Leaders Must Tweet!

Last week our Design39Campus team met with an exciting team of people from the Los Altos School District during our Bay Area travels. We had many discussions around topics of innovation and the group I was in was discussing change. 

A superintendent from a neighboring school district was discussing how he was going to be rewriting the district goals and that was going to facilitate change in the classrooms in the district. I stopped him in mid-sentence and challenged him on this. I basically told him that any energy he puts into district office level goal setting is a waste of time if he thinks that is going to transform the entire system. Top down initiates rarely do anything. 

So I challenged him to TWEET! Instead of talking through three or more layers of bureaucrats, speak directly to the teachers in the district. Share your vision in real time. Share articles, videos, TedTalks, quotes, your dreams, whatever! The power of social media is the ability to speak directly with a huge audience. And be ready to listen back as they share with you. 

Education must become more flat. The hierarchy of power of the past is not going to transform education for the 21st Century. Distributed leadership and teacherpreneurs are the future. And using social media tools, like Twitter, are going to be the communication devices needed in the fast-paced information age.

So school leaders, get on Twitter and encourage everyone in the organization to do so as well. And use the communication tool yourself. Don't delegate it to someone under you. YOUR voice is the secret sauce needed in this media. You have to be personally plugged in to your organization to nurture the change process.

With one tweet you can speak directly to everyone in your organization...regularly!

Stanford d.School Visit

On October 15, 2013 our Design39Campus team had the great fortune to tour the Stanford d.School and take a peak inside the design thinking spaces of the school. Having spent the morning at IDEO, we were ready to explore the halls of this famed school. 

From the outside the d.School is hard to spot as it looks like most of the buildings at Stanford. Inside, however, you know you are in a different kind of learning environment. Multicolored stickies, whiteboard panels on wheels and hanging from the ceiling, foam sugar cube seats, and roll-up garage doors for walls are all standard fixtures of this learning space. 

Upstairs you will find the lab spaces where students work through the design process in collaboration with a variety of people. 

Of interest to our team was the K-12 work group who is finding ways to bring design thinking into the classroom. Reading their walls excited us to see how the mission/vision of Design39Campus fits with the work the d.School is doing. We left business cards and tweeted to them about our visit in hopes we can make a deeper connection with this very busy group of thinkers.

The Makery rooms proved to be a treasure trove of ideas for our own Makeries back home. Our take-aways from this visit are:

1) learning spaces must be flexible

2) furniture must moveable and multi-use

3) designing is about making and sometimes it just has to be messy

4) we need "stuff" readily available to facilitate learning 

5) space, tools, and materials must be applied to real problems/projects to make learning real

6) traditional one teacher, one classroom organization is a barrier to innovation

7) teacher teams need to be composed of a variety of experts who help all members learn new skills in the application of the teaching practice.

Thank you d.School!

Rigor by Any Other Name

With the onset of the Common Core, there is an upsurge in the usage of the word RIGOR.  Since the day I first heard this applied to classroom learning, I scratched my head. As a bit of a word nerd I had to delve into this word deeper. The majority of references for this word are so far away from what education and the Common Core should be about. Google it to see what I mean.

Watching students in typical factory schools, there is a lot of sitting, silence, and stiffness. We want children questioning, thinking, and teachers adapting to learners. Students are ready for an ALIVE education! I get the use of the word RIGOR is supposed to mean intellectually challenging work that requires thinking and understanding. So why not spell it out like that? Everyone can say "RIGOR" and now we have a label on a box and nobody has to look inside because the proper buzz-word has been used. Publishers use the word RIGOR to describe their textbooks! This should be the first sign the is the wrong word!