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

Posted on October 18, 2012 by boadams1

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.

CHANGEd: What if we committed to visiting our peers more often? 60-60-60 #47

Posted on April 23, 2012 by boadams1

Thanks to Megan Howard’s riffs on the 60-60-60, I am bumping a scheduled post. She has me thinking about interdependence and making certain that we close the gap between metaphors and action. In fact, schooling has been a very silo-ed endeavor for practitioners…for a LONG time. Kathy Boles, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, calls school the egg-crate culture (think of a school building and the dozen eggs in your frig!).

So…how do we school folk work to become interconnected, interdependent practitioners? How do we take action to become more advanced professionals? One major, critical step is simply to visit each other’s classrooms. Yep. In fact, if anyone thinks that the Junior High School where I currently work has moved closer to 21st C education in the last decade, I would argue that the journey really began with peer visits – just committing to visiting each other’s classrooms and practices on a regular basis.

If you say that your school and your teachers are great, then take advantage of the single most valuable professional resource that you have at your immediate, daily disposal…take advantage of having each other just steps away. Connections don’t just happen…we make them happen.

Go. Do. Visit. Share. Learn. Grow. [Rinse & Repeat!] It’s good for the head and the heart! And with practice, the mindset spreads, other interdependent innovations emerge, and the ripples in the pond radiate outward. The tribe bonds and grows.

CHANGEd: What if…60-60-60 Project Explained

New creation: culinary, jazz-fusion luminescence in teaching – PLCs as surgical-musical-chefs

Posted on December 16, 2011 by boadams1

Working to understand better the functions and processes of PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) – this is a constant pursuit and area of deep investigation and learning for me. I am coming to believe, more and more, that high-functioning PLCs are like some hybrid-cross consisting of the following parts: chefs, surgical teams, and jazz musicians.

The three TED talks below are interesting and intriguing in their own, content-specific right. However, I think all three offer metaphorical meta-lessons about the nature of PLCs – teams of teachers working to learn with each other for the ultimate purpose of enhanced student learning. All three TED talks, when woven together into a common braid, speak to the power of CREATING SOMETHING NEW AS A TEAM. Great PLCs are like the innovative team of chefs at Moto – stretching concept and experimenting for fulfilling and engaging one’s appetite and taste buds (analogous to quenching the thirst for knowledge and wisdom). Great PLCs are like the collaborating surgeons who have discovered that luminescent dyes can be employed to light-up that which needs to be preserved and that which needs to be cut out (analogous to curriculum re-design and systemic formative assessment practices). Great PLCs are like the improvisational harmony of a jazz quartet that measures their successes by their level of responsiveness rather than by any sort of fixed-mindset worrying about mistakes (analogous to the thoughtful development of teamwork and use of RTI – response to intervention). Collectively, the three talks also point to the balance of art and science that seems essential to crafting the alloy which is a team of people working together to CREATE.

The Creation Project

This past semester, the English 7 team of the Junior High PLC developed a student-learning challenge about the nature of creation and creativity. This team of teachers acted in that careful blend of artists and scientists, and they utilized the professional practices of lesson study and instructional rounds to develop a common lesson and common assessment for their classes of English. Instead of simply sitting and being consumers of creation-archetype understanding, the students would become world creators themselves. [This reminds me of a recent post from Jonathan Martin: “Fab Labs and Makerbots: ‘Turning Consumers into Creators’ at our School.” Who knows…this may even partially inspire the next iteration of the world creations described below!]

Below you can find a Scribd document that provides more details about the learning challenge created by this team of teacher-learners. To me, they behaved something like that team of innovative chefs at Moto…that team of integrated-thinking surgeons pioneering the use of luminescent surgery…that team of improvisationally-responsive jazz musicians. This team of teachers is creating together in harmony – they are prototyping a product, as well as a process for using lesson study and instructional rounds to derive a better dish, a more successful surgery, a more beautiful harmony. They are innovating and creating. This stretch will provide potential for a further stretch next time. Their muscles are learning to work this way – a way that has been foreign to egg-crate culture schools for far too long.

“I’m passing along the “nuts and bolts” of our “What in the World?” Creativity Project, which is the product of our collaborative work in the 7th PLT…what a gift!”

What In the World – Creation Project (used with permission)

View this document on Scribd

Peer Visit – Mackey visit from Snyder 11-16-11 (used with permission)

View this document on Scribd

I am working on a blog post about this Creation Project – from the principal’s point of view. I plan to include the actual assignment document, and I am hoping to have a few more artifacts that point to ways that we (teachers, educators, etc.) can work on “teachers working in teams” and “integrated studies.” I think your peer visit serves as a superb artifact of how ideas and lessons can “seep” and “ooze” across disciplinary borders when teachers visit each other’s classrooms. [Brief backstory (from email to teacher requesting permission to use this peer visit)]

Now, we have a teacher of the subject of history interacting with a teacher of the subject of English. What interconnected learning and integrated studies might emerge from this seed? In other areas, we have World Cultures teachers teaming with Science 6 teachers to create a semester learning-challenge on global climate change in various world regions. We have PE and biology teachers crafting ideas of courses devoted to the understanding of the human body from an integrated approach through anatomy and exercise physiology.

We have distributed R&DIY “culinary, jazz-fusion luminescence” developing among our learners – teachers and students. Those are ideas worth spreading. Additionally, those teachers are inspiring me to think about the worlds that I would contribute to making. Hmmm….

Lesson Study, Observation 2.0, Algebra I, Jet Plane

Posted on September 22, 2011 by boadams1

Yesterday, I observed the Algebra I team deliver the lesson “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” They invited me to observe – as principal, as well as a pseudo-member of their team (pseudo only because I do not formally teach the course known as Algebra I). This team has engaged in lesson study before.

When I entered the room, I made an instantaneous decision NOT to observe in the manner I usually do. Typically, I take narrative notes, as I was taught to do in graduate school for educational leadership and supervision. In the moment, I decided to take video notes. Using my Flip camera, I recorded short, approximately-fifteen-second clips of classroom action. After I had three or four clips, I uploaded the videos to my MacBook Pro, and moved the videos into a Keynote slide deck. I titled slides based on the “learning progression” stage of the lesson. Then, I repeated this multi-step process several times. At the end of the class, the Algebra I team had a twenty-three-slide deck of video-embedded resources that they could review for their lesson study concerning “Leaning on a Jet Plane.” The deck was readily available because we share a Dropbox as a team.

Below is a PDF version of the deck – so you will not be able to view the videos. However, this Scribd doc will give you a simplified visual of what we now possess to review as a team – full of video. Now, to continue the fabulous professional practice of Lesson Study!

View this document on Scribd