Education Innovation

Failure Is An Option: Ideas and Failure In The Open Model of Education

What do you get when you combine education with the books Here Comes Everybody and Wikinomics, with Lego, Saddleback Church, new ideas, a website for solving problems, failure, and a mining corporation? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and see?

Adding to my previous posts (1 and 2)  on what I call the Open Model of Education. Why is the open model so powerful? Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, discussed the advantages of open models. In this case, open source movements. Open source movements have several powerful advantages that education could leverage to improve itself. 

One advantage of the open source movement is that it is not an organization in the typical sense. It doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t make capital investments, and it doesn’t control resources. The advantage is that it highly tolerant of failure. Open source reduces the cost of failure because so many ideas are brought to the table.

“…open source relies on the ‘publish-then-filter’ pattern. In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes from the failures in advance. In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction.”

In the Closed Model of Education that I have discussed previously, education is limited because the ideas that a school or district can consider can come from only a limited number of sources, usually teachers, administrators, and consultants. A great deal of thought must be put into the consideration of ideas because the time and cost of failure are so high. Time spent with meetings, staff training, and materials, has a cost. This means the filter for ideas is very high. Only those ideas that seem to have the most benefit will be implemented, though there is no way to know in advance that one of the ideas picked will bring the desired benefit, and one of the ideas left on the table could be the most effective and beneficial.

The Open Model of Education draws its ideas from a greater number of sources, including, and most importantly, the student. A wider net is cast for ideas, more ideas are implemented, and the ones that work will receive more resources, while the ones that fail can be quickly dropped. Because resources are only directed at proven ideas, this model essentially allows failure to cost nothing. Failure for free. But the chance of coming upon a better idea is increased due to the shear number of sources and ideas.

“Open system, by reducing the cost of failure, enable their participants to fail like crazy, building on the successes as they go.”

The open system has the advantage of exploring multiple possibilities.

“…the idea is that for any problem or goal, there is a vast area of possibilities to explore but few valuable spots within that environment to discover. When a company or indeed any organization finds a strategy that works, the drive to adopt it and stick with it is strong. Even if there is a better strategy out there, finding is can be prohibitively expensive.”

Our current Closed Model of Education is clearly locked into a few strategies and models that drive everything. Teaching takes place at a designated place and time, and it provided by designated people.

The Open Model of Education blends the sources of teaching to focus on the learning of the student. Learning, as opposed to teaching, can take place anywhere, at anytime, and can be provided by many people. It is this system that can bring many more ideas to the table. The current education system judges many ideas on whether that idea fits within the current construct of the education system. If the idea does not fit, the idea is not adopted. Those ideas that are adopted have been severely filtered in the hopes on ensuring success.

The Open Model of Education, or Clay Shirky’s open system, allow for many more participants, lowers the filtering of ideas, and is much more tolerant of failure because of the flexibility of the system. Ideas that fail are dropped instantly, and new ones adopted. It would be hard to say that failed ideas are dropped as quickly in education. Usually failed ideas have personnel attached to them, causing union issues, and resources that have been purchased, and possible even capital costs. This makes ideas difficult to drop on a dime.

Further because the Open Model allows participants from many areas to participate, the chances of great ideas and solutions are increased. In the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collboration Changes Everything, the authors describe in detail how organizations from Lego to mining corporation Goldcorp have opened their systems to the public and reaped the benefits that come from this openness. Websites like Innocentive.com open problems up to others to help solve and give cash rewards. Could you imagine what would happen if education opened itself to the public and gave cash rewards for great ideas?  Saddleback Church says to its member, if you have an idea, let’s do it. They offer help where they can, but they allow the member to come up with and implement the idea. One member had an idea for a ministry from people struggling with addictions. That ministry has become a worldwide ministry called Celebrate Recovery. Other ideas went nowhere and failed. But in allowing many ideas, having a low filter, they hit upon one of the most successful ministry ideas in recent years. It is the organizational model and mindset that is described in Wikinomics and displayed in Goldcorp, Lego, and Saddleback Church that education should look to.

The Closed System of Education does not tolerate failure, therefore restricting the quality and quantity of ideas and the chance for a superior idea. The Open Model of Education is much more tolerant of failure which results in a greater number of ideas and a greater chance of finding the superior idea.

Catalytic Questions:

How might you come at this issue from a different direction to get a different response?  What underlying principles are at work here?

In what ways could you shake the thinking of those in the education establishment? What might this look like?

What examples could you substitute to get your message across?

In what areas do you see opportunity for developing more openness in your school or your district?

Who is going to resist these ideas? How can you prepare for and mitigate their resistance?

Who is going to support these ideas? How can you leverage their support of these ideas?

Where could you focus your energy and ideas to make change?

In what ways could you use the disadvantages for of the Closed Model as advantages for support of the Open Model?

If your school or district were to be transformed into an Open Model school or district, could you let go of the past and adopt the new way of thinking? Does you answer impact your thinking or support for either model?

What problems might more openness create?

Three Signs of a Miserable Job: Final Thoughts

The Three Sings of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni

  Part 5

Principals, Directors, Managers, and Superintendents… want to set your school apart? Answer the three questions.

Anonymity: “Do I really know my people?”

Irrelevance: “Do they know who their work impacts and how?”

Immeasurement: “Do they know how to assess their own progress or success?”

If you don’t have any answers for the “big three” questions, then you need to immediately set about creating systems, policies, habits, actions, etc. that can directly address them.

Why you ask? “Employees who find fulfillment in their jobs are going to work with more enthusiasm, passion, and attention to quality than their counterparts who do not, mostly because they develop a sense of ownership and pride in what they are doing.”

The benefit is, “…managers who work to reduce the three signs in their organizations discover an unexpected side effect. Employees themselves begin to take a greater interest in their colleagues, help them find meaning and relevance in their work, and find better ways to gauge their own success, and they do all of this without specific direction from their bosses. In essence, they take some responsibility for keeping the three signs of a miserable job at bay. Ironically, this gives them yet a greater sense of meaning while creating a sustainable cultural advantage that competitors will envy but find difficult to duplicate.”

When teachers feel empowered and engaged, then change initiatives and improvement plans will succeed. A principal or district administrator should wish for just sort of an environment at his or her school. Not that schools should be in competition with each other, but others will notice the change that is taking place at your school when Anonymity, Irrelevance, and Immeasurement are overcome. What educational leader wouldn't want that? What teacher or support staff member wouldn't want to work at that school? 

Influence Strategy: Focus on Desired Behaviors To Reach Desired Outcomes

Want to be an Influencer?

From the new book Influencer: The Power To Change Anything

Philosophically you need to see yourself as an influencer. Believe that you can influence your school, your district, your grade level, and most importantly, yourself.

You must also study the works of those great influencers who have proven they are good at what they do.

Thinking about strategy, you or your organization should develop what is called an Influence Strategy. An Influence Strategy will produce the behaviors that create, drive, and produce great results in their organization. Not just any behavior, but those few vital behaviors that are the real key.

Would you say your organization, district, school, or team has anything resembling an Influence Strategy? Do you know what vital behaviors make the difference for your organization?

So how you create such a strategy and discover your vital behaviors? 

Step 1: Be Specific
There are hundreds of strategies that can be used, be you must use only those strategies that help you focus like a laser on behaviors, for it is behavior you are trying to change or develop.

“It turns out that all influence geniuses focus on behaviors. They’re inflexible on this point. They don’t develop an influence strategy until they’re carefully identified the specific behaviors they want to change. They start by asking: In order to improve our existing situation, what must people actually do?”

The key here is to focus on what you must do, not what you want to achieve. For example, raise test scores is end or goal, but not a means to accomplish the goal. If you focus on behavior you would ask how could we improve teaching and better our instructional plan to improve test scores. The teaching and the improving is the behavior, the test scores are just the result. Do not confuse the two. Focus on behavior.

Leaders when you say what must be achieved without focusing on the behaviors to achieve it, it amounts to saying, “Do something; we’re not sure what it is, but do something that results in…. (Fill in the blank goal).

Discipline at your school will not improve just because you set the goal of good student behavior. Discipline will only improve when you focus on those behaviors that produce good student behavior. You need to focus on influencing the behavior that will drive you to the results you seek.

Catalytic Questions:

What behaviors have you identified that drive performance in your organization?

Do you have an Influence Strategy? In what ways could you develop an Influence Strategy?

How might your organizational leadership be impacted if the focus was more squarely placed on behaviors that get results and not the results themselves?

Does your organization spend the time to clearly identify vital behaviors and then teach or coach them across the organization? 

How would or organization benefit if vital behaviors were taught and embedded into your culture?

How is a vital behavior different from knowledge or information?

How would a vital behavior focus change your staff development or professional training?

Recommended Reading:

Influencer Blog

Bare joy foot blog

Early Innovation and Creativity Education

Gordon MacKenzie is sort or a personal hero of mine. Though he has now passed away, I still turn to his book In Orbit Around the Giant Hairball for inspiration. In his book he relates a famous and oft repeated story about a trip to visit an elementary school.

As he meet with each grade level, he related to them that he is an artist. He would look around the room and notice all the student work and then wonder aloud who had created all the wonderful artwork.

He would then ask, “How many artists are there in the room.”  “Please raise your hands.”
The responses were very telling. In kindergarten and first grade class rooms, every student threw their hand up in the air. In second grade classrooms, about three-fourths raised their hands in response. In third grade, only a few students help up their hands, some very timidly. So it went, each grade a little worse than the one before it until he finally reached sixth grade. In response to Gordon’s question, most students looked around to see if anyone would admit to being an artist, as if such an admission was a violation of group norms.

In the span of Kindergarten to sixth grade, students had un-learned their naturally tendency to be an “artist.” Why?

Sir Ken Robinson has been the rage lately on the web. He gave a talk at the T.E.D conference several years ago about how schools systematically kill student creativity. I posted a clip of his talk several months back. You can find it here (Is Creativity As Important As Literacy). I am hoping to finally get to his book one of these days.

But there are so many people who seem to get it. I was very interested in what Doreen Lorenzo had to say at frogblog in his post Innovation Needs to be Nurtured Early.

He says…

“I believe that the emphasis on this frantic search for innovation is a result of our inability to foster this concept starting at the elementary school level. Shouldn’t we all be innovators? Part of what makes us human is our ability to think and reason. With that in mind, innovation should be part of our fiber. Why can’t children maintain their creative innovation past the 2nd grade? At some point the concept of innovation is ripped out of their souls. They are told to follow the rules, prepare for the standardized tests and think about getting a good job that pays well.”

In an age where standardized tests are the measuring stick by which schools and students are measured, we are creating an environment where we can’t afford to spend the time necessary to allow children to be as creative as they can be. We focus on getting the one right answer for each question because this is what the system has forced us into.  Politicians do not brag about the quality of educational programming, or how school X has made growth over time. Newspapers can’t print growth over or quality teaching. They can print a test score. The can print it next to the scores of other schools. It is very neat and orderly. Who is good and who is bad is a matter of running your finger up and down a column of scores.

Doreen goes on to say…

“Finding great creative talent continues to be the biggest issue in our world where in reality it should be the easy part. However, since schools begin to dismiss the notion of creativity once a child leaves kindergarten, the pool of applicants gets very small by the time they actually enter the workforce. How can we shift the focus to allow kids to explore, think bigger, reward their drive and ambition as not just an anomaly but a must-have in today’s world? Instead, creative kids are often labeled ‘creative,’ which means ‘different.’ And different is too often not a good word for a child.”

Education is beginning to have the conversation, but with much in education, the wheels turn very slow. Doreen’s voice is another to add to the growing call for change. I for one believe in Tom Peters call for NO INCREMENTALISM. But that is the prerogative of the idealist. I hate to wait.

Also check out these posts.

Free Your Mind

Color Within The Lines

Do We Limit Our Children's Creativity?

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.

The Four Forces of Change: Increasing Complexity

“Increasing compression of time and space produces increasing complexity.” Increasing Complexity is the second of the four forces of change impacting on us, as described by Peter Sheahan in his book Flip.

There are six factors driving increasing complexity.

1. Rapidly interconnecting networks of ideas and people.

“Did you know, for example, that 20 to 25 percent of daily searches on Google are unique? We are generating content—opinions, survey results, perspectives, ideas, or just pointless garbage—so fast at any one time more than one quarter of the World Wide Web is brand new.”

We are going to have to develop standards and practices to teach our students how to navigate through all this information, make informed and appropriate choices, and judge content for usefulness, bias, authority, etc. We will certainly do our students a disservice and our country a disservice if we don’t provide our students with the skills and knowledge to navigate through this environment. It is not a skill most of us needed as we grew up. One trip to the library or flipping through the World Book Encyclopedia was enough.

Times have changed and we need to adapt to ensure we are meeting our students’ needs.
According to Time magazine, the world produced 161 exabytes. That equals 161 billion gigabytes. Imagine that. In other words, the world produced three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written in one year. Understanding how to type a search into Google is not providing our students with the tools they need to succeed in the future.

2. Disruptive technology—innovations in product and process almost always have unintended consequences that challenge our ability to adapt, and reward those with flexibility to flip into new modes of acting and thinking.

Cell phones with built in cameras and texting capabilities are nice features, but of course our students use them to cheat. That is the law of unintended consequences. Social Web 2.0 technology is a wonderful tool that connects students, but then we fight against cyber-bulling and Internet stalkers. As technology is rapidly developed and adopted by our students, we are going to face the challenge of adapting to the consequences they bring to our schools and classrooms.

3. Explosion of choice—in a globalizing economy, no one has a monopoly on any product or service for long, and the consumer’s biggest problem is often choosing among apparently identical offerings.

Teachers and administrators are faced with increasing choices in curriculum, teaching materials, educational software, and technology. Being able to sort through all these choices requires an enormous amount of time, energy, and use of resources. Teachers and administrators are being asked to be savvy enough to make informed and fiscally sound decisions in an environment where the amount of choices is growing daily. 

4. Increasing intangible desires of the market—rising affluence shifts the business imperative from supplying customer needs to meeting customer desires for emotional fulfillment, no matter how mundane the product or service.

The increasing  desire for school choice and schools that specialize in the arts, science, or technology is all a part of fulfilling customer needs. This will only increase in the future.

5. Increased sophistication of technology, systems, and processes—complexity begets complexity.

For example, many schools purchase educational software that becomes obsolete in just a few years or is not functional on quickly aging computers.  The effectiveness of the technology becomes more difficult to measure as we struggle to integrate it into our literacy plans while managing all of the technical issues.  Should you go web-base or buy a server? What is the long-term service agreement? What about software updates? Is this something teachers or administrators should be forced to spend time working through?

6. Legislation—whether it’s financial transparency, safety, the environment, or human rights, the world’s governments are regulating it.

No Child Left Behind, Quality Education Investment Act, High Priority Schools Grant Program, etc, etc. Need I say more? We have binders full of legislation monitoring everything we do. Make a mistake, and have it printed in the papers or posted on the web for the world to see.

As you can see, we in education are facing the same extreme forces that businesses and organizations around the world face. The challenge will be to adapt quickly and successfully. It is going to take some creative and innovative thinking, because what we have done so far, will not take us past where we need to go. One thing is for sure, it's going to get more complex.

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?

The Four Forces of Change: Compression of Time and Space

The forces of change are acting on us. We may not sense it or we may feel it intensely, but change is coming. The forces of change are acting everyday to influence what we do and how we do it.

Peter Sheahan has identified The Four Forces of Change in his new book Flip: How to Turn Everything You Know on Its Head—and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings.

The Four Forces of Change, according to Peter Sheahan, are:
1.    Increasing compression of time and space
2.    Increasing complexity
3.    Increasing transparency and complexity
4.    Increasing expectations on the part of everyone for everything.

Let’s take a look at the first of the four forces, Increasing compression of time and space.

Sheahan writes, “Human beings have always been impatient. Today we expect things to happen faster than ever before. And not just a little bit faster, but over the last few years a lot faster. The quicker something can be something can be done, the quicker we expect it to happen…”

Education is certainly not immune. Think about the compression of time. How many emails do you get a day? People who expect a response the same day sent most of those messages. Data can be pulled up in an instant with databases such as Edusoft or Data Director. New education programs are created yearly and teachers are expected to learn them and put them into place quickly. Requests for information are made frequently and the expectation is that they be returned quickly.

“In summary, increased affluence and rapidly developing  communications technology are compressing  our expectation around time. If the late twentieth century was about doing more with less, then the twenty-first century will be about doing more with less, faster!”

No teacher would argue that the increasing demands of high stakes testing and legislation such as NCLB is driving them to get more teaching squeezed into the same amount of days. Education is going to have to adapt to the compression of time as we asked to do more in the same space of time.

Technology in education is subject to the forces of compressing time. Technology is being developed faster than ever, being adopted by society quicker than ever, which means educators will be expected to integrate new technologies into their classrooms and curriculum sooner than ever.

The compression of space will impact education as well. As the world gets “smaller” we are going to have more opportunities to interact with people from all over the world, whether in person or through technology. This may create more opportunities for our students to learn from those who are live in or have direct knowledge about the subjects our students are learning. Imagine learning about the pyramids of Egypt from the scholars who there everyday or learning about life in Egypt from the people who live there. Virtual field trips and collaboration across the world via technology are a result of compressed space and distance.

As we get “closer” to those we share the planet with, we may view our educational standards in comparison to other countries. Eventually, we will be in competition with many more people for the knowledge work that is so highly sought after. The compression of distance may require that we examine our educational standards in light of what others around the world are doing and what a world where distance and time are compressed. Tom Peters summed it up best when he said, “Distance is dead.”