Education Innovation

The Power of Attraction- Pulling Those You Need Into Your Learning Community

I have advocated that technology and other key drivers have created an environment in which individual Professional Learning Communities can be networked with, not only other Professional Learning Communities, but useful individuals such as specialists, district personnel, researchers, etc., physically and virtually.  I call this model the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. 

The essence of the PNLC is that the "who" of potential members and collaborators is increased exponentially because of individual members networking through collaborative technology platforms, the "what." It provides scale without mass.

Authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison explain why this is true in their book The Power of Pull. The reason that the PNLC is so powerful is because of the access it provides. 

A PNLC provides access—helps us find people, information, data, ideas, and resources on demand.

Access is, “…the ability to fluidly find and get to the people and resources when and where we need them.” 

Stocks of Knowledge vs. Flows of Knowledge

Access is key because we are finding that the many of the challenges and problems we are dealing with in education we were simply not trained to confront in our teacher preparation programs. We were given a “stock” amount of knowledge, but it isn’t enough.

“We are often disappointed to find that the education we invested so much time and money to pursue has failed to prepare us for the lives we are now leading.” 

Think of all the skills many educators have had to learn since leaving their college teacher prep programs—data analysis and management, conflict resolution, technology implementation, increasing numbers of learning issues and problems, etc. 

The challenges that we face in education today require that we tap into an ever refreshing stream of knowledge. 

“To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant ‘flows’ of knowledge—interactions that create knowledge or transfer it across individuals. These flows occur in any social, fluid environment that allows firms and individuals to get faster by working with others.” 

The Professional Networked Learning Collaborative provides a stream of new knowledge and learning that can help us meet the challenges and needs of our students, our schools, and the environment surrounding education. 

Passions and Interests

“People are seeking out others for mutual support around common interests and passions more actively than ever before. What’s also different now is the reach and scale of these networks—their actual size as well as the diversity of participants they attract and mobilize.” 

Think of a PLN- Personal Learning Network mashed-up with a PIN- Passion and Interest Network, combined with a PLN- Professional Learning Network and you have a PNLC- Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. 

The cognitive diversity that a PNLC is able to attract is a major advantage compared to the old PLC model. The ability to attract physically and virtually those who share our passions, interests, and, I might add, problems, is a key lever of what make the PNLC so valuable. 

Breaking Down Silos and Barriers

The authors point out, “…there are a lot more smart people outside any particular company than within it.” 

We need to tap into all the knowledge and expertise that is out there. The people sitting at the table with us are important, but so are all the other useful outsiders, the “smart people” who exist outside of our classrooms, our schools, and our districts. And technology can attract them. 

“As the number of people we can connect with expands, our ability to pull from that network the resources and people we require to address unexpected needs expands along with it. Using tools and platforms emerging today, any of us can now find a person in a remote part of the world who just happens to have the knowledge or expertise required to help us.” 

At its heart, the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is ambidextrous. It seeks those who we can physically connect with and those whom we can virtually connect with. It makes it incredibly flexible. 

“Flexible access to people and resources can be enormously powerful in a world driven by changes that, more often than not, lead us in unanticipated directions.” 

Thanks to Pull—and John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison for so eloquently describing what I have been trying to describe for the past year—the “pull” of the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. 

Also See: 

Edge Perspectives With John Hagel

John Seely Brown

The Edgerati

Question Your Assumptions--Who Is Missing At Your Meeting?

“The wrong people meet regularly in our schools. Instead of meeting by department, what if we were to meet around problems? What if we were to meet strategically with the best people to address the problem?” So asks Heidi Hayes Jacobs in her book Curriculum 21: The Essential Education for a Changing World.

Begin with “why” and the “who” takes on new meaning.

Heidi explains, “For example, if issues arise related to poor performance on 8^_th grade math tests regarding balancing an equation, then the group that is most likely to meet are 8th grade math teachers. A more strategically planned group would be the teacher in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 who would meet virtually to examine curriculum maps and consider the requisite building of skills; furthermore English teachers should be involved to help determine if, in fact, the test results reflect a reading problem rather than a math problem.”

Teams need to be scalable. Teams need to break through silos. Teams need to be strategic in their thinking. Teams need to network.

It is for the very idea that Heidi Hayes Jacobs describes above that a Professional Networked Learning Collaborative is the model of the future.

The ability to configure unique teams virtually, physically, or both; the ability to scale up membership and break out of pre-configured and or assumed silos, combined with the strategic thinking, will meet the challenges of the future and leverage the network effect that virtual technologies have made possible.

Start with “why” and then determine the “who.”

With the PNLC the “who” is anyone in the network and not necessarily those who are we assume must be a part of the team or whom we have organizationally pushed onto the team. The PNLC pulls from the edge of the network and assembles a team based on the need, the strategy, and the knowledge needed.

The PNLC "pulls" together those we need-- "who"--and their ability to share and or co-create the needed knowledge-- "what"--that addresses the need--"why."

Instead of the "wrong people" meeting, the right people connect and network to strategically solve problems and meet student needs. We question assumptions about what we think team or group must be or is pushed to be, and pull from the network to create what should be.

Check out
Curriculum 21

Curriculum Designer Inc. 

edgerati: People Exploring the Edge

Education’s Big Shift: Institutions of Learning to Learning Institutions

Lessons From The Digital Generation

"We need to listen to listen to young people, embrace their culture, adopt their tools, and change our organizations. And if we do that we will have better performance and better innovation and institutions and organizations that are more appropriate for the 21st Century." Don Tapscott

Education's Idea Killing Virus and The Miracle Cure

Satisfice: A virus that results from the combination of satisfying and sufficing. Known to frequently infect educators who are being asked to develop ideas and plans of action for schools and school districts.

It is a deadly virus that infects grade level, department, PLC, school leadership, and district decision and planning meetings. The virus does not harm the host educator, but rather kills potential creative innovative ideas that might arise from the host by creating an urge to hastily accept the first idea or decision that satisfies the members and suffices as an acceptable outcome.

Matthew May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why The Best Ideas Have Something missing explains the virus.

“In 1957, economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon published a book called Models of Man. In it, he examined the default human decision-making process in which we tend to go with the fist option that offers an acceptable payoff. Simon said that by nature we ‘satisfice’—his term, combining satisfy and suffice. In other words, we have a tendency to settle for ‘good enough,’ opting for whatever seems to expeditiously meet the minimum requirement needed to move us closer to achieving a given goal. We then stop looking for other ways, including the best way, to solve the problem. We rationalize that the optimal solution is too difficult, not worth the effort involved, or simply unnecessary.”

“We mistakenly pose the question “What should we do?” before asking “What is possible?” We want a solution, but we don’t have the patience to wait for the optimal one, favoring implementation over incubation. We throw some resources at the problem and move on, or tweak a previous solution and fit it to the current situation. We fail to look more holistically at the challenge. The result is we simply don’t see the best, most elegant solution.”

While the prognosis may seem grim, there is a cure, a miracle cure that can save thousands of educators from falling victim to satisfice.

Tim Hurson, author of one of my all time favorite books, Think Better: An Innovator's Guide To Productive Thinking calls this “The Miracle of the Third Third.”

“Studies have shown that in Osborn’s kind of good brainstorming, the first third of the session tends to produce mundane, every-one-has thought-of-them-before ideas.”

“Generally the second third of a good brainstorming session produces ideas that begin to stretch boundaries.”

“The third third is where the diamonds lie. These are the potential breakthrough ideas that often lead to innovative solutions. These are the unexpected connections. Whereas bad brainstorming tends to stop at the first reasonable idea and judge all others out of existence, good brainstorming encourages the generation of long lists of ideas by separating creative thinking and critical thinking.”

In other words, education has for too long been suffering from the satisfice virus and ignoring the cure. The cure is great ideas. Creative ideas. Innovative ideas. The satisfice virus has confused our brains into accepting the first idea that seems to move the agenda along. And all of education has paid the price.

“Bad brainstorming is binary; ideas are either good or bad. Good brainstorming is full of maybes. In bad brainstorming, we never get to the third third. In good brainstorming getting to the third third is the point”

Imagine the impact for students, teachers, parents, schools, school districts, and communities if more educators used “The Miracle of the Third Third” in their planning and decision making meetings to defeat the satisfice virus. You might not believe in miracles now, but just wait until you feel the healing effects of the third third in your next planning or decision-making meeting.

Preparing The Teachers of 21st Century Learners

Education’s Big Shift: Institutions of Learning to Learning Institutions

In their new book The Power of Pull, authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison describe what they call the "Big Shift."

The Big Shift for Education

“Our educational institutions are grappling with the need to move from being institutions of learning to learning institutions that rapidly evolve in response to the quickly changing learning needs of students and the find ways to extend the learning process well beyond the walls and semesters that define courses today.”

Personal Implications of the Big Shift

“We discover, to our dismay, that the significant investments we made in education in the early part of our lives was just the beginning. In order to stay successful in a world of accelerating change, we need to find ways to learn faster, often in areas that we once viewed as quite peripheral to our professions.”

“What we knew yesterday—either as employees or in terms of what our institutions as a whole knows about its business—is proving to be less and less helpful with the challenges and opportunities we confront today.” 

When I reflect back on my teacher preparation program and the skills I learned there, and then compare them with the skills I rely heavily on today, there is quite a gap. Take just two examples, data and technology.

Data- I have had to learn how to collect data, organize data, and use it to make instructional decisions. I have had to learn how to create effective assessments to collect data and how to analyze the effectiveness of my data collection tools, but the validity of the results.

More districts are exploring taking classes out of the classroom and moving them online. Are you ready for that? Do you understand the instructional principles at work in a virtual learning environment?

Technology- At one point I was teaching an Apple 1to1 laptop classroom. I had to quickly learn a new set of skills to meet the instructional needs of my students. I have had to learn how to develop a Personal Learning Network and how to use Web2.0 technologies.

While I could go on, I think you see the point. What we learn is quickly becoming perishable. Static knowledge has a role, but things are changing so fast, and we as educators are being called upon to do more and more, we need to develop a stream or flow of tacit knowledge.

Most of the new things we will need to learn are best learned while working with others, not from a textbook. You need a network and people to collaborate with, to co-create new knowledge and learn from. You need the explicit knowledge that comes from collaborating and learning from others. Just as someone can’t tell you how to ride a bike, no one call tell you how to create effective instructional routines based on hearing a student’s percentage score.

You need…a Professional Networked Learning Collaborative. It's the difference between a search engine and a network.

Search Engine	The Network
The Lesson Plan	The Lesson Designer
Book	Author
Photo	Photographer
Data	Researcher
Idea	Innovator
Music	Musician
Invention	Inventor
Program	Programmer
Historical Event	Participant who experienced it
What to do	Voice of experience that tells you how to do it and why
Public information	Behind the scenes
We have to know what we are looking for	Anticipates what we need and directs or provides it for us
Created	Co-create new knowledge
Find it	Attract it
Algorithm	Thinking
Static information that is locked on-line	Dynamic knowledge that can cross over into touch space (face-to-face)
Explicit Knowledge and Information	Tacit Knowledge and Know-how

It's the Professional Network Learning Collaborative that can take a school from a institution of learning and transform it into a learning institution--from a search engine into a network. That's the "Big Shift"

That's Education Innovation.

Six Elements of a Good Decision In A PLC

Professional Learning Communities make decisions everyday. But are they good decisions? How do you know? What makes a good decision?

Here are 6 Elements of a Good Decision from Carl Spetzler, director of the Strategic Decision and Risk Management program at Stanford University and CEO of the Strategic Decisions Group. (Via Kim Girard of Bnet)

1. The right frame — making sure you’re solving the right problem in the first place.

2. Clarity about what you want.

3. Creative alternatives.

4. Gathering the right information, including information about uncertainty, which is essential if you want to choose the best alternative.

5. Reasoning, which includes what you know and what you don’t.

6. A commitment to make it happen, since a decision is no stronger than its weakest link.

Education Reform Made Simple: Accountability, Authority, Responsibility

Authority<---->Responsibility

"Authority without responsibility is illegitimate; but so is responsibility without authority. Both lead to tyranny." Peter Drucker

Authority<---->Responsibility<---->Accountability

The responsibility of educating the next generation should be accompanied by the authority to do so; but that authority requires accountability for the results.

Accountability for the results of educating the next generation is a major responsibility; but that responsibility requires the authority to achieve it.

If you want the authority, you must take the accountability.

If you have the accountability, you must have the authority.

...because it's all of our responsibility.