INTRApreneurs Don't Wait to be Anointed

INTRApreneur- "A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation" The American Heritage Dictionary

The term intrapreneur was coined in the late 70's and became part of corporate discussions in the 90's. The big idea is people can work within organizations to make changes rather than having to strike out on their own to create something new to compete with the former organization. 

And with education being historically slow to innovate, this idea is only now catching on. The constraints around education are designed to squash and kill any ideas that result in a radical transformation of what we do. Thankfully, there are places where intrapreneurship have been nurtured in education. These are the schools where teachers are encouraged to innovate and take the lead to help transform education. This has been happening in small pockets for a very long time. 

We have survived over a decade of micromanaged, creativity killing, lists of trivia disconnected from anything relavant to students in the form of state standards. We are now at a critical point where a new set of standards, the common core, are poised to replace the old list and we have the potential to change schooling for the better. Of course the factory mindset is already trying to craft canned lessons based on the new standards in order to ensure "coverage" and "mastery" forgetting there are children who need to create! People are making the mistake of "standardizing" curriculum again rather than raising the standard as Ken Robinson is fond of pointing out.

In this time of instability, education intrapreneurs must push forward and disturb the status quo. We have to do just as Tina Seelig says, "Don't wait to be anointed!" Now is the time to run away from the factory model to one that brings creativity and problem solving back to the core of what students do. Thinking. Questioning. We have to stop forcing kids to collect the dots. It is time to help them CONNECT the dots. They have to engage deeply and care about what they are learning. 

There is a secret all education intrapreneurs know. Our world is about to be disrupted by technology in a way that will threaten the existence of the profession. Information is literally everywhere. No longer do kids need a teacher to give them information. No longer is memorization the key to future success. Most secondary teaching and university teaching still consists of a teacher telling while classes sit the required time copying information only to tell it back to the teacher on exams. This methodology is dead! Information age technology is the asteroid that is causing its extinction of this dinosaur. And all around the traditional education system people are creating alternatives that provide parents an option to the local school. Parents are lining up to be part of lotteries for these schools and this is only going to continue. Unions will be powerless to help save jobs as the number of teachers needed continues to fall. The shift is happening faster than most people realize. If what you do as a teacher can be replaced by a machine, you will be replaced!

Teachers have to shift to a model of education where they help students find understandings and connections. We have to create lessons where students encounter real issues and ideas. Where the exploration of Renaissance becomes about how ideas shape history and reality rather than matching the people to their accomplishments. Studying plants has to become how nature survives and thrives in environments rather than naming plant parts and functions. And in this new process, students must GENERATE content. They must be able to CREATE and EXPRESS their thinking and ideas. Teachers have to learn how to listen. Students must learn how to actively listen to each other and respond to the ideas of others. Not just through text, but through video, speeches, songs, etc. Our children are growing up in a media-centric world where navigating the resources to gain understanding is the new skill set needed. To learn, unlearn, adapt, and see the world from another perspective. INNOVATION is the goal.

Education intrapreneurs, now is the time to speak up. Parents, now is the time to demand more from your child's school than a copy of what happened to you. 

Want another perspective? Try The Future of Education Eliminates the Classroom. The shift is real folks. It is time to lead! If you ruffle some feathers, good! It's about time.

Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative

“Our job is not to teach subjects, but to teach students.” -- Sir Ken Robinson

The highlight of the CUE conference in Palm Springs for me was the keynote address delivered by Sir Ken Robinson on the morning of March 15, 2013. If you don’t know who he use, just look him up on YouTube and you will find many presentations.

Growing up in Los Angeles I always felt indifferent to movie stars. I saw them, but never had that crazy feeling you see in fans who flail wildly in the stands next to red carpet premieres and awards shows...until Sir Ken stepped out on stage. I felt like I was in the presence of someone very special. So hero worship aside, he delivered a keynote that was funny and poignant.

Sir Ken began with some perspective on humanity and then got to the heart of what he wanted all of us to think about. Schools have to bring back creativity and learn how to let kids be creative again. “Human talents are very much like natural resources in the ground…and they don’t always manifest themselves without the right conditions.”  And the right conditions are not an obsessive focus on standards. For over a decade we have been ticking down those blasted checklists of stuff to teach and have rushed past opportunities for great conversations and creativity. With the new Common Core, we are about to make the same mistake again if we don’t change our thinking. We should be raising the standard of teaching and the pedagogy that will support thinking and creating, not rushing to make everything the same in all grades. Sir Ken points out, “People confuse raising standards with standardization, and they tend to focus on certain standards while neglecting others.”

In an attempt to address the hole created in the obsessive focus on language arts and math test scores, thanks to NCLB, reformers are glomming onto STEM curriculum. To which Sir Ken says, “STEM is not enough!” Once again a complex problem is trying to be solved by a ready-made package of curriculum. As I have mentioned before, the factory mindset is insidious. Too many people are just trying to switch out conveyer belts or looping them through different doors before kids leave the factory. The factory is the problem!

Laying out his three principles for our species, Sir Ken makes the points 1) Humans are diverse, 2) Human beings are inherently creative, 3) Human lives aren’t linear; they are organic.  He goes on to explain that we need schools to embrace these principles because we need innovators. People who can create and adapt. Businesses are saying “adaptability is needed at the core of corporate America – but going through our schools closes that skill.” That’s because we are trapped in the compliance model. Come to class on time, shut up, sit down, absorb, and regurgitate. Not exactly the environment for divergent thinking.

Creativity is the opposite of standardization. Sir Ken went on to explain what he means by creativity. “...by creative we mean contributions that can’t be predicted by standards, but can yet be untapped by some modicum of freedom to create our own standards. Nothing seemed less probable…when I was a child…that I would have the life I have…it wasn’t a plan.  It was an evolution.” So the question becomes are we going to permit and encourage students to evolve or are we going to continue answering their questions for them by tracking kids into ability groups, preventing them from moving out of a label, containing their interests by forcing compliance to a set of standards? In essence, everything education does right now is the opposite of creativity. For heaven’s sake, we have schools that assign letter grades to student art! Really? We are allowing inspector 32 on the educational assembly line to assign a ranking to a work of creativity? I would assume Picasso would have failed his art class in today's school.

“Every life is a conversation between your talents and your experiences,” says Sir Ken. Learning is organic. It doesn’t proceed in a smooth pattern from point A to point B. It is more like a tide. It ebbs and flows. Our experience tells us that. And yet schools are stuck in the factory model. “The educational system is based on our compliance.”  We look for “what they can’t do, not on what they can do.”  Sir Ken asks, “How would it transform teaching if we flipped this philosophy?”

Sir Ken offered some recommendations for how to change education. “We have to get away from standardizing to personalizing. We have to get away from narrowing to embracing the diversity.” Individualize schedules.  Facilitate learning, don’t direct it. Recognize that kids learn at different rates. Find ways to embrace and nurture the unlimited variety of diverse talents. Broaden student experiences. Leverage the power of technology to help make this happen.

He closed with this idea. “George Orwell said, ‘Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.’ Who will win if education cannot evolve?” We can’t sit around waiting for bureaucracies to figure this out. We have to change what we do right now. Every teacher in America can start changing and be part of the revolution tomorrow. There is no need to wait for permission.

Neuroscience and Creativity

"In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. As Mark Twain said, 'Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.' For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become." -- GREGORY BERNS

I am currently enrolled in another MOOC which is exploring Innovation. After discussing Individual constraints to innovation, the professor included a link to an article from the Fast Company on what neuroscience reveals about creativity. (http://www.fastcompany.com/1007044/neuroscience-sheds-new-light-creativity)

The take away from the article is people will always see the familiar and always solve a problem the same way unless their brains are put into a situation that is novel. Our brains are lazy. Once they solve a problem the same way a few times, they soon make a routine that short cuts any new thinking and simply inserts the same answer. They stop seeing the differences in new situations and reduce the world to iconography.

Welcome to the world of the Common Core standards! Teachers are flipping out about the change that is coming. We can't possibly think about changing how we do school because the common core is coming! And the hilarious thing is people are all saying, "I used to do this years ago. We're just going back to what we did before." Really? Reach back into our brains and find the same solutions we had in the past and presto! No thinking required.

While I don't personally find the Common Core to be all that revolutionary, the shift is creating space in which to have conversations and change the way we do school. If we are smart about this, we will use this opportunity to challenge what we have been doing in education and radically change to meet the needs of 21st century children. Which will require more change than the Common Core calls for.

It will require us to get uncomfortable and put our brains in novel situations in order to generate new ideas. We have to get out of the herding mentality and quit using old solutions over and over again.

We have to pay attention to what is happening. Be present. Be aware. This is a very difficult thing for us to do because our brains have a tendency to be lazy. The following video illustrates just how inattentive our brains can be!

And an even longer example of change blindness from Dateline NBC.

To unlock student creativity, unlock teacher creativity

At this year's CUE conference in in Palm Springs I had the great fortune of being introduced to the work of the Thornburg Institute. The ideas presented in several of the sessions were music to my ears. Literally in the one presented by Ferdi Serim who played the flute to us during paired discussion.

The following video illustrates the thinking of the institute and the message that is so vital in this time of change. Students can't be freed to be creative if the teacher isn't first. We have to change our pedagogical model of education, not just add a new set of standards.

Our current content-based curriculum model is dead wrong. The focus is on delivering the answer to children. This is a creativity killer! As David Thornburg says in the video, "We are in a situation right now where we are providing students with the opportunity to learn things that are not going to help them in their capacity to learn more on their own in the future."

Teachers, stop ticking down the list of standards taught! It is time to engage students in the creative process and let them discover the answers to questions. Those who do not own the journey cannot see how to chart the way through the next one! It is our job to help students navigate, not drag them to the destination.

Time and Priorities

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."
--H. Jackson Brown


Over the years I have seen a fair number of “changes” in education. Most of them required very little effort honestly. Textbook adoptions were the biggest issue for most teachers. The hours teachers put into complying with a publisher’s program which resulted in kids still just reading and answering questions was time wasted! It was a misplaced priority. To really do something to change education and meet the needs of kids requires real change, real effort, and a deprogramming of factory thinking. 

Recently my school district launched an initiative to “Change the way we do school.” While this is a district-wide push, there would also be a small group of teachers who would be paid to meet and help chart the course to 21st Century learning. The information nights about this were sparsely attended. People complained about the shortness of notice to apply for the team. People wanted to know where the money was coming from. All the usual complaining and whining so common to education. I sat through the presentation and I was thrilled to see such a large institution embracing the journey in a way I did not expect. 

The previous leadership in our district was obsessed with compliance and franchising our schools to the point we referred to them as Mc Middle Schools. Everyone was required to use the same materials. Math teachers were required to be on a certain page in the textbook by a certain date. Innovation was stifled because factory thinking and compliance to rules was king. Words like risk were taboo. Ten years of wasted efforts. A decade down the drain in an effort to shore up the past practices. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved forward. My district is very far behind.

Now we have new leadership with a vision. To my district’s credit, the target for this new initiative isn’t defined at all. The goal is to move forward and improve education and learning for all kids. In a sense, move away from what we have always done because the world has changed. Anyone who is trying to embrace 21st Century pedagogy would have been thrilled by the stated effort. Our superintendent even used the word RISK. I expected lightning to strike him dead! It was great to see excitement by the teachers who attended. Of course there were those who left and commented, “That was vague.”

The factory mindset of teachers is constantly looking for prescriptions. The profession has been poisoned by compliance thinking and it is going to be very hard to innovate in some classrooms. Perhaps like the children of Israel wandering in the desert, a generation is going to have to pass on before real progress can be made. I hope not.

One thing is for certain. If we don’t change our priorities, we will be wasting time. And when people gripe that they have no time, I think about all the other innovators and game changers that came before us. They had the same amount of hours and they made a difference. We have excuses not to change. “I don’t have time” is a very telling statement. It really means, “It isn’t a priority.”

You have plenty of time if you have the right priorities.

The Sheep Factory

Few people in America, including teachers, know how our educational system began. Most universities teach about the beginning of schooling without an analysis of what impact those early ideas have had on our present reality.

This, of course, is quite descriptive of our entire system of education. Get to class on time, sit down, shut up, absorb information, go home a practice it, come back to class and regurgitate it, and then forget it.

While that may seem a rather harsh analysis, I dare you to ask students what they see. Think back to your own education. I think you will find education in America has changed little. And that was the point of the founders of the American education system.

In 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussian army and that embarrassment lead to a reimagining of the Prussian education system.  Their goal was to create a system that would turn out obedient workers and soldiers who didn’t question authority. In fact, they simply wanted citizens who would slide into their spot in the social fabric and be content being part of the machine.  Ultimately they wanted “well disciplined students who would follow orders without questioning authority...Every step in the education process was calculated to offer authority figures the least amount of trouble and consequently train a well disciplined albeit docile citizen.” http://nj.npri.org/nj98/05/prussian.htm

And once this system was up and running, a group of Americans visited Prussia and were highly impressed with the order, obedience, and efficiency

“A small number of passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th Century, fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its educational system and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to our shores. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and inappropriate cultural influences.”   John Taylor Gatto’s book, “The Underground History of American Education  http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

You can certainly read way more about this history, but the important values of this factory model of schooling have been and continue to be:

• efficiency
• order / conformity
• compliance / obedience / passivity
• uniformity

The entire original purpose of schooling was to create sheep out of people!

This factory model is insideous. It has been absorbed into the very DNA of every part of the educational system. And teachers who are not aware of it, mindlessly play out the plan each day. Just look at most schools.

• Age Batching
• Children literally standing in lines
• Desks in rows
• Districts demanding students be on the same page on the same day district-wide
• Benchmark testing by date. Everyone is expected to be on a page by a given date.
• Teacher instructs, children do type training
• Bells ringing
• Pacing guides
• Mechanistic writing programs that teach compliance to a format
• Kids stopped from moving ahead faster than others
• Tardy detentions
• Detentions and punishments for non-compliance
• Students failing classes for not complying with homework rules even though they demonstrate competency
• Teachers rewarding students for compliance rather than divergent thought
• Teachers restricted from working outside the factory model by colleagues who report divergence to the principal or the union for doing something not approved by a superior.

And the list goes on and on.

An awareness of the degree to which our educational institution is sick has to be our first order of business all the time. When we least expect it, the factory model mindset sneaks in.

We have to stop being sheep. We have to stop creating sheep. The future of our educational system depends on the bravery of people willing to stand up and stop the assembly line for the sake of our kids. We have to stop waiting around for an institution to grant us permission to make changes. It is time to treat students as humans and allow them to think and explore and every teacher has the ability to do this tomorrow! You just have to stop being sheep. Sheep don’t lead.