Can

I was paid a wonderful compliment recently by a very smart and very effective educator, she said, "It is great to work with someone who believes we can make it happen, even if we have no clue how it will happen."

"How" will never slow us down. "How" will never stop us.
We know we "can," because "Belief is the silent side of action."

Our vision is big and we understand and relentlessly prepare for the work that it takes to implement that vision.

William Easterly, writes "Planners announce good intentions, but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find (or create) things that work and build on them."

Everyone who focuses on HOW to do it, may never do it. These are Easterly's "planners."

Everyone who focuses on WHY we do it, can make it happen. These are Easterly's "searchers."

Be a Searcher.

Learn. Act. Imagine. Repeat.

Best advice I ever gave.

Grand Slam

On February 16th, Newton's Lab and the Greengineers hosted the MA Secretary of Education, Paul Reville, Newotn Mayor, Setti Warren, and almost 200 other guests for a showcase of educational innovation. The central theme of the day was "collaboration."

The link below will connect you to a short and wonderful slideshow/video of the event, produced by the Newton Patch.

Innovation and Inspiration at Newton's Lab

We seem to use that word (collaboration) a lot in the lab. And the more I think about it, the more I agree that it is the correct word to describe the work of innovation and ingenuity.
Despite the recent spin on the power of introverts, I believe that real implementation and progress depend upon collaborative efforts.

I know that most of the impetus for change often comes from that singular and quiet place of introspection, but it would also die there, in that quiet place, without the axis of collaboration to motor and maintain change.

I invented the Greengineers, from an intellectual  quiet place, but the Greengineers have grown far beyond my vision because of the students' ability to engage that vision and make it their own.

One of the most important aspects of that engagement comes from Preston Cline's research on Mission-Critical teams. He's articulated that one significant element of a mission-critical team is that every member sees themselves in a leadership position regardless of their role on the team. That's true for the engaged student and classroom.  I've written this before, but one question that keeps popping up for me is, "how necessary are our students?"

In most classrooms, the answer is "not." The truth is - Students are not necessary.  Well, engagement will not happen in that environment. Impossible. Never going to happen.

Every time a teacher begins planning a lesson, they need to grapple with that question before they plan one minute of curriculum, instruction, or assessment. And if they don't have a good answer, (hint...the only answer is "I have no lesson without the total (87%) investment from my students, or I better pack it up and head home, if my students are not essential to this plan), then STOP.

STOP and find an ally to help re-imagine how to design your students back into your lessons.

And YES the times demand this reverse engineering, this re-imagination.  In the past (limited to industrial education, aka modern, traditional education), essential students  were not necessary, because "teacher" was sole source of information. Now, schools and teachers must see themselves as translators and inventors in this information age. Access to information is no longer limited to the classroom and teacher. Those two things (classroom and teacher) should not be in competition with the endlessness of digital information either. Our role as educators is exactly how Umberto Eco predicted in "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," when he hints that it's not the source of information (he called it "communication") that's important anymore, but the destination. We, as teachers and scholars, are responsible for facilitating the discussion of the arriving message, at the destination of information (our communities) - "in light of the codes at the destination, comparing them with the codes at the source."

In the past, power sought to control the source and the channel of information. That was the function of industrial, traditional, modern education. However, the internet forced a change, similar to telephone and television, but on a scale unimagined.

EVERY AGE has been the information age. Listen humans. For humans, every age is the information age.

Pre-Gutenberg the source, channel, and destination of information were close in proximity and shared. Which means information was verifiable by experience and observation.  Circa Gutenberg these three (source, channel, destination) were distant, but shared, and limited in translation and interpretation. We had to hope the great documents were being honestly translated and interpreted. This post-Gutenberg (internet) time is a bombardment of information, a ceaseless, scope-less, purposeless mess of incredible, horrifying, and beautiful information.

We, the educators, must facilitate the complex and ill-defined dialogue to engage this endless information. We, as we have always done, will guide communities (and more importantly INDIVIDUALS) to filter out, slow down, and grapple with this new (not new) information age.

That's 21st century learning.  Which is actually 1st century learning, with new tools and new challenges.

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.