokes of this learning-in-the-21st-century wheel. To each and every one of you – THANK YOU! And to my wife Anne-Brown, BLESS YOU for your faith and support, and thank you for being the first and foremost of this tribe who helped me discern my next steps.
As of Tuesday, February 21, I officially have my new, dream job…my next chapter…my ideal, “plan A” role that will allow me to continue and to expand my service as an educational leader in these times of profound change. In his announcement to the Unboundary team, president and chief executive Tod Martin explained my future work in the following way:
Bo joins us in a hybrid role. He will be integrated into existing client work, particularly in workshopping, and will also play an instrumental role in expanding Unboundary into a new arena. Over the past year, you’ve heard me talk about the vision of us developing new kinds of clients — other than corporations — where our skills at transformation design would be valuable. One of the “new kinds of clients” we’ve talked about is education. Bo will help lead our efforts to build a practice and develop clients in education.
Already I am indebted to the visionary leadership of Tod Martin and to the team that he has fielded at Unboundary. So much synergy potential exists at the crossroads of corporate leadership and educational innovation, and I believe that Unboundary works at this exciting crossroads. Likewise, I am forever grateful to Westminster for eliciting and developing in me the vision and the skills that this fine school declares for all learners in its community – to serve and lead in a changing world.
To love what you do and feel that it matters – how could anything be more fun?
– Katharine Graham
I do love what I do, and I feel that it matters greatly. I am excited for this next chapter, to which I take a great deal of learning. Yet, I dare not consider myself learned. I am a continuous learner, and I intend to do all that I can to serve and lead in this changing world – to play my role on the team that strives to define purpose and pursue significance.
Our children – our leaders of today and tomorrow – deserve nothing less.
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