This is the third in a series of four posts about barriers to collaboration in Professional Leaning Communities.
According to Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen, author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, “The Search Barrier” concerns people who are looking for information and people, and but are not able to find them easily.
“Many companies are familiar with the adage, ‘If only we knew what we know.’ By that they mean that somewhere in the company, someone knows the answer to a problem, but the rub is that one who has the problem cannot locate the one who has the answer. That’s the search barrier…. the search barrier concerns the inability to find information and people in the company.”
Schools are becoming no different. As the increasing need for meeting state and federal accountability standards combines with increasing shifts toward more technology, transparency, and complexity, members of Professional Learning Communities are being asked to solve problems of student learning, manage data information systems, and leverage the knowledge and expertise of many who are outside of the team. As these trends continue, the search barrier is going to become more of a problem that teams will need to confront.
According to Hansen, the search barrier manifests itself in four typical ways.
1. Company Size
“The bigger the company, the greater the search problem.”
Obviously, not every school or district is going to face this issue. But, many schools and districts are so large that one hardly knows all the staff and finding who has the information, knowledge, expertise, or data to help Professional Learning Communities solve problems is a challenge.
2. Physical Distance
“Companies that are spread across cities, regions, countries, and continents have bigger search problems than those that reside in one place. People prefer to interact with others who are close by.”
Many school districts cover many cities and regions. Making a trip to the district office for some is often quite a trek. Some school campuses are immense is size. We naturally like to interact and work with people who are near us. If it takes a great deal of time and effort to go to the district office to find support, or we would rather not walk all the way across campus, we will limit those whom we can collaborate with and the expertise from which we can draw from.
3. Information Overload
The trend of data-driven instruction has resulted in students taking a multitude of grade level, district, and state assessment. This data is aggregated into data management systems such as Data Director or Edusoft. Combine this with other student data such as attendance, demographic info, etc and the result is a massive amount of available data on students. Teachers are awash in data and struggling to cope with it all.
All this data creates a paradox. “In a rush to help people get the information they need, companies have put in place databases, intranets, and knowledge-management systems, but these have created their own problem: too much information.”
Professional Learning Communities must struggle with the “Total vs. Useful Ratio” of data.
“Information overload makes search harder because of information noise—the ratio of the total amount of information available to the amount of useful information. Information systems, including knowledge-management systems, increase the noise ratio by making too much information available, and that complicates the search for the right type of knowledge or person.”
Professional Learning Communities have enough to accomplish without having to swim
through a mountain of data. What is needed is not all the data or information available, but the right data or information. That is why common formative assessments in the classroom are so useful. It is real time and focused on the current needs of the current students.
4. Poverty of Networks
How many steps does the average teacher have to go through to find someone who has the expertise or knowledge they require? For some very well connected teachers, those types who seem to know everybody, it might not be more than one or two. But teachers who are new to the district, new to a school, or new to a department, it might require that they go through three or four people before they find the person with the expertise of knowledge that they require.
“It may be a small world for a few well-connected people, but it’s a big world for many others, and that’s a formidable barrier to search.”
Professional Learning Communities offer a bit of a remedy in that members can begin tapping into each other’s connections when searching for expertise, information, and data. With the advent of social media and the resulting ability to create Personal Learning Networks, searching can become easier and wider as PLC members share and tap into their Personal Learning Networks. This shift toward a technological element that creates “virtual members” or “useful outsiders” is at the heart of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative model. It is a model designed to overcome the barriers of size, distance, and poverty of networks.
K.W.O.K. Knowing what others know is a term that I use when talking about the power of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative to harness networks and groups through technology to bring a greater amount of knowledge and expertise to the team. Be it a PNLC or a PLC, overcoming the search barrier is going to become an increasingly larger issue as the educational landscape becomes more diverse, more transparent, more accountable, the need to being able to find the right information or the right expert to help PLC or PNLCs meet the needs of their students is going to increase.
According to Berkley and INSEAD professor Morten T. Hansen, author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, “The Search Barrier” concerns people who are looking for information and people, and but are not able to find them easily.
“Many companies are familiar with the adage, ‘If only we knew what we know.’ By that they mean that somewhere in the company, someone knows the answer to a problem, but the rub is that one who has the problem cannot locate the one who has the answer. That’s the search barrier…. the search barrier concerns the inability to find information and people in the company.”
Schools are becoming no different. As the increasing need for meeting state and federal accountability standards combines with increasing shifts toward more technology, transparency, and complexity, members of Professional Learning Communities are being asked to solve problems of student learning, manage data information systems, and leverage the knowledge and expertise of many who are outside of the team. As these trends continue, the search barrier is going to become more of a problem that teams will need to confront.
According to Hansen, the search barrier manifests itself in four typical ways.
1. Company Size
“The bigger the company, the greater the search problem.”
Obviously, not every school or district is going to face this issue. But, many schools and districts are so large that one hardly knows all the staff and finding who has the information, knowledge, expertise, or data to help Professional Learning Communities solve problems is a challenge.
2. Physical Distance
“Companies that are spread across cities, regions, countries, and continents have bigger search problems than those that reside in one place. People prefer to interact with others who are close by.”
Many school districts cover many cities and regions. Making a trip to the district office for some is often quite a trek. Some school campuses are immense is size. We naturally like to interact and work with people who are near us. If it takes a great deal of time and effort to go to the district office to find support, or we would rather not walk all the way across campus, we will limit those whom we can collaborate with and the expertise from which we can draw from.
3. Information Overload
The trend of data-driven instruction has resulted in students taking a multitude of grade level, district, and state assessment. This data is aggregated into data management systems such as Data Director or Edusoft. Combine this with other student data such as attendance, demographic info, etc and the result is a massive amount of available data on students. Teachers are awash in data and struggling to cope with it all.
All this data creates a paradox. “In a rush to help people get the information they need, companies have put in place databases, intranets, and knowledge-management systems, but these have created their own problem: too much information.”
Professional Learning Communities must struggle with the “Total vs. Useful Ratio” of data.
“Information overload makes search harder because of information noise—the ratio of the total amount of information available to the amount of useful information. Information systems, including knowledge-management systems, increase the noise ratio by making too much information available, and that complicates the search for the right type of knowledge or person.”
Professional Learning Communities have enough to accomplish without having to swim
through a mountain of data. What is needed is not all the data or information available, but the right data or information. That is why common formative assessments in the classroom are so useful. It is real time and focused on the current needs of the current students.
4. Poverty of Networks
How many steps does the average teacher have to go through to find someone who has the expertise or knowledge they require? For some very well connected teachers, those types who seem to know everybody, it might not be more than one or two. But teachers who are new to the district, new to a school, or new to a department, it might require that they go through three or four people before they find the person with the expertise of knowledge that they require.
“It may be a small world for a few well-connected people, but it’s a big world for many others, and that’s a formidable barrier to search.”
Professional Learning Communities offer a bit of a remedy in that members can begin tapping into each other’s connections when searching for expertise, information, and data. With the advent of social media and the resulting ability to create Personal Learning Networks, searching can become easier and wider as PLC members share and tap into their Personal Learning Networks. This shift toward a technological element that creates “virtual members” or “useful outsiders” is at the heart of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative model. It is a model designed to overcome the barriers of size, distance, and poverty of networks.
K.W.O.K. Knowing what others know is a term that I use when talking about the power of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative to harness networks and groups through technology to bring a greater amount of knowledge and expertise to the team. Be it a PNLC or a PLC, overcoming the search barrier is going to become an increasingly larger issue as the educational landscape becomes more diverse, more transparent, more accountable, the need to being able to find the right information or the right expert to help PLC or PNLCs meet the needs of their students is going to increase.
Professional Learning Communities and the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative are going to have to adopt networking and data analysis into their core competencies to be able to overcome the search barrier to collaboration.
Part 1: Overcoming the "Not-Invented-Here" Barrier in Professional Learning Communities
Part 2: Overcoming the “Hoarding” Barrier in Professional Learning Communities.
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