disruptive juggling

So, I have a new analogy for innovation in the classroom and the disruption it causes. First let me explain why disruption is a beautiful thing. I was asked by members of a school committee (another name for a school board), "what is innovation?" My response was and still is, "You can call innovation anything you want. You can park it in the arts or the sciences, but what innovation will always be...is disruption." Now, that word is a bad, bad thing for most folks, especially in the static walls of a ancient educational model. Can you hear the old school masters echoing, "You will not disrupt this classroom!" or "You are a disruption to learning, young man." Maybe that was just my history. In any case, we spend most of our lives, personally and professionally, trying to avoid any and all disruptive situations. I'm certain it's tied to some evolutionary force for survival.  It's root is in Latin. It means "to break apart." In our modern connotations, we've added, "to throw into a state of confusion." Hence the fear and negative attention the word draws. But if we could go back to something I wrote a few sentences ago, to this concept of "some evolutionary force of survival," I think we'll start to see how beautiful and necessary "disruption" is as an evolutionary force  for our species.

We're only human. It is necessary for us to build, to make, to create, to survive. Innovation is evolution, is disruption to known systems and patterns of operation. Innovation is analysis - remember to "break apart" - of a modus operandi. Now if we called innovation "disruptive analysis" we'd sound all sorts of smart. Even though we'd be linguistically challenged and redundant. But that's all this is folks. If innovation is disruptive and disruption is analysis, then innovation is analysis. Analysis is Greek for a "dissolving." Invention is what you do with the parts you've separated. Innovation is the environment that facilitate and celebrates the itemized analysis of parts of a systems. If we don't create this space for innovation we will not evolve.

The analogy is this...

How many people here can juggle? And remember juggling is at least three objects in motion at the same time in and out of your hands. Tossing around two objects is not juggling. Ok, usual response to the question is 2-3 out of 20 people can juggle. A few more have tried.  Now let's look at the face of a first attempt at juggling, either complete cluelessness or total concentration. If you've ever been coached by a juggler, they always say face a wall, neophyte jugglers are sent to the corner of the room. Take that for whatever it's worth. Let's speed this up...

So let's imagine our jobs as juggling. It's an appropriate metaphor, almost cliche. A new job, hopefully you're juggling bean bags. No, negative impact. Just gotta focus on keeping the bean bags moving. but you cannot turn your head away for a second. And as a newbie, you will drop. The effect is actually in the fact the the bean bags are being pulled away from you. Hence the face the wall instruction from jugglers. Ok, as experience grows, you're still juggling, and now you can turn your head, now you can possibly have a conversation while juggling,  maybe even you have added an extra bean bag, whoa, how fancy of you now, go stevie, go it stevie, it's your birthday, its your birthday.

You know the feeling. As a newbie and as a moderately experienced juggler and the feeling of satisfaction of talking and juggling and keeping the bean bags moving. That's part one.

For the last year and a half, I've been framing my teaching and my learning around the explicit "design thinking" language shared by IDEO and Stanford's d.school.  This was an easy move because my practice was already there. I have been a design thinking teacher since 1996. I didn't know there was a language and maybe there wasn't in 1996, but I was doing it, along with scores of other committed teachers. We were committed to our students, not our principals or state standards. In design-thinking, Observe and Empathize sit at the center of design thinking and thats where you'll find great teachers.

I heard Steven Johnson say, "Chance favors the connected mind," during his TED talk in 2010. I believe design thinking helps create the "space" that fosters the connected mind. I would alter his sentiment this way, "innovation, imagination, and ingenuity favor the connected mind."

So, what is a connected mind? where is the connected mind? how do we create or facilitate the connected mind?

Read, Herb Childress's, "17 Reasons Football is Better than High School," or read up on Jane McGonigal's work on gaming and complex social solutions. They both offer wonderful insights on the connected mind, where to find it, how to cultivate it.

My job has always been to create the "space" that facilitates the connected mind. "Space" for a teacher is sometimes physical, but more often "procedural." What we do in class, is always more important than where we do these things.

Here's a photo of a flow chart (my version) from David Kelly's and Stanford's d.school (IDEO's) ideas on design thinking.

I'm constantly tweaking it to fit my vision and my practice.  But that's the easy (fun) part, because as I said, the core of my practice is already there.

I think there's something foundational in this approach to learning. In the best way, design thinking was reverse-engineered around learning.

I've already made changes to this mind-map.

I'll post those soon.

 In Spike Lee's, "Mo'Betta Blues," Bleek, played by Denzel Washington, says, "I may have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night." I think about this quote often because I believe this represents my learning curve as a teacher. Steep. New. Fast. Endless.

"Fail fast, succeed sooner." (via Tom Peters)

I'm a fast failer.

Two quotes that direct my action and my belief...

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds"
-Albert Einstein

"When the last fish has been caught,
When the last tree has been chopped down,
Then you will know that money cannot be eaten."
-Cree Nation

a tree?

I think one root of learning is the art of imitation. Frank Smith inspired this concept in his brilliant book, Insult to Intelligence. Smith writes, that we are attracted to learn, first from people doing things we think are worth doing. He calls those things clubs we'd like to join. We learn to play guitar because we want to be in the musicians' club. We may never be good enough to play in a club, but we're in the club as players. We learn to play chess, to act, write, debate, build, make, sell, etc, because, first someone we admired demonstrated those skills and second because we would like to see ourselves in that community of thinkers and doers. This echoes Pearse's "the only think we teach is the enthusiasm to learn." If you think about all things you know well, most of them would fit into this process, in some form.

So what's the pattern? What is the common denominator?

I think it's the profound step, the autonomous act of an individual. It's the conscious/conscience decision to be - Something in this world. To engage something, that offers us the cognitive and visceral experience of living on earth. Something that confirms our selves as existential beings (I really tried not to use that word, sorry).  Is this FREEDOM? Is this concept of freedom, Emerson's "Self-Reliance"? Is it one half of Buber's "I-Thou"?  I'm not sure, but I lean towards  -YES.

This works across human culture, in jungles of soil and jungles of concrete. Anthropology can teach us a lot about this. Tribal roles (healer, warrior, hunter, counselor,) and the decisions to adopt those roles are valued and necessary for both the individual's well-being, as well as, the society's.  And this (tribal role) process is very much alive in all of our modern cities and towns.

School, like the society it mirrors, offers a beautiful contradiction regarding this concept. We offer students a variety of roles and clubs to experience. We support kids in joining the clubs of writers, artists, musicians, scientists, etc.  In some ways, in some good schools, that's still the mission. But, the contradiction comes when schools believe and behave less in the student's interest and need of this autonomous act of learning, and demand control. Most school decisions are decisions of control and mediocre management. Most schools are not willing to let go enough to trust in this core function of human development. Most schools tend the ever-important leaves (of learning) by pruning and such, but forget or actively deny the roots - and the soil.

I want to tend the soil, first. and trust that the leaves will shine in the sun.

This is poetry...(the underlined bits)

"Beyond the numbers, the impulse to return to Greece’s rural roots itself represents a telling new tendency since the onset of the crisis — a turning inward, a quiet kind of national pride in response to the overall gloom. Dimitris Kaloupis, who left his job as a construction worker 20 years ago during the boom years and now is a full-time farmer in Volissos, raises his own animals and vegetables and runs a local tavern. He said he thought Greece could handle this crisis, as it had many others."

“We invented civilization, and we’ll take it back,” Mr. Kaloupis said over a lunch of stewed lamb that he raised himself. If the Greek economy really plummets beyond repair, “I will take the rock in my hand and squeeze it, and from the water that comes out of it, I’ll make pilaf to feed my daughter. We’ll manage.”

FROM: the NY TIMES, "With Work Scarce in Athens, Greeks Go Back to the Land," By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: January 8, 2012

rage and resolve, part 1

In some disconnected, yet tangible way I still carry the memory and the function of memory of an existentially overanxious and somewhat angry 14-year-old boy, who despite his personal history, has finally learned the value of homework. Rage and Resolve define my practice. The rage as a child was rooted in my memory of being a student who remained invisible beneath the raw mess of teenage angst. As a teacher, the rage resurfaces when I see a system that perpetually ignores the very people we are to serve. My resolve was born in learning how to circumvent the system and listen to students even in their silence.

The terrible beauty of childhood is language. The ability (or inability) to reflect and articulate the chaos of real experience is a standard expectation unfairly held against all students. To confirm emotion, real feelings when language fails to, was a great discovery in my personal and professional life. The need to be heard and understood is the ache of existence. The great teacher and leader will seek and or create the paths toward this goal (to be heard and understood), even if it means becoming a mind reader. In schools, invisibility sits beneath both success and failure. Kids at the top are just as invisible as kids in the middle and kids at the bottom. My practice is driven by an attempt to balance understanding the value of students as they are and as they can become. I needed rage and resolve to see beyond, speak beyond, and most importantly to listen beyond the limits of language and experience. My rage was natural and easy, as it is for most 14-year-old boys, but only through 21 years of experience with students, did I discover my resolve.