Education Innovation

Paul Bennett Finds Design in the Details

Design Thinking Method

DesignThinkers Service Design Method

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Design Thinking + Innovation

Design Thinking + Innovation

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Innovation Through Design Thinking

Innovation through design thinking

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Intro to Design Thinking

Intro to Design Thinking

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Education Design Thinking- The Balance of Exploitation and Exploration

Should schools get better at what they do or find better ways of doing what they do?

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, James March believes that organizations may engage primarily in two types of activities, exploration, the search for new knowledge, or exploitation, the maximization of payoff from existing knowledge.

In public education terms, schools can look for new strategies, methods, and models for delivering education, or they can refine, hone, manage, and systematize the delivery of their current models of education.

In his new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger Martin explains that while both are valuable and both are critical, it is hard to do. “…they are hard to engage in simultaneously; most often, organizations choose to focus on one activity, either exploration or exploitation, to the exclusion of the other and to their own detriment.”

In other words, education focuses on either the exploration of new models and methods, or focuses mainly on managing and administering their current model and methods.

Roger explains that there dangers of an organization that focuses only on exploration. “An organization exclusively dedicated to exploration will expire relatively short order. Typically, exploration alone will not generate the returns needed to fund further exploration.”

If education is always looking for the next best thing, the next model, method, or strategy, they will fail to produce the student achievement results demanded of them. They will not capitalize or leverage the good models, methods, strategies, and ideas that have been developed.

But there are dangers too for the organization that focuses solely on exploitation.

“ On the other hand, many organizations flip quickly from an early exploration phase—the generation of the founding idea behind the business—to the steady exploitation of that idea, never returning to exploration. These organizations, solely dedicated to exploitation, might last somewhat longer than exploration-only businesses, but the business that creates value only through exploitation will exhaust itself in due course. It can’t keep exploiting the same piece of knowledge forever. If it tries to do so, the cost of the business can be devastating.”

If education is never looking for new models, methods, strategies, or ideas for delivering education to it’s students, it is inevitable that the model they exploit will eventually cease to produce the results desired of it.

Roger provides the following table for reference. I have added the education references.

	Exploration	Exploitation
Organizational Focus	The invention of teaching and learning	The administration of teaching and learning
Overriding Goal	Dynamically moving from the current knowledge stage to the next	Systematically honing and refining within the current knowledge stage
Driving Forces	Intuition, feeling, hypotheses about the future, originality	Analysis, reasoning, data from the past, mastery
Future Orientation	Long-term	Short-term
Progress	Uneven, scattered, characterized by false starts and significant leaps forward	Accomplished by measured, careful incremental steps
Risk and Reward	High risk, uncertain but potentially high reward	Minimal risk, predictable but smaller rewards
Challenge	Failure to consolidate and exploit returns	Exhaustion and obsolescence

 

Roger Martin argues that what is needed is balance between exploration and exploitation found in Design Thinking.

“The design thinker therefore, enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, and originality and mastery.”

The education design thinker enable a school to balance finding new and better ways increasing student achievement and delivering effective instruction, while mastering, embedding, and refining the effective methods that are in use. Schools that get better at what they do while finding better ways to do it. That is educational design thinking. That is Education Innovation.

Essential Education: Tim Brown on Creativity and Play

Influence Education Through Design Thinking

In the book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, the authors discuss the idea of the power of the environment to influence behavior. In chapter titled Change the Environment, the authors share the power of “things” on the environment and behavior, and how often we miss their powerful influence because of two reasons.

First, often the most powerful elements in our environment remain invisible to us.
“Work procedures, job layouts, reporting structures, etc., don’t exactly walk up and whisper in our ear.” The environment affects much of what we do, but we often fail to notice its impact.

Second, even when we do think about it, we aren’t sure we know how it is impacting us or we may not know what to do about it.

Students spend much of their waking youth in school. 12-13 years, 180 days a year, 6 hours a day, in school. More specifically, they spend this time in their classrooms, at their desks, sitting in a chair.

I have been thinking and reading a lot about Design Thinking. In his book Change By Design, author and IDEO CEO Tim Brown says that a prerequisite for creative cultures, “…is an environment—social but also spatial—in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties.”

He goes on to say that, “They physical and the psychological spaces of an organization work in tandem to define that effectiveness of the people within it.”

12-13 years sitting in a chair. Do you think the type of chair students spend the majority of their youth influences behavior? It is possible that the type of chair might impact the approximately 13,000 to 14,000 hours spent sitting in it?

The pinnacle of educational design seems to be the plastic chair. Does that chair say something about our educational system?

Maybe it says, “This as good as it gets.” Or it might say, “We do what we have always done because it works.” Possibly it says, “The reliability of the past is more important than the validity of our current situation.”

But what if we allowed design thinking to create a new chair, a new system? Which would make the most positive influence on behaviors in the classroom? Which one do our students deserve to spend the majority of their waking hours as a child? What is our school environment saying about our priorities? Which would you rather spend your time in learning?

Which would you rather sit in?

Or this?

Professional Learning Communities DRIVE Toward Success

When Professional Learning Communities or Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives develop plans and ideas to deal with the multifaceted issues of student learning and achievement, having a clear definition and picture of what success looks like is key. Teams need to know what success looks like so they can recognize if they have achieved the results in student learning and achievement they set out to attain. If you don’t know your destination, how will you know if you have arrived? Developing an observable measure of success is key.

Tim Hurson, author of the book Think Better, offers this useful tool for helping you recognize once you have achieved it. He calls it DRIVE.

 

Do: What do you want your eventual solution to do? What must it achieve?

 

What outcome is the PLC or PNLC looking for? What do you want for the students? What should your students be able to do? The key here is to develop as many ideas as possible without judging them. Create a list of all the things your teams solution should achieve for the students. For example your list might include statements like: increase time on task, help student develop their own questions, include technology, or students should be able to explain the learning goals clearly.

 

Restrictions: What changes or impacts must you avoid?

 

What outcomes should not happen as a result of your plan? What must be prevented so as not to interfere with the student achievement? For example your list might include statements like: don’t confuse students, don’t ignore the high achieving students, don’t talk to much during the lesson, or don’t confuse students with too many strategies.

 

Investment: What resources are you willing to allocate? What are your “not-to-exceeds”?

 

What are the investments of time, materials, etc., that your PLC or PNLC is willing to commit to achieve your goal? Create a list of maximum investments that your PLC or PNLC, those you can’t exceed, that your team is wiling to put into the solution. The list might include things like: 30 minutes of instruction daily, one instructional aide per classroom, science materials for each pair of students, computer lab time, once weekly common assessments, etc.

 

Values: What values must you live by in achieving your solutions?

 

List the values of the school and the team that cannot be compromised in working toward the solution. What can you tolerate? What can you not tolerate? The list might includes things like: standards over curriculum, student need over teacher need, differentiation, must value teacher time, student engagement, etc.

 

Essential Outcomes: What are the nonnegotiable elements of success? What measurable targets must be met?

 

What are all the things that must happen for the PLC or the PNLC to consider the solution a success for students? What specific student achievement outcomes must be reached? What are the non-negotiable student results that must be achieved? Examples might include statement like: all students will master the standard, the student learning will be measurable through a common formative assessment, students will be given multiple opportunities to achieve, etc.

 

When PLCs or PNLCs use the DRIVE tool to create a clear picture and an observable criterion for defining success, they have a greater chance of ensuring that their solution will produce the desired result for student learning and teaching.

Borrowing Brillance