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!

Secret Teacher from the Midlands in England

Secret Teacher: we need to practice what we teach

We teach pupils to be self-sufficient go-getters, but we're forced to toe the party line like over-qualified sheep, says Secret Teacher

Read the rest of the story here...

Changing education from the ground up

Sometimes I find it helpful to review things from the past because my current circumstances may give me a different lens in which to gain insight. I have watched and listened to Sir Ken Robinson many times and this morning I was preparing an activity for a community meeting and decided to watch him again. And there it was! That new insight connected to my present reality. So I will leave you with this image I created to capture the point and then two questions. Then watch his video again to see what else you hear in a new way. As Sir Ken says, "It's time to bring on the learning revolution!"

Take time to make education unpredictable

In our race to cram knowledge into the heads of children over the last decade of our standards/testing culture, we have robbed our children of the one thing that causes children to learn the most, uncertainty. Our risk-averse culture in American education has systematically removed risk at every turn. In my own experience, the word risk itself was too risky for the system. It was actually removed from a previous school's founding document by the district office! Bureaucratic systems don't like risk because it requires a giving up of control. Of course control is ultimately an illusion, but that doesn't stop our system of education from crushing it out at every turn. Creativity, innovation, learning...all messy and risky!

Science teachers often think they are on the cutting edge of teaching risk-taking and critical thinking. And while some of them are, most of them have decided that inquiry is best handled in a controlled way. Teaching children the scientific method by filling out lab sheets is a classic example. Children are expected to memorize the scientific method, follow the steps of a lab, fill out the form, and are graded on the quality of their write-up and ability to complete the form correctly. We are essentially telling children that scientists are managers completing paperwork! Where is the wonder? Where is the thinking? Where is the excitement? I think of Roz from Monsters Inc. asking in her gravelly voice, "Where's your paperwork?"

Tina  Grotzer from Project Zero at Harvard  says it this way, "When science class only consists of facts and figure that we know to be "true," it communicates to students that we know all the answers, instead of letting them know that our ignorance far outweighs our knowledge. It keeps them from finding out that there are lots of mysteries that we can't begin to answer. Letting students in on the mysteries of the world ignites their curiosity and opens the door to a lifetime of finding out."

So shred those blasted lab sheets and ask kids to explore ideas. Talk about it, write about it, blog about it, video it, sing about it, whatever it takes to engage kids in the thinking and engage them! Leave the lab sheet for the day they want someone else to try out their experiment. Then they will have a reason to write it!

Do we really believe people like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking were inspired to think their big ideas and get excited about science because they memorized the scientific method and could complete a paper form? Time to bring the wonder and risk back into science!

Adjust to Learners

Education has survived the high stakes testing drive for over a decade now and the damage to the system is immeasurable. Increased isolation of content and factory fixes for perceived problems has only embedded deeper, the misguided thinking that relies on specialization and canned curriculum. 

The education establishment likes nothing more than to label and sort children and adults into manageable groups and remove anything messy that might get in the way of performing on high stake tests. As Will Richardson points out, the folly of this thinking is the tests were designed for a time that has passed. We can't get to the future by using processes that weren't intended to evolve.


There are two realities people have to embrace if we are going to move into a space that really meets learners where they are and helps them to grow. The world is diverse and change is the only constant. 

By diverse I am not talking just about ethnicity or culture. That is a part of the idea of course. The individuality of humanity means we are all different and not a single person can be understood through generalizations. Because we serve the needs of such diverse learners, we have to be aware of ways that we can adapt what we do to help children learn. We can't keep picking a one-size-fits-all approach to learning since there is no one-size-fits-all child. Just because we can label something doesn't mean we understand it!

Change is the only constant. Listening to learners to tailor learning to their needs is the best way to adapt our system. And this requires teachers to step out, get uncomfortable, and allow something new to happen. It means you CAN'T plan what you are going to teach a year in advance in detail. Parents have to stop asking for what their children are going to miss three weeks from now when the family pulls the kid out of school for a trip. If we know exactly what we are covering three weeks from now, SOMETHING IS WRONG! Education has to embrace the concept of just in time delivery. Of course we need to plan the journey and have timetables, but within that journey we are going to make stops when needed to explore, think, and create. If the journey takes longer or finishes quicker, who cares? Learning is organic. Finding ways to connect students with what they know and what they need to know and want to know is an art we must practice.

But doesn't that make it hard to teach? Yes and that is the point! You have to be slightly off balance to be your best as a teacher. When you get into a "groove" and you simply pull out the canned lesson you have done many times before, you are not being responsive. The corpse of last year's lesson isn't what your children need. 

The reality is our students change. Not just individuals over time, but each new cohort that arrives at our doors is different than the year before. If we don’t adapt, we quickly use tools designed for a different model and the mismatch can be devastating to learning.