Education Innovation

Professional Learning Communities on the Rocks.

Professional Learning Communities on the rocks!
 

Professional Learning Communities should be put on I.C.E. Education Innovation’s definition of on the rocks actually means on I.C.E. cubes.  An I.C.E cube is an acronym for Innovation, Imagination, Creativity, Collaboration, Experimentation, and Exploration. The six traits form the cube, the I.C.E. cube.

In his book Group Genius, Keith Sawyer describes 10 conditions that must exist for group flow to emerge. Today we will look at conditions 1-5.

1. The Groups Goal
“One study of more than five hundred professionals and managers in thirty companies found that unclear objectives became the biggest barrier to effective team performance.”

If you grade level teams, departments, or PLC’s don’t know what they are meeting about and what they are expected to achieve, results are going to be poor.

The principal or chair of the group needs to manage what I call the Innovative Goal Paradox. That is, you want to be clear on the objective that must be achieved or the product produced, but flexible on the means the group achieves it. It’s like telling them the destination on a map, but leaving it up to the group to determine the route, time of travel, method of travel, etc.

2. Close Listening
Are your PLC teams listening to each other?

“Group flow is more likely to emerge when everyone is full engaged—what improvisers call ‘deep listening,’ in which member of the group don’t plan ahead what they’re going to say, but their statements are genuinely unplanned responses to what they hear.”

Let the student work, data, etc. drive the dialogue. Don’t come in with preconceived ideas.

“Innovation is blocked when one (or more) of the participants already has a preconceived idea of how to reach the goal…”

3. Complete Concentration
Time is valuable, especially when you are taking time from the teachers to have them meet in their PLC groups. You want to maximize the use of the time to honor the participants and the process.

Deadlines are not a productive tool for developing innovative ideas. Similarly, keep distractions away from meetings.

“Group flow is more likely when a group can draw a boundary, however temporary or virtual, between the group’s activity and everything else.”

4.  Being In Control
“Many studies have found that team autonomy is the top predictor of team performance. But in group flow, unlike solo flow, control results in a paradox because participants must feel in control, yet at the same time they must remain flexible, listen closely, and always be willing to defer to the emergent flow of the group. The most innovative teams are the ones that can manage the paradox.” 

This is one of the toughest to get for teachers because they work in isolation and have much autonomy and control of what they want to do. In the PLC, teachers will need practice letting go of control individually, while being allowed to have control of the process.

5. Blending Egos
“In group flow, each person’s idea builds on those just contributed by his or her colleagues.

In other words, everyone needs to contribute to get the best result or idea for how to meet the needs of students. Everyone!

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways might technology be used to enhance these 5 conditions?

How might the organization of your school’s PLC need to change to achieve these 5 conditions?

What probing question could you ask of your grade level or department PLC’s to determine the level of these 5 conditions being present?

What is your hunch about these conditions in your PLC’s?

In what ways could you better focus your time and energy to ensure these conditions exist?

How might you question your assumptions about your PLC’s and investigate what is truly happening?

In what ways might you adapt these conditions to your PLC’s?

How might you put existing time for teacher planning, meetings, etc. to better use and increase PLC time?

Recommended Reading:

Keith Sawyer's blog

The Vision-less Learning Community.-Tempered Radical blog

Education Innovation Is A Stop On The Post2Post Virtual Book Tour

On Monday, July 14th, Education Innovation will be the first stop on the Idea Sandbox Post2Post Tour for the book Jack's Notebook  a business novel about creative problem solving by Greg Fraley.

Please make sure you come back to read Greg's interview on Monday, July 14th. 

July 2008

Jack's Notebook

by Gregg Fraley
Author Site | Amazon US | Amazon UK

Site	Date
Education Innovation by Rob Jacobs	Mon, July 14
The Naked Idea by John Lepp	Tue, July 15
Marketing Fresh Peel by Chris Wilson	Wed, July 16
InnoBlog	Thur, July 17
The Brand Chef by Andrew Clark	Fri, July 18

See you on Monday!

Doctorate Sweepstakes: Help Choose The Winner

The Education Innovation Doctorate Sweepstakes

I have deiced to get my doctorate and I want some help in making my choice. I have narrowed down the field to three finalists. The finalists were selected for their quality of program and their proximity to my home. Share your thoughts and opinions on the finalists. The three finalist are      (in no particular order)

The University of La Verne: Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership

Pepperdine: Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership

University of Southern California: Ed.D. in Education: Leadership in Urban School Settings

Help me make the choice and decide the winner of the Education Innovation Doctorate Sweepstakes. Your voice could change my fate!

Thinking Better: The Productive Thinking Model Part 2

Continuing with my examination of the Productive Thinking Model laid out in Tim Hurson’s book Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide To Productive Thinking. Looking at student discipline with T.P.M.

Step 2 of the Productive Thinking Model is called “What’s Success?” As I lead my staff through an examination of issues related to developing a new discipline plan, we examined what was going on in step 1 and discovered our Target Future, we then moved right into step 2, which focuses on knowing when we have arrived at our Target Future.

Tim describes how organizations tend to view proposed change in one of 5 viewpoints.
1.    Things were fine before. I don’t see what good any of this is going to do.
2.    Anything would be better than the way things are now.
3.    Not as good as I’d hoped but not as bad as I’d feared. In fact, some of these ideas are okay.
4.    This is the (you fill in the ordinal number)  (you fill in the expletive) change program we’ve had in        the last (you fill in the cardinal number) years!
5.    There goes my workload again.

But, Tim adds, “regardless of which camp they are in, most people will also think the following: It’ll never stick.”

The Productive Thinking Model is designed to help pull people from the past and prevent them from getting trapped in former patterns. Tim describes the use of “Future Pull.”

“The purpose of What’s Success? is to create Future Pull: to make you care. Deeply. I like to think of this phase of the Productive Thinking Model as throwing a grappling hook into the future. You wind up and hurl the hook into the most compelling future you can imagine. It latches on firmly, and then you start to pull yourself into that future.”

One of the tools that can be used to establish Future Pull is the Imagined Future (IF). You imagine what it would look like if your Imagined Future was a reality. Basically, you imagine a day in the life of your future. What do you see, hear, feel, think, etc?  What is happening?  This requires some divergent creative thinking ability. Surprisingly, this was an area that we struggled a bit with. We try to teach creativity to our students, but we struggle ourselves. Not wanting to get too bogged down, we came up with a few points to put on our list and continued moving forward.

The next tool we used is called DRIVE. The DRIVE tool is used to define the characteristics of a successful outcome. The DRIVE tool enables us to develop a set of observable Success Criteria.

Do: What do you want your eventual solution to do? What must is achieve?
Restrictions: What changes or impacts must you avoid?
Investment: What resources are you willing to allocate? What are your “not-to-exceeds”?
Values: What values must you live by in achieving your solution?
Essential Outcomes: What are the nonnegotiable elements of success? What measurable targets must be met?

Our Do’s: affect change, everyone on the same page, seamless, clear, fair, encompassing, motivation, and raise expectations.

Our Restrictions: time, attitudes, varying expectations, and perfectionism.

Our Investments (Resources): time, equipment, Multi-purpose room, staff, and people.

Our Values: equity, respect, accountability, moral development, and discipline with dignity.

Essential Outcomes: attitude, buy-in, training, and excellent plan.

So we have now developed a clear picture of where we are and where we want to go with Step 1:What’s Going On and have a sense of what it will look like if we arrive at our imagined future in Step 2: What’s Success.

One of the difficulties I found as we have gone through the process is that many people are tentative to get very creative and divergent in their thinking. We are so used to having ideas judged that we aren’t used to just letting ideas fly free. This is where the ability to ask insightful and thought provoking questions is really useful.

In addition, as a facilitator, it is very difficult to manage the session and also contribute ideas of your own. My brain was on overload as I tried to pull ideas from the staff and also ensure that I was participating my adding my own ideas. I guess that is why organizations often bring consultants like Tim Hurson, Greg Fraley, Dan Roam, or Andrew Razeghi into help with the process. When we were done I needed a nap, but I was so energized. I loved it. I absolutely loved it!

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 3: HOW: School Values vs. School Rules

Part 3

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

By: Dov Seidman

 

“We often rely on rules when they are not, in fact, the most efficient or effective solution to getting the results we desire.” Understanding that flaw, according to Dov Seidman, “is vital to thriving in a world of HOW.”

Have you ever participated in the creation or revision of a school sites rules? Do you ever ask yourself when students are going to finally follow the rules that your school has set up?  We all do. Seems like whenever we get a good set of rules, the students just figure a way around them. Then it is back to the drawing board with new revisions or brand new rules.

“Despite the best intentions, people create rules variously and often in reaction to behaviors deemed unacceptable to the larger goals of the group. That is why we often find ourselves revising the rules when new conditions reveal their loopholes.”

In other words, schools have to constantly revise their rules in response to new conditions or behaviors. Most schools today have created rules in response to cell phones, iPods, or “Heelyz” skate shoes. All rules created based in response to new behavior from students.

Students act, we respond. Not very efficient or systematic way of regulating student behavior because it always places teachers and administrators in a defensive position reacting to an ever changing set of student behaviors.

Consider the rule of the Teachers’ Lounge. How many of us have seen a scenario similar to this? “A manager puts up a sign in your company lunchroom that says, ‘Please Clean the Microwave after You Use It’; then another, ‘Do Not Put Your Feet on the Tables’; then a third, ‘Don’t Eat Other People’s Food.’ All these rules, and the myriad more little lunchroom dos and don’ts that your manager madly prints out and posts, attempt to codify a single value; respect. Rather and declare a common value, such as, ‘Respect Our Common Spaces,’ most rules makers spend their time chasing human ingenuity, which races along generally complying with the rules while blithely creating new behaviors that exist outside of them.”

Teachers and administrators are locked in a race to catch up with changes in student behavior. Teachers and administrators create rules based on what former students have done. Current students will do new things that teachers and administrators will seek to regulate. Thus to cycle or defensive reaction continues.

There is a further impact to rules. According to Seidman, “An excess of rules breeds and environment where we are less conscious about what is right. We become dependent on the rule book to govern our behavior.” Should we do this or that becomes is it forbidden or required. We leave behind the common sense of values (right vs. wrong or could vs. should) and replace it with rules that require us or forbid us to act.

Instead of always seeking to control the behavior of our students or our teachers and administrators by writing rules for every behavior possible, we should give them values to live up to. “Constitutions are powerful documents because they are filled with the values and principles of the people they govern.”

“The key to long-term sustained success does not lie in breaking all the rules; it lies in transcending the rules and harnessing the power of values.” 

Does your school have a set of values that students and employees are expected to live up to. Or, are you locked in the defensive reaction cycle of continually creating new rules to govern behaviors. Are you seeking to inspire or control?

For some excellent thoughts on this subject I suggest you check out Dov’s post  “Breaking the Ruler” over at his blog Howblogazine.com

Rob Jacobs

Creativity and Problem Solving

Jack’s Notebook by Gregg Fraley is a wonderful book about using Creative Problem Solving (CPS) to provide, “ a better balance of imagination and analysis.”  Gregg believes that, “With improved creative-thinking skills we can meet more of our challenges, solve more problems, and take advantage of opportunities by creating novelty that is useful.”

Gregg Fraley hits upon a point that is near and dear to my heart as an educator who is thinking about the future and the skills that will be necessary to succeed in our modern information age. He says, “Ideas are the most important asset any person or organization has. It’s very straightforward: if you have more ideas, and better ideas, you’ll be more successful—however you define success—at whatever your goals are. Of course, you have to take action on these ideas if you want to enjoy the fruits of your labors.” 

I wanted to stand up and applaud! It is clear to me, and I hope many of you, that the one thing that is going to set our students apart in the global economy is their creativity and ideas. If a manager has two applicants if front of him or her, and both of these applicants have learned the same knowledge and facts, but is going to set one apart from the other. Creativity!  Problem solving skills!  Two people who both passed standardized tests and assessments are going to be differentiated in some way. That is the cold hard facts. No employer is going to care about your elementary school C.S.T. test scores or you high school S.A.T. What they want to know is how will you solve problems because business and real life are filled with them.