We began this semester, with our advanced research students (aka CAPS-SYP), exploring the analogy of archaeology and artifacts as a great metaphor for research. We co-opted the language and process of archaeology  - mapping the dig site with a grid, excavations and the variety of tools used, and ultimately calling all discoveries (on the research dig) artifacts.

It's working.

This hunch is working. The students are getting it and are not afraid of the language/process of research. With this archaeology metaphor, research is now a fun and messy mystery to be solved. There are artifacts to find and stories to tell about them.

Here's the slide show we used to start the process.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1kiVBxzWC-EAPfJpiJvs3sleH8W34FJamU3uJy6gZ4e4&start=true&loop=true&delayms=3000


Stanford's Design School says, "research should be seen as a creative act as much as it is analytical."

Disruptive juggling, part 2

So, we're jugglers. Some are better than others. Some are happy juggling their three bean bags for an entire career. Some are not. Here's the rub...

So, in our jobs as educators, juggling is a life long pursuit. Teaching is an eternal competency. The variables are always changing, at least yearly, with new students.

But, some of us grow tired of the bean bags and want to juggle torches and swords. Now, just the mention of juggling swords and torches is disruptive to most. It's disruptive even if you promise not to include others in your attempts and practice sessions. Never mind public performances. Never mind reaching out and asking those bean bag jugglers to partner with you in a new flaming sword juggling routine.

So, this is how I see educational innovation and the disruption it brings - trying to juggle swords and torches next to people just trying to keep their bean bags moving and not dropping.

So, to those people who are afraid of the flaming sword jugglers across the room, the innovative jugglers, I say, "don't worry," or "trust us, we're professionals, too."

And until we ask or demand that you participate in the flaming sword routine, just back up and know that we'll give you a head's-up if one of the sharp torches gets loose and is heading your way.

Until then, let us innovate.

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.