Education Innovation

The Four Forces of Change: Rising Expectations

“The point is that what we are satisfied with today, we will not be satisfied with tomorrow.”

The fourth force of change impacting on you and your schools, as described by Peter Sheahan in his book Flip, is Rising Expectations.

This force of change, “results from the other three and in turn feeds back into them: rising expectations for faster, better, cheaper products, for more varied options, and for greater transparency and flexibility in response to customer needs and wants.”

Americans always expect things to get better. It is one of our most admirable traits. Good enough is never good enough. We push for better.

The forces of rising expectations have not spared education. Each year we expect to see test scores going up. Each year we expect to see more technology in the classroom. Each year we expect to see teacher quality improve. We have created standards, testing, and other accountability measures to meet the force of rising expectations.

When we look at history, there are things that came into being that today, we consider a necessity. Air conditioning, automobiles, cell phones, computers, and the like are all now part of what we consider a necessity. What in education today, will become an absolute necessity tomorrow? Remember, the Internet is still fairly new, but I doubt we would say we could live without it.

Teaching is going to be impacted by the force of rising expectation too. The basic price of entry for a teacher will be to have obtained a bachelor’s degree, completed observation hours, completed student teaching, completed a teaching program, and maybe some volunteer work in or substitute work in the classroom. But, rising expectations will drive up the bar. If everybody has completed the same basic requisite, the question might become, “How will you add value to this school? What else do you bring to the table?”

Standards, technology, assessments, data management systems, interventions, and Professional Learning Communities will soon become necessities that we won’t be able to imagine education without. But, times will change as they always do, and rising expectations will create new necessities.

As been famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Peter Drucker

The Four Forces of Change: Accountability and Transparency

Increasing Transparency and Accountability is the third of the 4 forces impacting on us as described by Peter Sheahan in his book Flip.

“The digital communications revolution has put global information in the hands of literally billions of individuals, who then can share that information with one another at will.”

Imagine that. Your school’s or district’s test scores can be looked up and examined by people living anywhere in the world the have access to an internet connection. From the parents on your P.T.A, to the teachers across town, to the principals across the country, to professors in the farthest reaches of the globe. You, my friend, are transparent.

The California Department of Education has a site called DataQuest. This site allows anyone with web access to look up and examine school performance data, test scores, student demographic data, school staffing information, student misconduct and intervention data, etc. This is the very definition of transparency. And parents are using this data to make informed decisions about which schools they want their students to attend and even making home buying decisions based on that data. Yep, it’s not just parents who are digging into your school’s information; realtors are using that information to market homes. Who else will soon find a use for your school’s data? It’s out there, transparent for everyone to see.

Educators across the country are acutely aware of the forces of Accountability.

Top Down Accountability: Legislation such as NCLB is making schools more accountable for their results. The federal Department of Education, state departments of education, county offices of education, and districts provide top down accountability. For good or bad, accountability is a factor that impacts education everyday.

Lateral Accountability: Principals, unfortunately, often compete for students by offering programs that will attract students and comparing one school to another. Public schools and private schools have lateral accountability dynamic. Competition is a natural result of all the transparency layered into a space where there are limited resources.

Bottom-up-accountability: Being transparent to the public, the community can make choices about which schools they want to send their students to. If they don’t feel you are meeting their needs, there is a school that will. Parents and teachers are able to spread opinions and views of your school or district via the digital world. Your school or district is apt to be branded good or bad by the views and opinions of the grassroots in your community.

Accountability is here to stay. There is a reason test scores are printed in newspapers and put on the Internet. While it can be difficult, the world we operate in demands accountability and transparency.

HOW Week Part 7: You Must Be TRIPing!

Tripping
In my previous post I introduced the acronym TRIP. As explained by Dov Seidman, TRIP stands for Trust, Risk, Innovation, and Progress. According to Dov, there is a second level of meaning for TRIP.

HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business (and in Life)

By: Dov Seidman

T “The T stands for transparency, which creates trust. Interpersonal transparency is a necessary power to thrive in a connected world, and not coincidentally, it creates trust."

When the teachers you work with can see that you are being open and transparent with your ideas, lessons, plans, etc. then they develop trust in you. For a department or grade level to be successful, a condition of transparency must exist. If others think you are hiding something, then they are not going to share what they know. We have all seen or know teachers who are hoarders of ideas. We have all seen and know teachers who are territorial about ideas, or committees, or duties, etc. When these teachers are not transparent, then the others they work begin to feel they need to close up and keep their ideas or territories. We become little islands or silos, each trying to keep their ideas to themselves in hope that they will be perceived as a, “great teacher.”  Meanwhile all the kids at the school suffer from this lack of transparency. We must open up and share our best practices and ideas. All of the students deserve the best, not just the ones in my class.

R The R stands for Reputation.

Do you know what your reputation is?  It may not be what you think. Perception is reality, as they say, so your reputation is largely going to be determined by the perception of those you teach and work with. It may not be what you intended it to be, but it is what others think it is.

I  The I stands for Instinct.

When there is trust, this can unleash you instinct. “When you are in a trust-filled situation, these synapses are strong. The various centers of your brain communicate seamlessly and rapidly, and you can then make split-second decisions that often pay off.” 

Wouldn’t it be easier if you worked and taught in a situation that allowed you to make quick decision without all the second-guessing yourself due to lack of trust in your students, your co-workers, or your principal. To work in an environment of trust will allow you to make decision in the best interest of the students each and every time without going through all the machinations that those who work where there is no trust will likely go through.

However, I took the liberty of adding another meaning to the I.

I The I can also stand for individual. We in education are being told exactly what to teach, when to teach, and how to teach. There must be room for the individual talents and ideas of each teacher or administrator. In an environment of trust, each individual teacher or administrator can offer his or her unique ideas and viewpoints.

P  The P stands for perennial prosperity.

Prosperity can mean performance. Prosperity can be translated to mean results. Trust brings results. Results from the teachers and administrators, which, in the end, translates to results from the students and the school. Performance increases steadily in the direction of great results.

Trust is key. We need to have trust. I get so tired of people who want to just talk about what has to be done without ever spending to reflect on the HOW it will be done. If we don’t figure out the HOWs then the “whats” won’t be accomplished. Is it worth our time as teachers and administrators to take some time to get our HOWs right?

So how do we get a TRIP going? You figure out where you are, where you want to go, and most importantly, you listen to each other. Our students are counting on us to get going on the TRIP.

Rob Jacobs

Thinking Better: Using The Productive Thinking Model Part 1

I read Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking and have been dying to have an opportunity to experiment with The Productive Thinking Model that he so skillfully describes in the book.

“One of the problems with problems is that they usually begin with a mess.”

I found a mess to work with.

“But if things weren’t messy or getting messy, there would be no discontent, and there wouldn’t be a need for productive thinking in the first place. The mess comes when we begin to realize that things might be better than the are..”

The mess I found centered around the problem of student discipline. While discipline is not officially a part of my job description, I had spent many months watching staff and students get more and more frustrated at the “mess”, so I volunteered to take the staff through The Productive Thinking Model to see what we might find at the end of the process. I was limited to one staff meeting, so we only able to get through steps 1 and 2 of the process, so we will be re-visiting the rest of the process at another meeting.

Step 1: What is Going On?
Sub-step 1: What’s The Itch?
An Itch is described as the discontent or irritant that compels us to want to change.

Most of the staff had and “itch” to be sure, but we needed to go through the process of discovering all the itches. So I facilitated a listing of all the itches that we could come up. I put no limits on what was considered and itch. If it bothered them it went up.

Some of the itches we listed were:
No system, student behavior, “Broken Windows” theory, paper work, before and after school, parents.

We then tried to makes clusters of itches based on common themes or characteristics.

(picture of our partial list)

Sub-step 2: What’s The Impact?
In this sub-step our goal was to discover what it is about our itches that concerns us. Which itches are a priority? Why?

We again made a list and then selected which seemed to be the most important to work on. What I found interesting was that after just two sub-steps we were talking in a way that was very different from what most of the staff expected and we were discussing ideas that may not have come to fore if we had just a “normal” discussion.

(sample list)

Sub-step 3: What’s The Information?
In this step we tried to understand what we already knew about the issue and what we needed to know about the issue. I used a thinking tool called KnoWonder. Essentially I made a T-chart with the word “Know” one side and the word “Wonder” on the other. For those of you who teach, think of a KWL chart.

We listed things that we knew about the issue and things we wondered about the issue. It is a very useful tool for getting some perspective on the problem. I found that some creative questioning helped to generate a good list. I did my best to ask questions that would generate ideas for the list.

(sample list)

Sub-step 4: Who’s Involved?

The next sub-step was getting a clear idea of all the people involved in this itch.
“How we see things depends on where we stand…”

We generated a list that came up with the typical stakeholders: teachers, students, parents, administrators, support staff, and community.

Sub-step 5: What’s the Vision?
In sub-step 5 we attempted to create a vision for the future or what the model calls the “Target Future.”

“The Target Future is the place you want to get to. It doesn’t tell you how you’ll get there; in other words it is not a solution. Rather it’s a brief description of a future in which your issue is resolved and your Itch no longer irritates you.”

I listed sentence stems on the board that said, “I only we could..”,  “I wish…”, and “It would be great if..” I used these sentence stems to facilitate a list of Target Futures. This was one area where I had to be more active in encouraging ideas. Some were hesitant to state their Target Future because the immediately started to think about how it might be accomplished. I reinforced the fact that we are simply stating what we hope for, and not worrying about the details. I think the staff was surprised that what they listed on the board was is some ways very different from what they might have walked into the room initially thinking.

Once we were done generating our list, we then used a thinking tool called I3.

“I3 allows you to determine which items on your list will be useful to work on. I3 stands for the three criteria you use to evaluate the items in your list: Influence, Importance, and Imagination.”

We used symbols (check mark, triangle, and a flower) placed next to the items on our list to get a visual sense of what we had influence over, what we thought was important, and if it would require some imagination.

Some of the Target Futures that seemed to hold a lot of promise was the creation of a flow chart, acknowledging  positive behavior more frequently and systematically, and staff training.

(sample list)

After completing all 5 sub-steps of Step 1, we had a great sense of what was going on with our discipline “Itch.”

I will discuss the result of Step 2 in a later post. I might add here that one of the most useful things for me as a facilitator was having some one who would chart the ideas for me. It was hard to do both and stay in the flow.

Coming Up Step 2: What’s Success?

HOW Week Part 6: Take A T.R.I.P.

In my previous post, Trust Issues, I discussed the impact of our HOWS with regards to trust. So, how do we get to this place called Trust?

Dov Seidman came up with the acronym T.R.I.P. After all, “It takes a journey to envision and learn about trust, but trust also propels it own trip.

 

HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything...in Business (and in Life)

By: Dov Seidman
T R I P

Trust
Risk
Innovation
Progress

Trust
“Trusting in a sense, means giving something away and ceding power to others, an essential step in achieving the outward focus needed in a hyperconnected world. Trust empowers others, but because it is a virtue.” 

In the classroom that means taking the first step to give away our perception of control and trust the students. As an administrator, you must give power away to others to develop trust in them and their trust in you.

Risk
If there is no trust, “We drive slower, act cautiously, shrink our circle of friends and associates, and generally default more conservative impulses. When there is trust in the room, however, all of these tendencies are reversed. We are secure and so can act boldly. We feel free to invent new process…”

We experiment and try new things. Imagine how a student would feel if he or she was secure enough to try new things, stretch themselves, and take a risk.

Teachers who feel trusted will be more likely to innovate and create and share better ideas and practices.

Innovation
“In a trusting environment, everyone feels emboldened to take more risks. They challenge the system more, they solve problems, and they don’t stay in small boxes afraid to venture into new territory for fear of criticism (by bosses or colleagues). Innovation flows from this creative spirit.” 

In a trusting environment teachers would be more open to trying a new grade or teaching a class. With trust, a teacher will be more open to sharing new ideas or insight with colleagues. Administrators, if you felt more trust, you would be more willing to experiment with bold programs.  Teacher and administrators innovating new ideas without fear of criticism could generate great benefits for students.

Progress
“What happens when you innovate? You create progress.” 

Progress is not just limited to higher test scores. Progress extends to personal progress.

“We go on TRIPs because we want to accomplish big things. We go on TRIPs because we want to solve real problems and because we want to create lasting value.”

We go on TRIPs because helping build minds and making a difference is why we got into education in the first place. We go on TRIPs to make an impact.

Good luck on your TRIP!

Rob Jacobs

The Individual Pace of Adopting Innovation

Any school or district that has ever adopted a new textbook adoption, report card, data collection system can relate to the varying motivations of the people in the organization. Adopters generally fall into one of five levels; innovators, early adopters, middle adopters, late adopters, and laggards. I am sure you could tick of the people you work with each into each category.

I thought this post, Re-thinking Diffusion of Innovations, written by Eric Swanson, Director of Externally Focused Leadership Community at Leadership Network, provided some valuable insight into the issue.

Eric writes…

“A couple of months ago I picked up a book called Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore. This work is important in helping to understand why some innovations fail and others succeed. Most of the time, when I explain the bell curve of innovation adaptation (see previous entry) I present it in such a way that once the early adopters begin creating models for the middle adopters to observe and emulate, BAM!... the late adopters fall into place and the 16% of laggards either get on board or leave.

“Moore has a different approach. Moore points out that the people in the five segments have different motivations that need to be taken into consideration and that there are actually gaps between the innovators, early adopters, middle adopters, late adopters and laggards and these motivations must be taken into consideration when trying to bring about and implement change in a social system. Each chasm represents the peril of losing momentum. Although Moore is specifically writing about the adoption of technology, I think his insights are applicable in a larger context…like a church. Let me explain.

“First, Moore makes the distinction between continuous innovation and discontinuous innovation. Continuous innovations are improvements on existing products that do not require any change in behavior for the consumer. Crest may make their toothpaste “New and Improved” but you’ll still brush your teeth the same way. However, ‘any time we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior’ we are experiencing “discontinuous innovation.” So, for instance, switching from a PC to a Mac is a huge disruption that changes the way we interact with a key board, a mouse and the user interface. Who would have ever thought that “Safari” means “connect to the Internet?”

The differences between those times when we are experiencing continuous innovation and those time when we are experiencing discontinuous innovation places requires an understanding of which is currently occurring and what sorts of stress and issues accompany the two types. District and site leaders need to think about the impact that will occur to a school or team and prepare in advance to mitigate any negative issues. 

Eric continues…

‘Early adopters are buying some type of change agent and by adopting first they expect to get a jump on the competition. They expect a radical discontinuity between the old and new and are prepared to champion this cause against entrenched resistance.’ Think of the hoards of people who lined up to pay $600 for the iPhone. They are willing to put up with gliches and are willing to fight the battles. ‘Because early adopters do not rely on well-established references in making their buying decisions, preferring instead to rely on their own intuition and vision, they are key to opening up any high-tech market segment.’ These are the “visionaries”—those ‘who have the insight to match an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into high-visibility, high risk projects. Visionaries are not looking for improvement. They are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.’ Early adopters are essential for any enterprise to move ahead and perform a vital function if the “new” is to be adopted. Now, Moore insists that there is a chasm between early adopters (visionaries) and middle adopters (the pragmatists). This is because the pragmatists ‘want to see well-established references before investing substantially. Because there are so many people in this segment—roughly one third of the whole adoption cycle—winning their business is key to any substantial profits and growth.’ This group however is unlike the visionaries. The pragmatists want ‘to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. The goal of the pragmatist is to make a percentage improvement—incremental, measurable, predictable progress.’ There is also a huge chasm between the pragmatist and the late adopters. The late adopters (the 34% on the far side of the innovation bell curve) are what Moore calls the “conservatives.” ‘Conservatives…are against discontinuous innovation. They believe in tradition far more than in progress. And when they find something they like, they stick with it.’ Change efforts often fail, because we mistake the enthusiasm and receptivity of the early adopters (visionaries) to be a foretaste of how everyone else will and should respond. However, to cross the chasm, each group needs different motivations and information.”

Though the early adopters will bring the new idea into the organization early, it will take time for the critical mass of middle and late adopters gain the enthusiasm and receptivity that the early adopters have. Educational leaders need to understand that the power of time is a major dynamic a play. TTT; Things Take Time. No idea, technology, program, or text is going to make an impact until the middle and late adopters become advocates for the idea. Early adopters need to be encouraged to run with the new idea and even spread the good news, the educational leader needs to keep a keen eye on those who will follow because the true power of the idea will be realized once these middle and late adopters come on board. Once that tipping point is reached momentum will build, but it would be a mistake to push the middle and late adopters at the same rate as the early adopters. It is not in their nature and the results could result in very negative consequences. Encourage, coach, support, and nudge, but don’t force or rush an unnatural pace.