Questions, play, and getting it right.

What are your associations with the word play? What does it suggest?

Are unplayful questions really a statement with a ? at the end?

 

The principles of questioning and play can serve to define arc-of-life learning, and they have tremendous effect on, and resonance with, learning today.

Page 19. A new culture of learning – Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

It has been so frequently stated that it is now common lore:

Success is not the measure of how often you get it right, but of what you do when you get it wrong.”

Easy to say.

Looks good on a fridge magnet.

Here is the challenge for teachers (and humans):

1. Play is a valuable activity.
2. Playing “properly” is not the sum of “getting it right”.
3. Playing “properly” is all about immersion, committing to the moment, and changing immediately if it stops working.
4. If we want to ‘get it right’ we have to be prepared to ‘get it wrong’ and change when required.

That is why Play is so important.

If we want to ‘get it right’ we have to be prepared to ‘get it wrong’ and change when required.

If you accept the premise that Play is an important part of learning ask yourself these questions:

1. What are you being playful with?
2. Are you letting ‘getting it right’ stop from your learning?
3. What was the last thing you ‘got wrong’ that you learned from? (Rhetorical question?) 🙂

Sitting here in the semi-dark, curtains drawn. My son sends me a text, he has been playing Football (Soccer) for his school team. It goes like this:

So I scored in the second game, we won the first, lost the others.

Woot

Be more excited!!

Dude.  I  just did a little dance.

Yay, the girls team won their comp.

Great work mate.

He has been “playing” all day. He is tired, but feels satisfied. He has had to make hundreds of decisions today, and not all of them worked. Some of them did. He scored one of two goals. He will say this was a great day, why? Because he got to play. And the girls team won, and now he is on a long bus trip home with them. Tough to be a 16year old boy.

Today is a good day.

Why?

Because we have the luxury of asking ourselves “Was today a good day?”

We are in a unique position to reflect on our relationships with self and others.

All humans have this capacity.

How do we use it?

When you wake up tomorrow, play hard, play fair, play for fun. Winner or loser are choices you make, not results on a scoreboard.

Questions and being playful do have an impact on arc-of-life learning. You want to be a life long learner?

Questions > Statements.

Playful > Unplayful.

You all need to change. NOW. Yes, but not us, we are Teachers.

Having spent two days with Tony Ryan I am inspired, more inspired, additionally inspired?

On his website he uses the title  Provocateur as a handle.

Getting a handle on Tony is difficult, because his rapid mind, ability to connect multiple complex ideas in a simple manner and frequent practical examples or prompts is only matched by his good humored provocations. He is absolutely transparent, authentic, and up front. But. You know he isn’t completely unleashing, he is selecting from his knowledge and experience to suit the people he is currently in relationship with.

In his interactions with us Tony was an exemplar of excellent pedagogy.

He taught us through:

1. Questions, always questions.
2. Listening, always listening.
3. Directness. (Think about it, being indirect is not only inefficient  but is a stupidly ineffective way of making something easier to take, by making it irrelevant.)
4. Humor, always laugh. Laugh to learn.
5. Practical Pedagogy. (Which is a tautology, look it up.) In countless conversations with teachers Tony gave an actual instance where a process could be employed to embed inquiry/questions into teaching.

So the subtext to the workshop was:

1. Change.
2. No really, change.
3. If you aren’t planning/implementing a change plan you, begin now.
4. Build a network. Do it now. You can’t be any kind of teacher (Good is a given, if you aren’t a good teacher, you are just drawing a wage, so you aren’t a teacher) without a network. You can’t do it alone, trying to go it alone will fail. We have worked in parallel isolation for 200 industrial education years. Shoulder to shoulder at the grindstone, spitting out manufactured students for a predictable world. The world has changed, so must we. The first thing = get a network. Use Twitter. If you don’t know how to send me a message and I will step you through it.
5. Build a network. Now.

There was more. But that is my summary this evening.

Teachers have mastered the art of dismissing changes in pop culture as a change in generations, kids today, it isn’t like it used to be, idealisation of the ‘good old days’. I remember learning Latin in Year 7, the good old days were not that good. The irony is, we are adept at initiating a conversation with students about how rapidly the world is changing, yet we refuse to turn the spotlight on ourselves. Or rather, we are reluctant. Some are. Some are not.

So my question is this:

1. Do we need to change now?
2. Why do we, teachers, resist or provide excuses from the reality which is this century?

Oh, and my real question is this:

1. Have you ever seen a lifesaver punch a drowning man in the jaw? Why do you think he had to do that?

Future Proofing Your Students

How to (type that into youtube) future proof your students.

I am sitting in a training and development taken by Tony Ryan

http://www.tonyryan.com.au/home/

Get him to a school near you.

What are the feels?

Impending. Sense. Of. Doom.?????

Really though?

So much is going to change in the next 10/20/40 years.

But it starts/has started/is in motion, it isn’t linear, but lets just use the metaphor of a travelator.

It is slowly whirring past you. You don’t really like it, think you can get there more comfortably on your own. You didn’t notice the correct way to get on it, so it is too late now. You need the exercise.

Think of a reason why you want to carry your baggage without help.

While you are doing that, others are getting on the travelator.

They are already there.

I won’t extend the metaphor by adding the rapidly increasing speed of the travelator.

You weren’t there day one when someone introduced ICT, or inquiry, or whatever the innovation is?

Jump the rubber rail and get on the travelator. The people already on it are travelling the same speed as you, they will fill you in.

We are moving from knowledge consumption to knowledge co-creation.

We partner with our students, who are they partnering with?

Connectivism

Connect your classroom to the world. Crowdsource the information.

Inquiry

• Not just a technique, it is a belief system about ongoing learning/discover.
• Not either / or. It’s both / and.
• Teacher inquiry as well as student inquiry.
• Pedagogy = the art of being an inquirer. “The art and science of learning”
• Androgogy = adult learning.
• Focus on questions as well as answers.
• Authenticity. Authenticity. Authenticity.
• Deep understanding, higher order thinking. Formative Assessment.
• FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT.

Questions:

• Androgogy: Pedagogy Leaders have a relationship to this?
• Creating an inquiry culture takes time. How? Who? What? When?
• Benevolent intolerance. Humble impatience. How?

*Need explanation? : Some things are not negotiable. Not in a 20th century imperialistic hierarchical I am YOU BOSSSSSSS YOU MUST LISTEN!!!!!” way.

BUT in a THAT LION IS CHASING US, WE HAD BETTER START RUNNING. Way.

OR!!!!

This is a really beautiful sunset, it is only going to last 8 minutes. HURRY UP!!!! Way.

We didn’t invent the urgency. BUT we don’t get the luxury of pretending there is none.

• What is the purpose?  If it doesn’t have purpose, bad luck.

Massive Professional Man Crush on Tony Ryan.

Casually (elegantly) stripping us back. We know this stuff, we get this stuff. Reducing obstacles to accepting the challenge.

(Oh, and Gamification is/will be big… I have to finish my inquiry on that. Everyone needs to have a beautiful obsession that they are researching.)

Woooooooooooooooooooooooosh…. The sound of things happening.

Nearly finished Term 1 2013.

What a term we have had.

Brilliant work from a dedicated team of teachers, finding solutions for the full range of educational puzzles from:

1) How do we replace someone on leave, when we are  a program with 145 students in an open space?

to

2) Formative Assessment… what is it? No really. What is it?

I am bone tired. But that could be day I spent in the sun recording discus throws at our sports carnival yesterday.

Or it could be the 4 days I spent wheeling dirt, rock and lawn around my back yard, over easter.

I suspect, though, it is because this has been a deeply satisfying term.

What have we learnt?

What does term 2 look like?

We have learnt a lot.

We have are reshaping the program to fit the evaluation and feedback we have received from our students.

That is what this post is about.

That is what I am looking for feedback on.

We are embedding the Guided Inquiry into the program in a more integrated manner in term 2.

Additionally we are explicitly addressing the 21st century skills, as identified by the partnership for 21st century skills.

http://www.p21.org/

This is in addition to integrating outcomes from the HSIE, English and RE curriculum.

1. How does this look?
2. How can it work?
3. Isn’t “More” just adding layers of complexity, when we want it to be simpler?

We have adopted the following names for the stages of Inquiry:

1. Open (Launch the concept/question/inquiry in a SPECTACULAR fashion. WILL involve costumes and other such dazzle.)
2. Immerse (Provide learning experiences to introduce the content/content area so students can begin to imagine their areas of interest).
3. Explore (Students make small decisions to focus on parts of the content area, and dig a little deeper).
4. Identify (Students identify areas of interest by asking 4 questions:
   1. What is interesting to me?
   2. What are my learning goals?
   3. How much information is available?
   4. How much time do I have?
5. Gather (Students gather important information and make decisions about what is valuable, and why.)
6. Create (Students reflect on their information, and create new meaning with their research, and communicate this meaning.)
7. Share (Students share their learning with each other, and an authentic audience.
8. Evaluate (Students reflect on the content and process.)

Using those 8 framing ideas to guide learning we will integrate the curriculum outcomes and 21st century skills outcomes.

We are creating pro-forma’s and tools to guide the students, and to encourage self-direction in learning. I will post those in a later blog.

My question now is this:

THAT IS A LOT OF WORDS!!!!!!

How do we take a conceptual framework and make it “at a glance” accessible to students, and to other teachers to have a go?

1. We can reduce the number of words: Launch, Research, Publish
2. We can use colours?
3. We can use a web page, or hyperlinked document to hide the number of words so it isn’t intimidating?
4. We can….

How would you like to be introduced to a new pedagogical meta-language?

We are still learners, what works for us?

Looking forward to your feedback.

Carl

Must I Teach? Must I be…

Raniar Maria Rilke is one of my favourite poets.

In the early 1900’s a young soldier wrote him a series of letters asking him if he should write. Should I be a poet? Is my writing good enough?

On one such occasion Rilke responded thus:

Paris, February 17, 1903

Dear Sir,

Your letter arrived just a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great confidence you have placed in me. That is all I can do. I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

 

With this note as a preface, may I just tell you that your verses have no style of their own, although they do have silent and hidden beginnings of something personal. …

 

 You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

 

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. …

 

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. 

 

Yours very truly,
Rainer Maria Rilke

 

With deepest apologies to Rilke I appropriate his challenge thusly:

1. Where are you looking for evidence that you should be a teacher?
2. Who are you asking?
3. You are the voice that must speak in that room full of children, how are you ensuring you are listening to yourself?
4. Some of teaching is unsayable, intangible, it is not just a job. Knowing why you teacher empowers your teaching. Do you know why?
5. Do you have a style of your own? Are you doing your best to create curiosity in the hearts and minds of your students? Do not be invisible in their lives, you can’t be.
6. Have you gone into yourself? Have you found out the reason that commands you to be an educator? Has that reason  spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to teach? (A little melodramatic yes, but the $$ won’t keep you coming back, if you don’t have a commanding reason to be in a school you will distress yourself and your students.)
7. Must you teach?
8. On the days where the school/students/pay/workload seem poor and unfair, impoverished even, what do you draw on? How do you ensure your reason to teach richly inspires you to be optimistic and positive?

 So this is what I believe:

• Everything is a choice.
• Everything.
• So if I feel trapped, or dis-empowered, or frustrated, or disconnected, I am missing the choice. It is there, but I cannot see it.
• Teaching is rewarding, but it is difficult, and challenging.
• Why not choose to be the person why is “rich”? Why not choose to be the teacher who refuses to concede to negativism?

I must teach.

PS) Was in at school yesterday, preparing for the year we are about to begin. The weight of  the responsibility we share caught my breath. Teaching is important. Don’t miss the opportunities to laugh, but never forget the responsibility we have.

Two Thousand and Thirteen let me introduce myself

It is a new year, and a new school year in Australia.

• How do you begin a new year?
• What parts of last year do you preserve, reserve, or simply discard?
• How do you go about sifting through last year to find the value? The learning?
• How do you make changes?
• Do you set goals?
• How do you prioritise your year?

Change can be something we seek, or something that is thrust upon us.

Sometimes we embark on the discomfort of change for an imagined reward. Other times it may be to avoid a perceived threat or source of pain. How much of our planning is planned? Do we, as teachers, out plan the year?

It is a week until students will sit in front of me with open eyes and minds. How am I preparing to be dynamic, and focussed on them?

At our school we are embarking on a project, we have called it TED for ConnecTED learning. It involves 145 Year Seven students in a single room. There are glass partitions, and it can function as 8 separate (transparent) units if the learning demands it.

The biggest challenge for me as a facilitator is that the level of authentic relationship required to make student centred decisions requires authentic time and effort. There is no instant fix. There is no ‘overnight’ success in education. Everything that looks easy, has a back story. So here are the values I am taking from 2012 (and prior) and I am offering to 2013 in the form of an introduction.

Dear 2013,

I am an educator. I love the messy dynamism that bubbles up when young people really believe they are part of the team. Empowered young people = the force that will break the unbreakable rock. I have years of experience, have read widely, am quite clever, enthusiastic and highly energetic. However, Dear 2013, I want to introduce myself as the facilitator, and once the introduction is complete want to disappear, as much as possible. You see, Dear 2013, education is not about me. It is not about the teacher. We are the coaches, we prepare the stars, but the stars play the game.

TL:DR 2013? Okay.

My professional resolution for 2013 is:

1. Listen.
2. Be grateful.
3. Acknowledge others.
4. Be patient.
5. Be kind.
6. Learn.

I will add more to that list as we get to now each other better, but for now, Dear 2013, let’s get on with it?

 

If it ain’t broke, you aren’t looking hard enough…

I just read this superb piece of enthusiasm:

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2011/07/nine-tenets-of-passion-based-learning/

The nine tenets, in summary, are:

1. REACH OUT TO THE DISENFRANCHISED.
2. SHOW RELEVANCE TO LIFE OUTSIDE SCHOOL.
3. INDOCTRINATE PASSION INTO THE SYSTEM.
4. TRY USING THE SCHOOLWIDE ENRICHMENT MODEL.
5. DIGITAL MEDIA IS KEY.
6. TAP INTO THE WISDOM OF YOUR TRUSTED PEERS.
7. BECOME A DIGITAL CITIZENS.
8. PASSION IS INFECTIOUS.
9. CONNECT WITH PARENTS.

The blog does a great job of exploring the tenets. It is hard to disagree with, except…

A school that is not in crisis is unlikely to get much past the first point.

REACH OUT TO THE DISENFRANCHISED.

A school that is ‘travelling well’ ‘achieving excellence’ and is highly regarded in the community may not have a pool of disenfranchised patrons, stakeholders or students. Why is this point so important? Because ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Where there is no need, there is no change.

Must we wait for a crisis to contemplate change?

Are we letting our ‘okayness’ prevent innovation?

Are we ‘resting on our laurels’?

In my case, my school is highly regarded and achieves excellent results across each dimension of student life. BUT we are also led solidly by a thirst for innovation and design in education.

What motivation do we have to change?

What are the reasons for ‘looking hard enough’?

If it ain’t broke, you aren’t looking hard enough.

That is what troubles me. The cultural shift that must take place to make points 2 through 9 of the above tenets actionable.

As questions they would be:

• How are we indoctrinating passion into the fabric our our school?
• How are we innovating in a manner that is either school wide, or develops a school wide enrichment of all teachers?
• How are we immersing ourselves in digital media?
• How are we ensuring relevancy by tapping into the wisdom of trusted peers?
• How are we challenging each other to ensure relevancy?
• How are we becoming digital citizens? Contributors to online community and learning?
• How are we being infectious with our passions? How are we open to becoming infected?
• How are we connecting innovation with parents? Students? Non-Teaching Stakeholders?

 

Coming up with great ideas is part of it.

Looking hard enough to find where it is broken and demands new design solutions is part of it.

Being open to the challenge is part of it.

Being willing to challenge others is part of it.

What parts am I missing?

ConnecTED or The ConnecTED Project?

It is nearly, and has not yet begun. (We are nearly finished designing, but we haven’t taught a lesson yet… bring on 2013)

This term the ConnecTED learning team has been given time to design the project for 2013. This is what I have learnt:

• Things that are important, demand an authentic approach.
• Authenticity takes time.
• If you want more than a superficial checklist of terms and buzzwords, you must have a team of people committed to each other, and to the idea.
• The idea must have a set of core values statements. These value statements must be foregrounded in all discussions and decisions. The team must have the courage to ask “Does that develop the core values?”.
• It is not possible to agree on everything.
• Disagreeing, yet committing fully to the project is not compromise, it is dialogue. Compromise is settling for a weakened alternative to excellence. Dialogue is committing fully to one of the possible actions, giving it every chance to succeed, but being open to adapting rapidly if it becomes necessary.
• Explicit thinking skills are essential. Critical. Not-Negotiable. Passionate, talented people tend to have a ‘style’, and style matters. But if people work to ‘style’ the friction created by working to ‘natural thinking styles’ creates routines, and routines become ruts. A rut is never a good thing. Explicit thinking skills, routines, habits, techniques, frameworks, break routines and ruts. Skills based frameworks for working together are a manifestation of the idea “anyone can do this, willingness it the only prerequisite”.
• Human beings are naturally resistant to change, even when our stated objective is to create change.
• Design is fun, energising, exciting, important and demands the participants honour the process, rather than simply state outcomes/objectives/products and move on.
• Design is tiring, because it requires a mindset of openness, curious, and dissatisfaction with easy answers.
• Design loves simple answers, and thrives through core questions and statements that grow from the core values.

What does this look like?

We have a series of tasks and activities that will track our Year 7’s through three phases of learning as assessment.

Phase One: Weeks 1-3

• Orientation and learning to learn activities.
• Workshops designed to build expectations, routines, habits and address the essential question “How am I being asked to learn?” Specifically addressing the elements of a guided inquiry approach, including discovery, research and public publication of projects, in addition to core skills related to technology, team work, problem solving.
• Welfare and support networks are identified and accessed.
• Students will be asked to produce objects, digital and analogue, that  demonstrate their understandings of how they are part of the ConnecTED learning community. They will also be asked to prepare this for current and future audiences that may have questions about how the ConnecTED project works.
• Immersing students in collegial, negotiated team-focussed learning, this phase is focussed on developing corporate understanding and skills in being a community of learners. Learning HOW to learn together.

Phase 2 – Discovery Phase

• The ConnecTED Project team has designed a series of 20 activities. We have called these ‘Stepping Stones’. Appropriating the metaphor of journey, or travel, through a series of activities to achieve knowledge and skill mastery.
• These stepping stones provide the opportunity for the teacher facilitators to observe and develop questions specific to each student. These observations will inform us as to how the student-directed phases of learning will/should/might need to look.
• The discovery phase provides more-content-structured activities to facilitate a smaller ‘bunny-hop’ in skills and expectations for students.
• Additionally, the discovery phase provides information and skills that are central to how the student will answer the Driving Question in Phase 3 of the Project.
• There is limited choice written into the stepping stones activities, but the tasks sit within a commitment to inquiry. Students will be empowered to ask ‘Can I complete this in a different manner?’ or ‘Can I ask a different question here?’. Students will self-differentiate, or differentiate the tasks through conferencing with the teacher facilitator.
• Each phase is a connection of learning outcomes across the RE, History and English syllabus.
• The ConnecTED Project Team has created simple tasks that guide students through this information and skill mastery phase.

Phase 3 – Guided Inquiry

• The Driving Question is “How would I like to be welcomed?”
• Students will be given the choice to work individually, or as a group.
• The product needs to address a specific community, past, present or future.
• The product needs to offer support to an individual who is new to the chosen community, exploring how they will be welcomed into that community.
• The audience is the community the product is being designed for.
• The public publication of the product will involve an invitation to an exhibition late in Term 1.

Which leaves us with:

What is the name of the project? What is the name of the space?

We workshopped ideas and quite like ConnecTED, allowing for it to be called TED, or ConnecTED. In consulting with part of my twittersphere support network, I am also liking the name “The ConnecTED Project” or “The TED Project” which would allow for “TED Project 07”, appropriating number/naming conventions used on Gaming titles or Movie Sequels, rather than “Year 7 TED”. It also opens the door to TED being a framing idea for innovation at our school, and the future projects being “TED Project 08” or “The TED HSC Project”.

The space a visual and design feast. It is visceral. Through furniture and other design elements it is a flexible, dynamic learning space. Rewarding students for engaged learning behaviours. It facilitates the waterhole, campfire and cave, learning spaces.

• Waterhole = everybody focussed on a single gravitational point. Essential for some framing for learning, but no one spends the whole day at the waterhole.
• Campfire = smaller group, center of gravity is the group, not a person, and it shifts as the group undertakes tasks, or learning activities parallel  in correlation  or in dependence on each other.
• Cave = Separate individual space for working on a task alone.

We don’t have a name for the space yet, we have had suggestions, but they are more descriptive of what the space looks like, rather than the kind of learning community that will work within the space. So ideas about a name for the space are invited.

Questions:

Name:

• ConnecTED?
• TED?
• The TED Project?
• The ConnecTED Project?
• ConnecTED 07?
• The TED Project 07?
• The ConnecTED Project 07?
• Other?

(Edit: Project is called ConnecTED, or TED. Props to @gregmiller68 for leadership in this. AND go team 🙂

Technology for collaboration

Exlore on your own

Discover with others

Approach:

• What systems, frameworks, tools, challenges can you suggest for us as a learning team as we meet regularly in 2013 to implement the project?
• The approach is student centred, demands technology, foregrounds 21st century skills and student choice/autonomy. What questions would you ask to ensure those values are the focus, and remain so?

  Edit: These are the questions/values that have been central to our design process, as per @gregmiller68
  Essentially, student centred learning:
  · provides students with greater autonomy and choice of subject matter and pace of study;
  · involves students in more decision‐making processes;
  · requires extensive use of digital technologies; and,
  · results in memorable experiences where students ‘learn by doing’ with relevance to the real world.

  The above should then translate into core questions you ask yourself and others when trying to measure the worth and value of a learning activity. Questions such as:
  – Does this activity provide greater choice of subject matter?
  – Does this activity provide a choice of the pace of their study?
  – How are you (the teacher) involving students in more decision‐making processes?
  – Have you pursued the extensive use of digital technologies for this task?
  – Will this be a ‘memorable experience’ for the students?

Crowd Sourcing? Pffp. It is Peer Pressure, and we thought of it.

Crowd Sourcing = the Big thing. IT IS THE BIGGEST THING EVER.

Wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Killed Britannica. Cold. In fact killed paper encyclopaedia’s cold.

Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline.^[1] The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees.

Outsourcing = acquiring the assistance of people from outside the formal paid roles and structures of the organisation.

Distributed group of people = diversity of people and skills, sometimes across disciplines or locations, virtual or real.

Not Paid Employees achieving core outcomes for the organisation?

THAT IS A CLASSROOM.

The teacher is the paid employee. The students are, for all definitions of the word, volunteers. Without their willing consent LEARNING CANNOT TAKE PLACE.

Distributed = the natural differentiation that takes place within a classroom. It also accounts for connections/relationships/learning that can take place across the classroom into/through/with other groups of people seeking to design solutions to the same problem.

 

BUSINESS GETS IT.

MUSIC GETS IT.

Education has looked at “enthusiasm to be popularly involved in a project” as a weakness. We decry our students for their sheeple behaviour, saying Peer Pressure and conformity govern them.

Crowd Sourcing is not about conformity. It is about exciting people, in groups, to voluntarily adopt similar behaviours to achieve a shared task. The Infographic states it clearly.

Guided Inquiry is Crowd Sourcing for Teachers.

Get on it.

Yes. No. Not Yet, Yes But. Innovation Now.

Innovation is like oxygen.

Innovation is like oxygen, after you have run 3 kilometres.

Essential, and the more exercise the system that needs it, the more you need it.

Is it possible to overdose on Oxygen? Yes.

Oxygen Poison? Yes.

Insert “Laffer Curve Here”.

• None = Bad.
• Some = Better.
• More = Good.
• Even More = Okay.
• Even more = Bad.

The increasing benefits of a thing diminish, and at a certain point are counter-productive.

Add reference to the Pareto Principle. It is even better.

Also known as the 80-20 rule. It states that, for many events, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

• 80% of your public accolades come from 20% of your students
• 80% of your complaints come from 20% of your students
• 80% of your measurable improvements come from 20% of the time you spend
• 80% of your improvements come from 20% of your actions
• 80% of your excellence is created by 20% of your contribution
• 80% of your attempts will create 20% of your successes
• 80% of your ideas will result in 20% of our initiatives

What?

Some of those will be out. And they are, simply, my attempts to project the Pareto Principle into Education.

As an innovator I am plagued by the tension between optimism and curiosity. I believe ideas are important, and should be explored.

Here is my question:

Where should ideas go? (Not good ideas, or proven ideas, or relevant ideas, or safe ideas, or ideas we can do something with.) (Just ideas.)

Where can we put them? Who can hold them? How shall we interact with them while we decide their value?

There are three possible answers to an idea or proposed innovation:

1) No, 2) Yes and 3) Not yet, Yes but.

NO

No is an effective response when there is a clear disconnect between the idea, and the values, resources, capabilities of the team. No is dangerous to employ arbitrarily as some ideas need to be shared, tweaked, experimented with, before their value/lack of can be certain.

Yes

Yes is an effective response when there is a clear connect between the idea and values, resources and capabilities of the team. Yes is dangerous to employ because Yes can be easy. Yes may NOT be an extension of the methods of the team. Yes may simply confirm, in a different shape/size/colour/form, the skills and abilities of the team.

Not Yet, or Yes but…

This is the best answer. This answer admits the yes is dangerous, and employs a series of questions in the exploration of the idea.

Tom Peters says:

Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast. — Tom Peters

Test fast.

What are you currently testing?

Fail fast.

How are you ensuring you learn the maximum amount of information in the richest time period?

Adjust fast.

How are you anticipating the learning you will have from your innovations? What have you put in place to shift your methods to account for your learning?

• Who are the people you are trusting your Test/Fail/Adjust cycle to?
• Do they understand their role?
• How are they supporting each other?