Education Innovation

Practical Wisdom: The Mashup of Moral Skill and Moral Will

“We hate to do it, but we have to follow procedure.”
Or
“There is nothing I can do, that is the policy.”
Or
“That is the way we have always done it.”

These answers are all too common, but they are sadly to frequent in our schools. Do any of those answers seem adequate or satisfactory? I doubt it.

Have you ever read a job description that required common sense? What about wisdom? Not likely. Most job descriptions don’t include these types of skills, yet, these are the skills more desperately needed by our schools. Barry Schwartz calls this dire need Practical Wisdom.

As Barry Schwartz describes it in his amazing TED talk, Practical Wisdom is the blending of Moral Will and Moral Skill.

Moral Will: the will to do the right thing
Moral Skill: figure out what doing right means

According to Barry…

A Wise Person Knows:
When and how to make “The Exception To Every Rule.”

A Wise Person Knows:
When and how to improvise—Real world problems are often ambiguous and ill defined.
Wisdom allows a person to innovate and solve problems as they arise. Schools deal with change and ambiguity each day. Schools need the ability to improvise wisely.

A Wise Person Knows:
How to use these moral skills in pursuit of the right aims—people, organizations, countries, and the world suffer when we pursue the wrong aims. Wisdom allows us to pursue and obtain the right aims. You must have wisdom enough to know the proper aim of your school.

A Wise Person:
Is made, not born—

Wisdom depends on experience. Experience takes time. Time to know the people you are serving. Permission to improvise, occasionally fail, and learn from failure. Experience is also served by mentorship of wise teachers. --It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. It takes a lot of experience to be able to educate a person. Not just teach, but educate.

Wisdom does not depend on brilliance. One need not be brilliant to be wise. But, brilliance without wisdom is not enough. School and students cannot afford brilliant ideas or brilliant leaders who miss the aim or goal of what must be done.

“Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking.”

Rules are created because things went wrong. When it comes to rules, rule makers generally reach for two tools.
1. Better rules and more of them
2. Better incentives and more of them

These tools are reached for over and over because, most people ask, what else is there?

The fact is that rules and incentives are not enough to do the job that they intend to do. Dov Seidman pointed this out in his excellent book HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business (and in Life). I commented on rules here (Student Discipline Issues: Rules Vs. Values)

You will never be able to create enough rules for all the possible violations that students will commit. As soon as the rules change, they change and begin violating rules in a whole new way.

Rules are not elegant. How can you write a rule that makes someone empathetic? How can you enforce compassion?

But according to Barry Schwartz there is a dark side to rules. Long-term, rules create a downward spiral the chips away at the moral skill, improvisation, and our desire to the right thing. It amounts to a war on wisdom.

Rules and The War on Moral Wisdom Skill
Barry uses an example from education to point out the The War on Moral Skill. Scripted lock-step curricula—Every teacher saying the same words, on the same day, in the same way. Why? We don’t trust teachers to use their own judgment. The result is an education system that prevents a disaster of ignorance but ensure mediocrity. Too many rules get in the way of innovation and creativity.

Incentives and The War on Moral Will
According to Barry, the thinking goes, “If one incentive is good, two must be better.”
Motivational Competition—instead of complimenting each other incentives can end up competing against each other. “What is my responsibility?” becomes what serves, “What serves my interests?” Sadly, many people will look out only for themselves. These people use incentive system for their own gain, and in ways not intended. People stop asking if it is right and start asking if it is right for them.

So what is the solution? Barry describes what he calls “Remoralizing Work.”
He suggest that we can begin by making exemplars of inspired moral heroes, those ordinary moral heroes that we interact with everyday. Most people want to do the right thing and most people do the right thing. Teachers are excellent moral heroes. The opportunity that teachers are afforded every day to model moral actions and thinking is tremendous. School, in essence, are a moral modeling school.

Barry points out that any work we do that involves people is moral work. Moral work depends on practical wisdom. Education certainly involves people, all kinds of people, all kinds of ages, and all kinds of backgrounds. Education is a moral endeavor. Education must have practical wisdom to ensure that is continues to be a moral provider to our children.

Teachers need to remember that the “camera” is always on. Barry mentions KIP schools and their belief that the single most important thing our students can learn is character. They must learn to respect themselves, their peers, their teachers, and their learning. Students need to believe in themselves.
We need to believe in our students.

We need some practical wisdom in our schools

Recommended Reading:
On Education, Creativity, and too Many Rules - Ugly Doggy Blog: Creativity Bites Back

Organizing For Improvisation: Creating Collaborative PLCs, Schools and Districts

As someone once said, “In any bureaucracy, paper work increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and less you are doing”

_{Photo by Durotriges}

According to Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius, “In most companies, bureaucracy prevents innovation from emerging.”

Education is not immune to the damaging effects of bureaucracy, and in many ways suffers even more due to the number of government agencies adding to the layers of bureaucracy. Federal, state, county, district, and site level rules, regulations, processes, procedures, and mandates have created a maddening level of inefficiency.

Albert Einstein once said, “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work”

Educators are faced with the task of creating an environment that can harness the wisdom, creativity, and intellect of their teachers and staff as a means of mitigating the harmful creep of bureaucracy. The key is to create schools and districts that are built on collaboration. Collaborative teams that can be assembled to harness their combined talents into innovations and solutions for schools and districts.

As detailed in his book Group Genius, Keith Sawyer describes collaborative organizations. Collaborative organizations are made up of teams who, “…form and reform, their structure emerging improvisationally from the bottom up, and membership is largely self-selected.”

Imagine a school site in which staff members from all grade levels, or department, or other areas volunteer to use the collaborative leverage of the group to innovate ideas and solutions to improve instruction, management, and the operation of the school. Teachers, janitors, counselors, psychologists, coaches, instructional aides, parents, and managers collaborating together from the bottom up to meet the needs of the school site.

Keith Sawyer calls these Innovation Labs.

Education is an ever-changing bureaucracy and districts and school sites must not just deal with change, they must come to expect and even welcome change. It must be embedded into the culture of a school and a district. “Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.”

Three characteristics would be the basis of the collaborative organization and an Innovation Lab. “The culture of the collaborative organization is based on flexibility, connection, and conversation.”

In his book The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl Weick suggested what he called “loosely coupled” organizations. Bringing staff members together when needed into loosely coupled teams that innovate, create, and develop solutions for the school or the district. Like Lego blocks that can be brought together, disconnected, or re-formed easily without much disruption to the school or district. The benefit is a loosely coupled organization is much more innovative than carefully planned organizations.

According to Sawyer the, “University of Maryland reviewed the previous ten years of studies of organizational design; their conclusion was that team-based companies performed better than traditional bureaucratic firms.” Team-based schools and districts are better.

The Innovation Lab which is, “made up of people from different corporate functions representing all stages of product development, including purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, engineering, service, and finance—result in quicker product development times.”

The Innovation Lab is faster at solving problems and innovating because of the combined cross functions represented on the team. Breaking people out of their department, district office, or grade level silos allow the Innovation Lab to leverage the various knowledge, wisdom, experience, and insight to the team.

These sorts of teams have also been referred to as cross-functional teams. Regardless the label, imagine the speed and efficiency these teams could bring to solving problems, issues, and innovating ideas at the district or site level. All too often great ideas fail to work because some other concern or issue was not considered and anticipated because all the people that would be required to work together to implement the idea are not at the table at the moment it is conceived and developed.

Instead of running an idea by various departments or concerned persons after the fact, why not include them in the development of the idea. Innovation Labs can experiment with a high number of ideas and innovations because those required to work together to implement the innovations are communicating in real-time. Not in their silos after the fact.

“We’re really collaborating and building ideas together as opposed to the old model where everyone works in silos.”

How can you build a culture that is comfortable with change in your district or at your school? Think about issues and problems that have arisen in the past. How would an Innovation Lab or a collaborative organization have changed the outcomes of those issues and problems? Creating a culture of collaboration could be the key to taking a PLC, a school, or a district to the next level.

None of us is a smart as all of us.

The Great 8: Catalytic Questions For Your Thinking

1.    What is a stake for your school or district? Can you afford not to create a collaborative organization?

2.    What kinds of questions should you be asking yourself about your collaborative models?

3.    What other organizations can you look to as a model of a good collaborative culture?

4.    What assumptions are you making about the level of collaboration and the ability of your teams? 

5.    What is one step you can take right now to increase the collaboration taking place in your school or district? What might it look like?

6.    Reframe the issue. Is it an issue of flexibility among staff, connection, or conversation? Is it a problem of communication, access, or time?

7.    What criticisms will people have when you begin to create Innovation Labs or great collaboration? Anticipate and plan for solutions. Choose the idea that is easiest to implement.

8.    Can you substitute one process, procedure, and regulation with one that will increase collaboration?

What Is Information? Can You or Your Students Define It?

Have you ever asked yourself or your students, "What is information?"

Information takes form as we write it, draw it, act it out, or verbalize it. But often our students confuse the form as the information. For example, a newspaper is not information, but the message it carries is. A hand gesture telling us to stop is not information, but the message it conveys is.

As the number of forms information takes continues to increase via technology, the question is and interesting one to ask and an important distinction that our students should know. The form is not the information. The message contained within the form is.

Take a look at this great video that explains the idea.

7 Characteristics of Creative Professional Learning Communities

Professional Learning Communities are a proven element of building successful schools. While a major proponent of PLCs, I argue that creativity is often lost in the meeting process and the examination of student achievement data.
 
Author of Group Genius, Keith Sawyer, has spent years researching what makes for effective creative teams. Not just effective, but teams that are creative and innovative at what they do. Keith has identified seven key characteristics of creative teams.

1. Innovation Emerges Over Time
“Successful innovations happen when organizations combine just the right ideas in just right structure.”

The main issue here is time. Having enough time for teachers to meet and not only plan lessons, analyze student learning data, and prepare to meet student learning needs but time to get creative. Often problems re-surface because teachers only have enough time to manage the problem, but not truly solve.

Secondly, the processes and values that schools choose to use when teachers meet is a key factor as well. According to Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and Disrupting Class, “The reason why innovation often seems to be so difficult for established firms it that they employ highly capable people, and then set them to work within processes and values that weren’t designed to facilitate success with the task at hand.”

2. Successful Collaborative Teams Practice Deep Listening
“Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.”

Stephen Covey might say, “Seek first to understand.” Deep Listening is a doorway to trust and understanding. Being able to hear and truly understand the issues, feelings, and values involved in a team’s discussion requires that team members put aside their agendas and spend time listening deeply to what other team members have to say.

Deep listening will help teams understand what Tim Hurson, author of the book Think Better, calls “What’s UP.”  What are the underlying principles at work here? Teams need to listen to each other to understand these underlying principles and trust that they will be addressed in their work together.

3. Team Members Build On Their Collaborator’s Ideas
“When teams practice deep listening, each new idea is an extension of the ideas that have come before.”

In other words, the best ideas are a mash up of the team’s ideas. Ideas are like Legos or Tinker Toys. Individual ideas can be combined and built into a great idea. Much like a recipe, the individual ingredients work best when they are combined into a wonderful dish.

4. Only Afterwards Does The Meaning Of Each Idea Become Clear
“Even a single idea can’t be attributed to one person because ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others.”

Tim Hurson, author of Think Better calls this Gator Brain. Gator Brain is a strategy used to avoid having to think about an idea. You see alligators don’t have much choice about how to react to new stimuli or sensory input.

“If a new creature comes into it’s territory, a gator can flee, it can try to feed on intruder, it may try to mate with the intruder, or it can freeze.” So depending on the size or nature of the intruder the gator is limited to those reactions.

Team need to avoid Gator Brain by not being too quick to respond to ideas. Like a fine wine, ideas need time to breathe.

Think of the team like a band of improvisational actors. “Individual creative actions take on meaning only later, after they are woven into other ideas, created by other actors. In a creative collaboration, each person acts without knowing what his or her action means. Participants are willing to allow other people to give their action meaning by building on it later.”

5. Surprising Questions Emerge
“The most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before.”

Teams need to take time to reframe problems and ask questions. The major weakness of most PLC teams I have watched or participated in is a failure to ask questions of themselves and each other and a failure to reframe problems to get to underlying issues.

Believing you have the answer or the solution before you are even sure of the real issue is a failure of many PLC teams. Teams must learn to question their assumptions, their ideas, their data, and their plans.

Questioning and problem reframing might lead to the surprising result of finding new problems. “That’s critical because creativity researchers have discovered that the most creative groups are good at finding new problems rather than simply solving old ones.”

6. Innovation Is Inefficient
“Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, and has as many misses as hits. But hit can be phenomenal; they’ll make up for the inefficiency and the failures.”

Failures are part of the process. PLC teams should expect for some of their ideas not to work. That is part of the creative process. Think of the story of Edison and the light bulb. It supposedly took Edison thousands of attempts to get it right. But when he got it right, he changed the world.

“When we look at an innovation after the fact, all we remember is the chain of good ideas that made it into the innovation, we don’t notice the many dead ends.”

7. Innovation Emerges From The Bottom Up
Principals and managers, get out of the way.

“The improvisational collaboration of the entire group translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation. Allowing space for this self-organizing emergence to occur is difficult for many managers because the outcome is not controlled by the management team’s agenda and is therefore less predictable.”

Principals, you need to let go of the process and let PLCs develop their creativity and innovation.

Most Principals, “…like to start with the big picture and then work out the details. In improvisational innovation, teams start with details and then work up to the big picture.”  This is especially true when teams are creating and innovating from student achievement data. PLCs need to be free to discover the big picture based on what they discover through the data.

These 7 characteristics of creative teams should allow your PLC to be more creative in their approach to the PLC process. It is important that PLCs ask and discuss what they want students to know, how they will know if students know it, what will they do for students who know it, and what will they do for students who don’t; but to do so creatively will make the team all the more effective and innovative.

A Letter To Teachers and Parents: We Have A Common Purpose

Had a great conversation with my Personal Learning Network (aka Twitter) about a comment the President made. President Obama suggested that parents and community take responsibility for schools.
I asked how parents could or should be held responsible for schools. What would it look like? How might parents share in the responsibility for schools?

The point I continually struggled with was accountability. If I am accountable as a member of a school district, how would a parent be held responsible?  A difficult question to answer.

Heidi Hass Gable (@HHG) shared this amazing video that she created on how parents and teacher might come together to see their common purpose. You can also see a summary of the conversation we had on Twitter here. How will parents and community be held responsible for school improvement?

This video should be watched by every parent and by every teacher. Teachers and parents both have the same purpose. To do what's best for kids. It is a call to action for parents and teachers to work together.

What can we do to make sure every school
                                             every classroom
                                             every student
                                             every child...........will thrive?

Open a conversation with your child
                                       your teacher
                                       your principal
                                       your superintendent
                                       your school board trustees
                                       your government

Together we need to Believe
                               Get Involved
                               Ask Questions
                               Listen
                               Be Curious

Subliminal Advertising in Teaching and Learning

I was wondering if the characteristics of subliminal advertising might have implications for teaching and learning.

by BBColin

The impetus for this question is this excellent You Tube video in which to marketeers are influenced in their ad strategy by strategically placed subliminal visuals. Take 6 minutes to watch what happens to these two pro ad people as they create and idea and then see how their ideas was influenced through subliminal messages.

Link To You Tube Video on Subliminal Advertising

I wonder what sort of subliminal messages the the classroom or school campus is sending our students. It it one that locks them into a certain way of thinking or using the same visual over and over again. Or is your room or school campus sending messages that help to subliminal messages of learning or creativity.

Does what students hear and see on a subliminal level influence their learning and their thinking? Probably. But, can we as teachers, educators, trainers, pastors, etc. harness the power of subliminal messages?  Or, should we even attempt it. Is there too much downside from thinking seriously about subliminal messages.

Will we one day come to see that power of subliminal messages and even begin to plan purposefully to use it in our lessons, training, or sermons?  What benefits might this bring? What dangers might it unearth?

Subliminal Messages as a learning and teaching tool. That is Education Innovation.

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