Tag Archives: TED

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:

PROCESS POST: Roused emotions of possibility – choreography as teaching and school leadership

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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.

PROCESS POST: Brittany Wenger, TEDxAtlanta, and Re-Imagining School

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Live like you’ll die tomorrow. Learn like you’ll live forever.

– Ben Dunlap, The life-long learner, #TED

Yesterday, on September 25, I lived on an edge with a number of inspiring people gathered on a common edge – people who are living like they could die tomorrow and learning like they could live forever. Gathered in Unboundary’s TED Dome, more than 300 movers and shakers came together for TEDxAtlanta “Edge of the South.” We lived and learned with “12 Southerners who are breaking new ground. In art, filmmaking, media, and fashion. In business, social innovation, energy production and the sciences.” I grow giddy with excitement and anticipation about these TEDxAtlanta days…

Here’s a quick Storify that captures a bit of the incredible experience for me:
tedxatlanta-edge-of-the-south-empathize-go-do-conn

Once again, though, I failed to ask my most burning question:

“So, in what ways did your formal schooling propel you on your current path, and in what ways did your formal schooling impede your current path?”

I remain optimistically frustrated by this question. Certainly, most everyone with whom I’ve ever talked can remember a moment in school or a particular teacher that contributed to his or her unique path in life. Of course, all of those same people can also name an aspect of formal schooling that existed as an obstacle to their journey, too.

We can learn so much about how to continue improving school by exploring this question.

I could recount more than a thousand stories or thoughts inspired at TEDxAtlanta “Edge of the South.” At this particular event, however, one stands out…

“Brittany Wenger, 17, Wins Google Science Fair Grand Prize For Breast Cancer Diagnosis App.”

If you missed Brittany’s talk, I cannot wait for you to see it when the videos are processed and uploaded to the TEDxAtlanta site. Yes, she spoke of being inspired and supported by a biology teacher and a computer science teacher. And she spoke of the project that she undertook as an independent study – partly due to the fact that her school does not engage in a science fair system, partly due to the fact that her work did not “fit” into her required coursework.

Motivated by a passion to make a difference in the lives of others and in medical science, Brittany combined biological biopsy processes with cloud-based artificial intelligence to create an app – Cloud4Cancer – that could just be a revolution for breast cancer detection, prevention, and treatment.

And Brittany worked on this primarily “outside of school.”

Why couldn’t this BE school? Let me ask that in a more positive manner…

How might we re-imagine school so that a veritable army of learners – students and teachers together – might contribute to the problem identification and solutions-finding for our world’s grand challenges and issues?

[Out of time to write, for now! There are deep connections among the TEDxAtlanta “Edge of the South” speakers…and educational transformation. There are deep connections between Ben Dunlap’s talk and re-imagining schools.]

Fill-in-the-blank I can rally behind! Candy Chang: Before I die I want to… #TED

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For years as a teacher, I used fill-in-the-blank. They were easy to check and grade, but they gave the illusion of more-than-multiple-choice. Over the years, I grew weary of fill-in-the-blank…as I grew to care more about what children could dream and think, instead of what they could tell me they had memorized.

This morning, I watched a number of TED talks – those that were released recently on the TED RSS feed. I’m sharing the one I found most powerful. The six minutes and twenty seconds is time well spent as I continue to contemplate how I will spend my life to make a powerful difference in this world.

Is it worth your time?


Candy Chang: Before I die I want to…