Hearing is not...Learning
Learning is not...Application
Application is not...Accountability
Accountability is not...Life Change
Life Change is...Accountability
Accountability is...Application
Application is...Learning
Learning is...Hearing
Hearing is not...Learning
Learning is not...Application
Application is not...Accountability
Accountability is not...Life Change
Life Change is...Accountability
Accountability is...Application
Application is...Learning
Learning is...Hearing
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.”
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."
"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."
When using design thinking to plan
your instruction, don’t neglect the white spaces. Find the right balance. It might make all the
difference.
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.
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.
Is
it possible that teaching could be designed so that software could do the same
job a teacher does? Can a teacher’s role be broken down into a piece of
software code?
Seth
Godin shares the following law in his book Linchpin.
The
Law of the Mechanical Turk
"Any
project, if broken down into sufficiently small, predictable parts, can be
accomplished for awfully close to free."
A
prime example of this law would be Wikipedia. Seth explains, "Wikepedia
took advantage of the law of the Mechanical Turk. Instead of relying on a
handful of well-paid people calling themselves professionals, Wikipedia thrives
by using loosely coordinated work of millions of knowledgeable people, each
happy to contribute a tiny slice of the whole."
"The
internet has turned white-collar work into something akin to building a pyramid
in Egypt. No one could build the entire thing, but anyone can haul one brick
into place."
So
how is it that we have arrived at a place in education where instruction can be
provided by a computer and an Internet connection?
Roger Martin, author of The Design of
Business, would say we have driven the teaching (not all) of students through
the "knowledge funnel.”
Mystery-Knowledge
Funnel Stage 1: Roger describes this stage as the “mystery.” Ask questions and
exploring the mystery. For example, "What should students be able to do or
what should they know when they complete school." Or maybe, "What
should education look like?"
Heuristic-
Knowledge Funnel Stage 2: A heuristic is a general rule of thumb. We create a
rule of thumb because it helps us break down our question or our mystery of
into a manageable size. As Roger describes it, "It is a way of thinking
about the mystery that provides simplified understanding of it and allows those
with access to the heuristic to focus their efforts."
In
teaching a heuristic might be that we should start by connecting to prior
knowledge and then build background knowledge or that we want to have student
engaging each other. Another might be that using graphic organizers helps
student better organize the information they are working with. Its what we
would call best practices. Generally, it is a rule that should be followed in
teaching a lesson, etc.
Algorithm-Knowledge
Funnel Stage 3- Roger describes stage 3 this way. " As an organization
puts its heuristic into operation, studies it more, and thinks about it
intensely, it can convert from a general rule of thumb...to a fixed formula.
That formula is the algorithm..." We might call it research based. There
is validity and reliability to applying the algorithm. We get the result we
want each time we apply the formula.
So
I am wondering as Educational knowledge is being driven through the knowledge
funnel, are we still in the mystery stage, the heuristic stage, or have we
arrived at the algorithm stage? The mystery of stage 1 requires the asking of
questions and seeking of problems to solve. The general rule of thumb required
of the heuristic in stage 2 requires some artistry. The algorithm of stage 3,
standardized, codified, honed, and refined to such a point that ultimately
anyone could with access to it could deploy it and achieve more less the same
results.
As
Roger Martin points out, the ultimate destination for the algorithm is computer
code. "Once knowledge has been pushed to a logical, arithmetic, or
computational procedure, it can be reduced to software."
Isn't
this what much of the current developments in educational software is doing. A
student responds to the software and the software responds with what is needed
next. Over time and with enough opportunities the software is able to move the
student through all the required learning tasks it was designed to provide and
do so using research based methods to instruct these tasks
Teaching
on the algorithmic level.
Now
if teaching can be achieved on the algorithmic level then Seth Godin might say,
"It only follows, then, that as you eliminate the skilled worker...then
you also save money on wages as build a company that's easy to scale. In other
words, first you have interchangeable parts, then you have interchangeable
workers."
Teachers
viewed as interchangeable. Is this possible? Is this something that software
designers and on-line learning researchers would desire?
Online
learning is opening the doors for thousands of willing students and willing
students to connect and to break down knowledge into smaller pieces. The
teacher in the classroom is slowly losing his or her monopoly to an online
crowd or teachers who have the knowledge and expertise to teach their subject
to thousands of willing students who want to connect and learn at their own
choosing.
Is online learning disruptive enough to begin the making the classroom teacher dispensable?
Seth compares the Dispensable Employee vs. Indispensable Employee
Dispensable
Employee
"The
cause of the suffering is the desire to of organizations to turn employees into
replaceable cogs in a vast machine. The easier people are to replace, the less
need to be paid. And so far, workers have been complicit in this
commoditization."
"The
future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It's easy to buy a
cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef
book."
Are
we in education chefs or cooks?
Artists
or house painter?
Composers
or players of musical instruments?
Architects
or builders?
Movie
producers or movie viewers?
The
inventor or the factory worker?
Designers
or users?
Teachers
or computer code?
Do
we adjust to the new reality described by Seth and become indispensable?
Indispensable
Employee
"The
indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her
organization. She is the key player, the one who's difficult to live without,
the person you can build something around."
Design Thinking, which I think is a powerful approach to re-designing education, requires a sense of humanity at its core. Teaching and learning is fundamentally a human experience. Teachers, along with students, provide the human experience that makes the learning experience so powerful. Teachers are indispensable to a well-designed learning experience. My hope is that teachers are never replaced with code.
The design I am looking for is an indispensable teacher,
not an algorithm.
I have been reading Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Here are few thoughts from the book and few of my own. "Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees. The compliant masses don't help so much when you don't know what to do next." Old System "The system we grew up with is based on a simple formula: Do your job. Show up. Work hard. Listen to the boss. Stick it out. Be part of the system. You'll be rewarded." "That's a scam." "There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do." ABC "Thorton May correctly points out that we have reached the end of what he calls attendance-based compensation (ABC). There are fewer and fewer good jobs where you can get paid merely for showing up. Instead successful organizations are paying for people who make a difference and are shedding everyone else." The truest determiner of teacher pay is not ability, performance, creativity, innovation, or initiative...it is simply..who got here first? Factory worker thinking. Old system thinking. Factory Work "Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but they're still working in the factory." "They push a pencil or process an application or type on a keyboard instead of operating a drill press." "But it is factory work." "It's factory work because it's planned, controlled, and measured. It's factory work because you can optimize for productivity. These workers know what that they're going to do all day--and it's still morning." If your schedule is laid out to the exact minute in pre-determined prescribed fashion, are you more factory worker or white collar knowledge worker? I hope we are not turning Education into McDonalds. Everything done in the same way, following the same procedures simplified and standardized to eliminate judgment, and to produce the same results over and over. This kind of work does not require a knowledge worker it just requires labor. The Pursuit of Interchangeability "The essence of mass production is that every part is interchangeable. Time, space, men, motion, money, and material--each was made more efficient because every piece was predictable and separate. Ford's discipline was to avoid short-term gains in exchange for always seeking the interchangeable, always standardizing." Standards of what should be taught-School, state, and federal standards Standardized curriculum used. Standards of how the curriculum should be implemented. Standardized pacing. Standardized time/minutes for each subject. Standardized tests of what should be measured. Standardized use of researched based strategies. Standardized use of data collection. Standardized plan of intervention. -RtI Standardized method for collaboration- PLCs. Standardized goals and purpose- NCLB and RTTT Standards on teacher qualification- teacher credentials and education Remember Seth’s warning..."There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do." Is teaching at McDonald's a great job?
“Each step on the ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous steps. To join the group on a step, a consumer need only participate in one of the listed activities at least monthly.”
I believe that each rung of the Social Technographic ladder presents a unique literacy challenge for our students.
As an educator you know the standards, the curriculum, and the methods to bring about literacy. If technology is not part of that you are missing a major component of what our students will need in the coming years. Our students need to be able to climb the "ladder" and it is your job to make sure they get those opportunities.
Top Rung: Creators
These
are the people who, at least once a month, publish a blog, put an
article online, maintain a website, or upload music or videos. In the
United States, about 18% of us on are the top rung or creators.
The percentage is only going to go up. So, what are you doing to prepare your students to be creators? How are you preparing your students to occupy the “top rung” of the Social Technographics ladder?
If you think about it, this is a question of literacy. For example, here are the writing standards for 6th grade in California:
Narrative
write narratives, that(1) establish and develop plot and setting, and choose a point of view that is appropriate to stories
(2) include sensory details and concrete language to develop plot and character
(3) use a range of narrative strategies (e.g., dialogue, suspense)
Expository
Write expository compositions (e.g., description, explanation, comparison and contrast, and/or problem/solution) that
(1) state the thesis or purpose
(2) explain the situation
(3) follow an organizational pattern appropriate to the type of composition (e.g., if problem/solution, then paired)
(4) offer persuasive evidence for the validity of the description, proposed solutions, etc.
Research Reports
Write research reports that
(1) pose relevant questions narrow enough to be thoroughly covered
(2)
support the main idea(s) with facts, details, examples, and
explanations from multiple authoritative sources (e.g., speakers,
periodicals, on-line information searches)
(3) use a bibliography
Persuasive
2.5. write persuasive compositions (or letters for grade 5) that
(1) state a clear position in support of a proposition or proposal
(2)
support the position with organized and relevant evidence; and (3)
anticipate and address reader concerns and counter-arguments
The standards seem to say that we want students to be creators. The question I have is; are we preparing our students to occupy the top rung in the groundswell. Remember, the groundswell is: “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.”
In other words, the groundswell is what is taking place in this new ecosystem called the web where any person, in any place, can be a producer of media. Or, as Clay Shirky says, every person is a one-man media outlet.
So why only 18% participation? Obviously this is an optional activity. Nobody has to be a creator. In our classrooms we require that our students be creators. We want all of our students on the top rung. We ask that our students create stories, research reports, projects, and narratives. We are teaching the next generation to succeed in this new online ecosystem. The standards seem to suggest we have the right intentions, but do those standards prepare our students for life in the groundswell? I think it depends on the teacher. The greater the teacher's understanding of the power of the groundswell in the online ecosystem, the better the assignments will utilize technology as part of learning and mastering the standards.
The next rung down: Critics
Critics react to what has been created. This is similar to the responding to literature standard.
Response to Literature
Write responses to literature that
(1) develop an interpretation which exhibits careful reading, understanding and insight
(2) organize the interpretation around several clear ideas, premises, or images
(3) develop and justify the interpretation through sustained use of examples and textual evidence
Again, the question becomes, are we properly preparing our students for being a critic in the groundswell?
When I was a student, I was never allowed to comment on what other students wrote. Even in college, my job was to create. The only opportunities I had to be a critic was in writing a book report. Most of us are simply not used to commenting on blogs. We were not trained to do it as students and we had so few opportunities in our academic lives to practice it. But, our students are growing up in the online ecosystem that allows them to comment and critique nearly everything. They can comment on a song, a picture, a video, place a comment on a blog, put a book review on Amazon, or review a product on CNET.
Their world is the world of the critic. Are we as educators equipping them to succeed in this world? Are we preparing them for life on the second rung? What opportunities do your students have to critique what others have created?
The next rung down: Collectors
Collector collect RSS feeds, save website to Del.icio.us, vote for sites on Digg, and accumulate all forms of created digital media from the online world.
So, what standards address that? How are we preparing our students to be effective collectors of information? What opportunities do our students get to practice the art of selective information collection? How do our students learn to filter information for their select needs? How are we preparing our students to be literate collectors?
The next rung down: Joiners
Members
of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orcut, etc. are all joiners. These are
the people who maintain profiles on social networking sites. My guess
is that most of our students are far ahead of most of their teachers in
this aspect. But, how can we teach our students the skills necessary to
properly maintain these sites for optimal effect and leverage their
power to further themselves via networking?
Our students are natural collaborators and net-workers, but how are we making them literate in the power of networks?
The next rung down: Spectators
Spectators
consume what the rest produce. This is the largest part of the
groundswell. This is about making choices. What they choose to consume
can enhance our students’ education. So, our students need to make
choices that will enhance them as people, as students, as informed
citizens, etc. Of course kids will always choose the strange and
offbeat, but we can equip them to understand what sorts of media are
important for them to consume. What opportunities are your students
getting to be selective literate spectators?
The bottom rung: Inactives
These
are the people who are not impacted by the groundswell at all. For our
students, it might those students who have no access to technology and
the web. I still meet students and parents who have no web access. If
the school isn’t providing it, and they have no access at home, when
are these students given chances to move from inactive to spectator, to
joiner, to collector, to critic, or to creator? We need to think about how we
can provide opportunities and resources for them to climb the Social
Technographic ladder. It is a literacy issue for life in the 21st
century.
Catalytic Questions
In what way is your leadership preparing your school and your students for the literacy of technology?
Is your personal leadership and catalyst or hurdle in the implementation of technologies that will provide opportunities for technology literacy?
In what ways do our current literacy standards meet or fall short of the issues and challenges faced by our students at each rung of the Social Technographic ladder?
In what way can we better prepare our students to be literate creators of information?
How might this look in a classroom?
In what ways can we provide opportunities for our students to be literate critics of created information?
In what ways can we prepare our students to be literate collectors of information?
What might this look like in the classroom?
How might we prepare our students to leverage the power of networks?
In what ways could we prepare our students to make literate choices about the networks they join and the information they place on those networks?
In what was are we preparing our students to be literate spectators of information?
How might we better equip our students to make excellent choices in the information they consume each day?
In what ways can we provide resources or tools to move the non-participating Inactive up the Social Technographic ladder?
At school, the great teachers are the teachers who will show you, not tell you.
Creator and Developer of E.I--EducatationInnovation
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