Education Innovation

Teaching In The White Spaces: Leaving The Right Things Out of Your Instruction

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote

“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub,

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel,

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room,

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there,

Usefulness from what is not there.”

Consider Lao Tzu's lesson in your classroom and in your instruction. The usefulness might be found in what you take away or what you leave out of your instruction. Like a diamond, great instruction requires that we strip away some things to make the whole brilliant and thus more valuable.

Consider this example. You are teaching a lesson on the geography and history of ancient Egypt. Instead of stating for students that the ancient Egyptian civilization arose around the banks of the Nile River leave something out.

Give your students a map or show them a Google Earth shot of Egypt and ask the students where they think the people of ancient Egypt lived. Next ask them why. Remove the facts and let them use their background knowledge and imagination.

While no means a major revelation, it is strange how often we feel the need to fill in the holes, the empty space for our students.

Leaving out the right ideas, concepts, information in our lessons engages the student’s imagination. This is the “white space” of instruction that I referred in Teaching In The White Space

As Matthew May points out in his fine book, The Pursuit of Elegance: Why The Best Ideas Have Something Missing, “What we normally think of as the easiest thing in the world to do—nothing—is in reality often the hardest.”

Doing nothing during a lesson is hard. We know we should let the students have some think time, or develop their own ideas and theories, but we often feel so pressed for time we simply ignore what we know we should do.

We feel the urge to fill up the time with activity or the silence with our voice. How powerful though, can white space be to engaging our students’ thinking and imagination?

Matthew May points out that the most innovative and creative individuals are, “…creatively engaging people’s imaginations by leaving out the right things.”  

Next time you are planning a lesson, think of what to do, but also think of what not to do. Plan for some “white space.”

Teaching In The White Spaces

According to Wikipedia, “In page layout, illustration and sculpture, white space is often referred to as negative space…. White space should not be considered merely 'blank' space — it is an important element of design which enables the objects in it to exist at all, the balance between positive (or non-white) and the use of negative spaces is key to aesthetic composition."

Wendy Richmond is a visual artist, author, educator and a contributor to Communication Arts. In a recent column she discusses the need for white space in teaching art.

Artists know that designing the void, or the white space is just as important as designing the content that surrounds it. Wendy explains it this way....

"In my teaching, I use the idea of white space as a metaphor. When I develop a syllabus, I also design the activities for which I will not be present. On the first day of class, I tell my students, “By the end of this course, I hope to be the least important person in this room.” I believe that in addition to providing the content, my role is to create an environment that contains an active void. I need to disappear enough for my students to jump in and fill the learning environment with their own excitement and discovery. Again, as in my artwork, it takes confidence to leave that space empty.

I have a friend who teaches memoir writing. In every session, each student reads a short piece of his own writing. In the first two classes, my friend makes notes as she listens, and then delivers a constructive critique. In the next class, she institutes a change. After each reading, instead of delivering her critique first, she waits for the participation of the other students. Inevitably, there is silence; an awkward void where there is no response.

Initially, my friend found it hard to remain quiet. She feels that it is her job to keep the class engaged, to be imparting knowledge. In other words, as she told me, she had to make sure they are getting their money’s worth. It required confidence to not fill the silence with her critique. She had to trust that this emptiness was essential; it allowed the students to develop their own responses. When her students began to talk, there was a new energy that continued not only during the coffee breaks, but between classes as well."

Have you considered the time you are not teaching, not speaking or directing students is just as important as the times you are?

Are you giving your student enough white space to operate in? Reminds me of the idea that the more I am teaching the less I am talking.

When using design thinking to plan your instruction, don’t neglect the white spaces. Find the right balance. It might make all the difference.

STEM Is Not Enough: Moving From STEM to STEAMD

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) is being held out by many as the essential priority of education in America, and in some minds, the key to saving the global competitiveness of the U.S itself. 

I do not dispute the value of STEM. I just believe it is not complete. I believe there is some valuable pieces missing that will complement the power of STEM in meeting the needs of our students and our nation in the 21^st Century.  

It’s time to move from STEM to STEAMD. The addition of the Arts and Design are significant improvements over the original members four members of STEM.  

The arts are a source of culture, a source of creativity, a source of expression, a source of freedom, and a way to express ideas and meaning that STEM just doesn’t provide. Art, dance, theater, music, etc. provide a valuable cultural connection between past and current generations.

 

The New Horizons website puts it this way, “Always among the highest expression of every culture, the arts teach us much about every historical period through its literature, visual arts, music, dance, and drama. Today it is recognized that to be truly well educated one must not only learn to appreciate the arts, but must have rich opportunities to actively participate in creative work. The arts are languages that most people speak, cutting through individual differences in culture, educational background, and ability. They can bring every subject to life and turn abstractions into concrete reality. Learning through the arts often results in greater academic achievement and higher test scores.” 

Art is important. 

The D is for Design. Design and Design Thinking takes STEM and directs it into meeting human needs and centers it on people. It gives STEM meaning and purpose. Design Thinking takes STEM and uses it to solve problems, especially Wicked Problems. The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960's by mathematician and planner RittelHorst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science

Churchman describes wicked problems as, " a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing."

Our students are going to be asked to solve wicked problems. Wicked problems will need to have designed solutions. Our students need the skills of design and design thinking to focus STEM on meeting human needs and understanding the scope of human problems.
The power of combining Arts and Design with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math makes for a more complete and well-rounded focus for our students. Most importantly, it provides context, meaning, application, and wisdom through which STEM can be applied.

 

So from STEM to STEAMD…that is Education Innovation.

Gever Tulley's Tinkering School

eXperience and eXpectations- Education's X-Problems

In my previous post, Problem X: eXploring and eXposing Problems In Education

I explored what frog designer Adam Richardson calls X-problems. In this post I go deeper into exploring the differences between wicked problems and X-problems.

Why is public education facing more than just wicked problems, but X-problems?

For public schools these X-problems might be a question of experience and expectation.

Adam Richardson, in his new book Innovation X, identified several factors that differentiate X-problems from wicked problems and as you will see they point to issues of experience and expectation in public schools.

More and Better Competition: The presence of competition, and competitors that are getting better and more diverse.

“The major element missing from the traditional definition of wicked problems is competition.”

Does public education have competition?

Private Schools

On-line virtual schools

Home School

“Certainly wicked problem address the issue of competition of stakeholders, but primarily stakeholders who have a common interest and will mutually benefit for the solution.”

The competition that public education is facing is expanding in number and diversity.

Private schools, on-line virtual schools, and home schools have no common interest with public schools. They compete for students and parent support alike. They attempt to differentiate themselves through the experience they provide and expectations they meet.

Public schools are teaching based institutions. That’s what they provide. Students are seeking learning and learning is not confined within the walls of public schools. Learning is becoming somewhat akin to the “cloud” of computing. As more and more great teaching goes online, students will be able to access more content, great content, in virtual and physical space. The learning cloud is going to provide fierce competition to public schools, especially at the secondary level. That is competition.

So the X-problem for public school is what do they do about it?

More Demanding Customers: The need to satisfy more demanding customers and provide superior customer experiences.

“The more informed our customers are and the higher their expectations, the better we will be positioned to demonstrate our differentiation.” 

The public is the customer and private, on-line, and home schools are steadily eroding the monopoly that public schools have long held. We as a nation of discriminating consumers are no longer content with things that just work, we demand more. We demand design.

“These differentiation and expectation trends often translate into increased demand for aesthetic qualities of using a product, not just its raw functionality. As Daniel Pink has put it, ‘For business, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique and meaningful.”

Who wants to send their student to a boring sterile institutionalized buildings, surrounded with fences, lacking any aesthetic beauty, with an crumbling physical infrastructure, out-dated technology and equipment, cramped spaces, etc?

“The term customer experience refers to the qualitative experience of using a new product: how easy it is to use, the emotions that are evoked by it both during and after use, the self-image that the customers feel they are projecting, and of course who well the product satisfies their needs and desires. The customer experience should be considered.”

When the public thinks of public schools do they think?

“…how a product does its job is now as important as what is does.”

Public schools are facing challenges on many fronts, but one of the ones that most education leaders and managers are ignoring is the “how.” It’s not going to be enough to just teach curriculum to students, society is going to demand more than just functional competency.

Nordstrom’s is more than just a department store. Apple desktops and laptops are more that just computers. Disneyland is more than just a few rides. They provide an experience. Does public education provide and experience? Yes, but is it the experience that society demands of them? It’s all about the experience.

Customer Expectations Are Resetting: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“Customers no longer judge based on solely on comparison with direct competitors; they use standards set elsewhere: my satisfaction with a new dishwasher may be blunted by comparison to the ease of use of my iPod, for example.”

Take the examples I mentioned in the section above. Society is not just going to measure public school against public school or public school against private school, etc. Society is going to start measuring public school against the customer experience of a Nordstrom’s, or the encompassing emotional and sensory experience of a Disneyland. Society is not just going to compare the technology in school, but how that technology experience compares to the design and ease of use provided by the iPod and iTunes.

Systems, Not Products: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“What often goes unrecognized is that every product is part of a system.”

Everything at our public school is a product, but is also part of a system. The problem for public schools is that the products are not being integrated to produce an excellent system. Different text, different standards, Curriculum covers things not on the test. The test assesses things not in the curriculum. New technology doesn’t work with old technology. They myriad of differences in policies, procedure, rules, regulations, organizations, etc. make it difficult teacher, student, and parent alike to navigate through all these differences.

Society is looking for results, but results with an experience. The system that has developed around public education provides varying results and virtually ignores experience. We are ignoring the “how” of what we do. 

“Developing complex integrated systems is the new order, and it forces pieces of a company to come together and collaborate in ways that organizational silos had not previously required or even allowed.”

When a teacher, principal, or other school employees says to parent, “That’s just not the way it works.” Or “I can’t do that because we are not allowed.” or “I know it doesn’t make sense, but that is just the reality.” we demonstrating to the parent, to society, that our system won’t work for them. We are not able to provide the experience they seek or meet their expectations.

So what do we do?

Emergent Clarity: Clarity about the problem emerges slowly, as with wicked problems, but iterative approaches to solving them are necessary, in contrast to the one-shot deal of wicked problems.

In other words we need a lot of ideas, we need to try them, and we need to build on the ones that work and abandon those that don’t. Continually arguing about the one idea to solve it all is not going to move us forward. Government is usually lacking in ideas and loathe to abandon ideas that are not effective. Tweaking the edges is not going to solve the problems of public education.

The sooner public education begins the prototyping new models and methods, the sooner we can learn more about the very definition of the problem we face. Each prototype offers clarity and insight about the very nature of the problem. Without making attempts to solve public educations problems we are limiting our understanding of just what the problem is.

Clarity will emerge. The questions of experience and expectation can be answered.

Problem X: eXploring and eXposing Problems In Education

Albert Einstein famously said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

When it comes to the problems of education, there has been a lot of great thinking done by a lot of great people. Ask a thousand educators, students, parents, researchers, business people, or politicians what the problems of education are in America today and you are bound to get a thousand different answers. Ask these same people how to solve these problems and you will get a thousand different solutions.

 

The problem of education in America today is not just a simple problem, or even a complex problem, but a wicked problem. But it’s more than a wicked problem… it is an X-problem.

 

 

 

Adam Richardson of frog design coined the term X-problem in his new book Innovation X.

 

Adam explains that most organizations or systems face 4 types of problems.

Simple Problems: These are problems for which both the problem and solution are easily defined.

 

Which budget should be used to purchase supplemental materials? Which grade level will require an additional teacher next year? Who is going to teach the new section of Latin? Which classrooms need instructional aides?

 

Complex Problems: Here the problem is known, but the solution is not.

 

How can we get students to complete their homework? Which technology is best to introduce into an elementary classroom? Which curriculum will best meet the needs of our students who are two years below grade level? How do we create a system that allows for student input? What is the most effective assessment of reading comprehension for English Learners?  How can we increase teacher collaboration and trust?

 

Wicked Problems: The challenge here is that neither the problem nor the solution is known. How can you define a good solution when cannot even state what the problem is?

I previously discussed wicked problems here [Wicked Problems Need Designed Solutions].

 

The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960's by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science.

 

Churchman describes wicked problems as, " a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing."

 

There is no definitive statement of the problem, and each solution reveals new aspects of the problem.

 

How do we fix public education? What is the problem? Which part is broken?

 

Take the issue of technology. Is technology essential in education? Do we need more technology in school? How much technology is enough in school? Which technology should we focus on? Who decides? How do we measure it? How do we pay for it?

 

Or take the issue of creativity. Do we attempt to teach creativity or let students use their own creativity? Can creativity be taught? If so, who should teach it? How do we measure it? Is there good creativity and bad creativity? Is creativity in school even a problem?

 

Or how about the questions of making students go to school longer. They do they go more days or should they go longer each day? What about breaks? Should they go to school on Saturday? How long is too long? Do we pay teachers more for the longer day or just for more days?

 

Each one of the problems opens us another can of worms as you dive deeper into it. There are so many factors involved with each. What does the research say? What do the parents think? What is best for the brain? How will it impact the budget? Who makes the final decisions? Who is in charge? What is best for our society? Which will ensure success in the future? Is it scalable? Who should be involved in crafting the solution?

 

As you try to answer these questions more questions arise. It really gets...wicked.

 

None of these “problems” can be explicitly stated as a problem statement, because, they may or may not even be problems. It all depends on your perspective.

 

Since there is no definitive problem, there is no definitive solution.

 

Can’t fix it if we can’t point out exactly what it is we need to fix.

Each wicked problem is risky because it is unique, and it’s hard to test or simulate solutions ahead of time.

 

There is no way to simulate a new public education system in America, without actually building a new public education system in America. Simulating a school model here or there does not provide solutions or the same experience as a new system of public education. The scale is simply not comparable.

 

There are many stakeholders with different perspectives on the problem and how to resolve it.

 

Teacher, parent, student, administrator, union official, county official, state official, federal official, education researcher, business person, school board member, elected city, county, state, and federal politician, statistician, economist, sociologist, technologist, etc. They all have a different definition of the problem and a different solution.

 

But there is a problem even more difficult to grapple with than the wicked problem. 

It’s called the X-problem. Why X-problems? Adam shares his thinking on why X represents another level of problem. 

 

X is extreme: X-problems are extreme in risk and complexity.

Educating an entire country’s population and building a system that does it in the most effective way is a risky proposition. You can’t build the wrong system. You can’t make a mistake.

 

X is mysterious: Every X-problem revolves around questions that have never been asked before, or challenges that are unprecedented.

 

Solving the “problems” of education and doing so in a way that meets all the needs of all the stakeholders now and in the future is going to create some questions that we have never encountered of thought of.

 

X is a crossroad: A crossroads is a place where things converge together—and diverge outward. At a crossroads one must make a choice among paths, each of which could entail risk or opportunity.

 

Do we take the road of creativity, technology, brain research, etc? Saying yes to certain solutions requires that we say no to others. Which do we choose?

 

X means opportunity: X marks the spot for treasure—the winnings that come from finding the problem and capitalizing on it before others can.

 

In the global competition for knowledgeable, creative, innovative, caring, informed, collaborative, cooperative, and intelligent populace, the country that can figure out which problems to solve and which solutions to choose will have an advantage in the future.

 

See what I mean? This is not easy. It’s not a simple, complex, or even a wicked problem. Education is an X-problem.

 

There are several factors that Adam says differentiate X-problems from wicked problems that I will discuss a coming post. 

It's Never Too Early- Teaching Design Thinking In High School

From the website Good comes this article (Why We Should Teach Design Early) by Rob Stokes,a Senior Interaction Designer at frog design in Austin, Texas, on the need to begin teaching design thinking in high school.

What follows is an excerpt from the article...

 

Designers, through training and experience, develop a different lens through which to see the world. They move through spaces, environments, and systems, making observations and developing insights about what works well and what doesn’t. They then use those observations and insights to create innovative solutions for everyday problems. If design is the crossroads of beauty and purpose, design thinking is the intersection of creative and analytical thinking.

But when do we learn how to think like a designer?

In today’s world of standardized tests and performance-based educational funding, students are not evaluated on the way they approach a problem, but whether or not they come up with the right answer.

What happens when there are many right answers, as is often the case with non-linear design solutions? When can we start teaching students how to creatively evaluate their ideas?

Design education typically begins at the college level, but if we wait until then to teach design thinking we are missing critical points in the growth of young minds, whose ability to think creatively is boundless. Teaching high school students to think like designers would help shape the way they look at the world around them and positively affect their future endeavors.

Inspired by these notions, a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design got together and started an initiative called “TeachDesign.” The objective of this initiative is to expose high school students to design methodologies through immersive, real-world projects that have a lasting positive impact on the participating students, school, and community.

Read more: http://www.good.is/post/why-we-should-teach-design-early/#ixzz0fl4BQciH
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Design Thinking Picture of What The Education Experience Could Be

Design Thinking is about the human experience. David Kelley shared his mind map of what the K-12 education experience could be through the lens of Design Thinking in this article in Fast Company. 

 

Design Thinking- d.School Bootcamp Bootleg

The d.school at Standford has put to together this collection of the methods, modes and mindsets about Design Thinking into this Bootcamp Bootleg.

Download Bootcampbootleg2009 

 

Brainstorming at the d.school

This video from the Design School (d-school) at Stanford provides a great look at what Brainstorming is and isn't. Useful for all Professional Learning Communities, Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives, and school leadership teams.