AdaptED versus AdaptIVE

Adaptive Schools

This week our Design39Campus leadership team participated in the first part of Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar training in Los Angeles. Our facilitators were Jon and Carrie, pictured with our team above, from UCLA Center X. Highly recommend this seminar to anyone interested in collaboration and supporting inquiry.

There are many ideas to explore and practice and I was struck by two big "Aha!" moments that became blog-worthy to me. One is a stream of thoughts connected to my my last blog entry on Scarcity vs. Abundance. Related to that is the idea of ADAPTED vs. ADAPTIVE. Adapted refers to ways that living things have changed in order to survive in a specific environment or niche...specialization. The idea explored was how this specialized state prevents an organism from rapidly changing when environmental conditions alter. When organizations are adaptED, they are endangered species. AdaptIVE organizations find ways to change and grow within the changing environment.

Traditional schools are stuck in an adaptED world. They are operating as if nothing ever changes. The insanity of this thinking is the fact that schools are HUMAN organizations and humans are non-linear and ever changing. The fact that we have spent more than a century running schools in a linear, mechanistic manner is beyond unfortunate. Linear thinking and linear schools are fundamentally at odds with human needs. It's not that things have now changed, this system has never been a true fit for humans, it's just the pace of change was so much slower in the past it wasn't as obvious. 

Now the out of balance tire is spinning so quickly that the banging sound is becoming obvious to more and more people. There is a convergence of ideas and thoughts around the need to be adaptive from many different arenas. The chart below lists a few that I keep running across.

ADAPTED	ADAPTIVE
Linear Fixed mindset Specialized (Narrow focused) Programs matter Just-in-case teaching People must "buy-in" to the program Everything seen as cause/effect The sum of the parts add to the whole Like clockwork Clutching to tradition and often rigid Production orientated	Non-Linear Growth mindset Generalized (Big picture) Relationships matter Just-in-time learning Experimenting with options Cause/Effect not closely linked The sum of the parts add up differently and aren't always predictable New patterns create new possibilities Open to new ideas and flexible Process orientated

The second "Aha!" moment for me was around INQUIRY. So often education runs on the factory conveyer belt thinking model. This applies directly to INQUIRY and the Common Core. Teachers who are stressing out about Common Core are not getting the point of the shift. INQUIRY is not about producing a product or a piece of evidence every day to be cataloged in the factory checklist of grading. INQUIRY is about thinking, being curious, conferring, investigating, a questioning process, an invitation to transmit thoughts or feelings... it is all about PROCESS. 

How liberating to imagine a space where children just process and think for chunks of time! Teachers can just orchestrate the space for inquiry and monitor the process. In order to do that, teachers have to become skilled at collaboration and inquiry. This is why Adaptive Schools is so vital to the work of schools that want to shift from an adaptED world view to an adaptIVE one.