Visit to Design39Campus

Over the holidays, I was fortunate enough to visit Design39Campus, an incredible school in San Diego California. On their website, Design39Campus describes itself as:

"At Design39Campus, learning experiences are designed with the individual learner in mind. As a collaborative community, we nurture creative confidence, practice design thinking, learn through inquiry, connect globally, use technology and real world tools, and promote the courage and growth mindset necessary to change the world." - source

There are many great things that happen in a great many schools and classrooms around the world. There are a great number of people who are experimenting with rethinking education and schools and who are having, or starting to have great success at doing so. However, every now and then, a school comes along that not only rethinks and experiments with new ideas of school, but who are truly revolutionary. Although I only visited for a few hours, I suspect Design39 is more than just another school rethinking education. I think there might be something truly revolutionary taking place.

I took eleven pages of notes and many photographs, I have pages of questions and have wondered aloud about much of what I saw at this school. The following are a few of the key things that really stood out for me from my visit.

Collaboration
One of the things that I genuinely believe is critical to the future success of both our education systems and of society is an increased need for collaboration. If we are unable to truly collaborate, if we are unable to learn and think together, our impact will always be limited. If we are not collaborative, we will always be limited to our own perspectives, trapped in our own eco-chambers, and we will be unable to use the diversity in our teams to solve complex problems.

Many schools make claims to being collaborative. Many schools are genuinely collaborative, where teams work together to solve problems. However, in many other schools, we often talk about how we need more collaboration. The question then becomes, why don't we see more collaboration in schools? What stops us?

One of the things that made Design39 so revolutionary in my opinion, is their attitude towards collaboration between their teachers. The school recognises that collaboration is not easy, that it takes time. However, not only do they value collaboration and recognise its challenges, but they have made significant commitments towards ensuring that it can happen. Design39 have been bold enough and committed enough to create the space and time for collaboration. Teachers at Design39 meet every morning before school for an hour to collaborate in various teams. Additionally, the teachers in the school are also relieved every few weeks for entire days to work collaboratively.

How many of us are willing to really commit to collaboration? Are we really willing to accept how much time it takes and how challenging it can be? How many of our schools are willing to make this much of a commitment towards collaboration. And if more of our schools did, how would education be different?

Refusing to accept the status quo
I bet as some of you read about the extra time commitment towards collaboration, you already started thinking that it's just not possible in your context.

One of the major aspects about why I feel that Design39 is not just innovative, but revolutionary, are the barriers that they have overcome in realising their vision. For many of us, we encounter obstacles and might find ways to work around them. Sometimes, we even let obstacles stop us. As you can imagine, the enormous commitment towards collaboration from the school has encountered a number of obstacles. One of those, is the teacher union. However, after years of negotiation, the school now have a memorandum of understanding with the teacher union that allows for their collaborative vision.

I feel this memorandum of understanding is hugely significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, how many of us are willing to defy the status quo when it might involve taking on a teacher union? What about a government organisation? The Design39 story suggests that if we want to see genuine shift in education, then we will need to take on more that just our parent communities and our professional learning structures. We will need to take on the institutions and systems that might contribute towards keep our education systems stagnant and slow to adapt.

I also want to emphasise the 'understanding' part of the above. I believe this memorandum of understanding is significant because it shows not just a school that was willing to challenge the status quo, but rather, it shows a school and union who found a new way to define their relationship and conditions. If a collective agreement from the union, standardised rules and even the way stipends are paid does not allow enough flexibility to reimagine school, perhaps they need to be renegotiated? I commend both the school and union for taking on this challenge!

Elephants in the room
One of the elements that also appears to be key in what makes Design39 so special is their approach to mistakes, failures and uncertainty. On the tour, principal Joe Erpelding was unbelievable frank about what the school is still struggling with. This frankness seems to permeate the school in many of the systems and structures in the school including the use of Design Thinking to problem solve, action learning groups and even the use of elements such as the Brain Trust.


Action Research from Joe Erpelding on Vimeo.

Public acknowledgement of our mistakes and our failures is in my opinion one of the most fundamental things that we must do if we hope to redefine schools and our classrooms. Unless we are able to identify those elephants in the room, we are unable to address them. And education is full of elephants that need addressing.

Of course there is a whole host of other things I enjoyed about the school. The enormously respectful way the students and teachers spoke to each other, the clear presence of some of Jo Boaler's mathematical mindsets thinking, the students sitting in small groups have discussions and recording the video for their teachers to monitor the discussion and more. I also genuinely love (and I use the word love very deliberately here), that their school vision is not just about the individual, but also focussed on how they might enable their students to make the world a better place. Over the next few weeks as I settle in back home I will make sure to share some of what I saw at this incredible school. In the meantime, make sure you follow the great stories, thinking and people from Design39campus and also the great collection of videos about the school.

Finally, a huge thank you to principal Joe Erpelding for hosting me and Grant Lichtman for recommending the school and helping me set up the visit. A massive thank you to all the team at Design39 too, for their hospitality, but more importantly, for their bravery, hard work and collaboration in rethinking education.

All this reading is making me wonder...

source

Behind the scenes of all things #edchatNZ, my teaching, learning and leading within my school, and my masters, I have been reading like crazy, watching videos and curating content. The more I read, explore, make sense, listen, the more I wonder...

• How 'future ready' are New Zealand teachers really? In fact, are New Zealand teachers even coping with today? I just think about my unruly and out of control inbox, as well as the mental aerobics and resilience it has taken to reimagine learning at my school.
  
• What kind of future are we heading towards if we retain our current mindsets? What kind of a future might we head towards with a shift in mindset? I worry about the paradigm of growth that appears to dominate everything from economics to education in our society. 10% increase here, new target there...
  
• How do New Zealand teachers and schools cope with complexity, rapid change, radical change? What about our schools and their policies and procedures? I think about how challenging it is to navigate the space where my students' lives are overlaid by a digital parallel universe, where their alternate selves are roaming far beyond the walls of the school and classroom.
  
• How do we know if we are coping? How do we know if we are thriving in complexity? Just because it feels like we are thriving or doing well, doesn't mean we are. It is easy lulling myself into a false sense of security as I go about my comfortable daily life, forgetting the impact of the bottle of water I bought because I forgot my own, forgetting that the cheap T-shirt I got on special was probably made by an underpaid child in a developing country somewhere. Surely thriving doesn't mean that I am happy and comfortable at the expense of others? 

I am not alone in wondering about all these things. In fact, a research study from the Auckland University of Technology is doing exactly this - wondering about teachers and how 'future ready' they might be. 

"The last two decades have seen a paradigm shift in international thinking about education. Driven by an awareness of the massive social, economic, and technological changes taking place in the world outside education, there is now a questioning of the role and purpose of “traditional” forms of schooling. The literature in this area argues that today’s learners need knowledge and skills that are qualitatively different from those the current system was set up to provide. But more importantly, if they are to thrive in today’s world, learners need new ways of knowing. They need new and different “dispositions” towards knowledge, thinking, learning, and work. 

There is now a large literature on how we might go about developing these dispositions in students, but very little work on how these dispositions might best be fostered in teachers. While there is a great deal of New Zealand-based research on teacher professional learning, much of this is oriented towards “improvement” or “best practice”, not “transformation”. Research investigating the demands “future-oriented” education makes on teachers’ thinking, learning, and ways of knowing is, as yet, in its infancy."

The survey takes a while to complete. It's thorough, so rather than wondering about the future, future readiness, complexity, etc, I am now going to take the time to actually do the survey... I know that the team behind the survey would greatly appreciate if you could take the time to do the survey, but also to share it with your colleagues. The more people that do the survey, the better. Even better, the more diverse the groups of teachers who do the survey, the better.

You can access the survey here. 

PS: I completed the survey, it didn't take me nearly as long as they said. There were some pretty fascinating questions in there too! 

L is for left behind

It appears that I got a little left behind with the A to Z blogging challenge, for no good reason other than needing the time to concentrate on other things.  I should be up to to the letter P by now...

However that is not the only 'left behind' I want to comment on today. Today I want to comment on those people in our schools, even whole schools, that are being left behind. Chances are that by blogging about this, I am preaching to the converted. However dear converted, if you agree with what I say here, consider printing a copy and leaving it strewn across the staff room, in someone's (or everyone's) pigeon hole or wrapped in a bow with a chocolate attached on a someone's desk. 

The last 15 years has seen the introduction of NCEA, a new curriculum and national standards in New Zealand. As well as this, there has been more schools that have introduced bring your own device and other technology related changes including email taking on a central role in teacher's lives. We have also seen the introduction of more and more modern learning environments and the arrival of MOOCs (massive open online courses, often free courses that allow anyone from any part of the world free/cheap access to courses from Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Yale and more). There is no question about it, change is non stop (for more about this read my post about the role of 'change' in the future of education).  For some, all these changes might feel like a passing fad, and that there is no need for them to invest too much time or energy into considering the effect of these. There is however one change that I hope that fewer educators might stop ignoring, the increasing need to be connected. Let me explain.

• Being a connected educator means that you are part of learning conversations with those inside and outside of your organisation. Or as the study by Forte et al. puts it ".... through Twitter, teachers forge and maintain professional ties outside their local schools and, in doing so, become conduits for new practices and ideas to move in and out of their local communities ...  teachers are using Twitter as a place to share resources and to make and respond to others’ requests for information." Hence, if you are not part of these conversations, it is likely that you are missing out on the distribution of effort that happens through being connected. It means you are less likely to know about international trends and influences that are or should be impacting the day to day in your classroom and school.
• As well as not being part of the sharing, curating, discussion that happens when you are connected, it is likely that you are relying on those people in your office or your school to challenge and develop you as a professional. Chances are that you are stuck in an echo chamber, rarely having your views challenged by those outside of your organisation. Chances are, your whole organisation might be stuck in an echo chamber, reinforcing its own misconceptions. Chances are, that you are in a bubble, unaware of how the world outside education has fundamentally shifted, unaware that the job market, the value of a university degree, society, has changed more than any one person can possibly hope to know. Examining change in today's world is like "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else".
• Chances are, that if you are not connected, you are likely to fall behind in both the conversations that discuss and consider new practices and ideas, but also that you are likely to constantly feel the agitation and stress from always being reactive, always being on the back foot. It is Lewis Caroll's Red Queen in education, you have to keep running just to keep up. When you stop running, you are left behind. 

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. 

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" - Lewis Caroll

Image Source or E-Book 

• You might argue that you read professionally and that is enough for your learning. However, as Margaret Wheatley puts it, "real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles and positions." Power and energy in our profession comes from the relationships that we build, and these need to extend beyond our organisations. Or as social network theorists have explained, "social network theory suspends or challenges assumptions about the meaningfulness of organisational boundaries ... social network theory eliminates the organisation as objects of interest." Hence, educators who are not connected, may not be contributing to the power and energy of our profession. 
   
• Research has also identified that connected teachers are more likely to be part of, and driving reform efforts "Our findings portray teachers on Twitter as progressive thinkers who are in a position to build the trust and support networks necessary to strengthen leadership in educational communities and increase the effectiveness of reform efforts" (Fort et al, 2012). Guy Claxton quotes Geoff Mulgan about this in his great book, What's the point of school?, "One of the optical illusions of government is that those inside of it think of themselves as drivers of change ... Yet most far-reaching ideas and changes come from outside ... Most radical change has to start outside government, usually from the bottom [up] rather than the top [down]." If you are not a connected educator, how are you likely to be part of driving the positive changes that our learners need? This idea is further iterated in a report from the OECD when it says that "The complex nature of educational governance, involving myriad layers and actors, can be an overwhelming problem with no clear entry point for policy makers. Traditional approaches, which often focus on questions of top-down versus bottom-up initiatives or levels of decentralisation, are too narrow to effectively address the rapidly evolving and sprawling ecosystems that are modern educational systems. If educational governance is recast as the building of effective networks of strong independent schools collaborating continuously, and sharing knowledge both horizontally and vertically, there is no contradiction between the ideas of devolved power and effective national networks. It may not be that the devolution of power is increasing complexity in the system at all. In fact, increased curricular diversity, broader professional support, and the shared purpose this approach enables create a stronger and more reactive holistic system."

You see, being a connected educator is absolutely critical.

If you are not yet connected. Make sure you join your country's education Twitter chat. Join the great Google+ communities, attend the range of free EdCamps on offer across the world.  Whatever you do, get connected. If you are in New Zealand, join #edchatNZ (see www.edchatNZ.com) and the range of other great Twitter chats we have. Join the Pond.  Educate yourself dear educator about what it means living successfully in a connected society, leveraging the network for your and your colleague's benefit. 

References

Daly, A. J. (2010). Social Network Theory and Educational Change. Harvard Education Press. 8 Story Street First Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Forte, A., Humphreys, M., & Park, T. H. (2012, June). Grassroots Professional Development: How Teachers Use Twitter. In ICWSM.

Snyder, S. (2013). The simple, the complicated, and the complex: educational reform through the lens of complexity theory.

Claxton, G. (2013). What's the point of school?: Rediscovering the heart of education. Oneworld Publications.

B is for Back to the future and C for Change is afoot

Over the past few weeks I have been spending a significant amount of time focussing on the ideologies that our education system in the past, and largely still in the present was founded on. You may have even read my post, Education's great wicked problem where I explore some of these ideas. However there is always more to the story...

Our ideologies are the things that we think with rather than about. It is how we think rather than what we think. There are examples of this everywhere. What we think about any given thing, a government proposal, gay marriage and even whether you recycle, is driven by your underlying ideologies. What we value drives our choices. Hence, if I value the earth and the future generations who will have to deal with the problems created by current generations (environmental degradation, over population, global warming etc.), I might be more inclined to actively promote and participate in ideas and actions around sustainability. Equally, if I value honesty, I will be more inclined to be honest. Although in both cases I might actively think about the fact that I value sustainability, or that I value honesty. What I am less likely to think about is what caused me to value it. What experiences shaped my world view, my perceptions to value those things? And further, what experiences has shaped others to think about the world and all that happens therein, differently? And without actively stopping and thinking how and why did I come to think in a certain way, I am likely to simply think about the what, e.g. recycling, asset sales, education reform and then find the evidence to support my argument. Most likely, and without meaning to, I would probably be employing some selection bias to bolster whatever I was thinking about.

It seems that everyone has an opinion about education, and rightly so since everyone has experience of it. Perhaps, what we spend less time on is thinking about what shaped our underlying view of what an education system might be. For example, most people would agree that education is a means of addressing inequality. However, have you stopped to think about what shaped that view? If you were going to cite some facts and figures now about how education has allowed some to break the cycles of poverty, I might remind you of my previous comment about selection bias. Again, what we think is that education should address inequality. But how we think is a whole other ball game. How have you come to believe your views? 

The above seems very philosophical, and you might wonder what it has to do with you. Remember those arguments you have with colleagues when you are taking risks, trying to be more future focussed? And it seems that they just can not get on board? Chances are, the way you think about the world is different. Although what you think about is the same, students, pastoral care, assessment, developing thinking, how you think about it is probably different. Given the breakdown of the ages of teachers in New Zealand, the types of thinking and socialisation that each generation would have encountered is likely to be different. 

Currently falling in the under 25 to 29 category, it is very likely that I think of the world as a constantly changing place. In fact, it is what I expect of the world, that it does constantly change. Perhaps some things stay the same, like human nature. Many other things are not the same. Society, the way it works, what we value, what our goals are, has changed. Once upon a time it may have been the case that you could go to university so that you get a good job, and then you can buy a house. You might have gone to work and spent time with your friends and family on the weekend or the evening. Some might even have travelled to other cities and countries for work. What are the chances that many if not most of the 59% of the teachers over the age of 40, currently in our education system still has a world view that resembles this? Many of those in their 30s and below will also have this world view. Go to university to get a good job. 

However, Is this a likely future for the students currently in our schools? Or are they more likely to work with many individuals, in many countries, possibly without ever needing to leave their home? I know that already I regularly Skype people from across the country and across the world, working alongside on a range of projects. I also know that the current success in my career can not be solely attributed to a university degree. It is only one brick in the wall, it is not the foundation. It is a ticket to a big party in town, with many many other guests. So I am nothing special having this ticket, but not having it just makes things a lot more challenging. Last night I attended the TEDx Auckland launch party. Of the range of people approximately my age that I spoke to, not a single one of them went to work, and then went home at the end of the night, only to repeat it the next day. They all collaborated on projects outside their 'main' job. They use social media, and any other resource available to make connections. They carve out niches for themselves, not ones that are predefined roles. And there are many people like this.Think Michelle Dickinson, Jade Leung, Oscar Ellison, Emma Winder, Claire Amos. These people don't just have a day job. The manage a portfolio of projects.

People often cite that old pearl "there is nothing new under the sun". But that is just not true anymore. Do you realise, that the question "where are you?" is a new question? Because before mobile phones, email, internet, you could only contact someone if you knew where they were.

The way we communicate, they way we network, the way we build relationships, the way we run companies, the way we organise events have all changed. Children working abroad don't get occasional letters from their family or friends that they left behind. They can Skype them, see them, interact with them, on a daily basis. Talking to an employee at Spark's Lightbox (TV programme streaming service), she commented on the distinctive difference between viewing habits of those above and below 30. If you ask my 14 year olds at school how they would go about learning something new, they would say Youtube and Google, usually in that order. We are never going to go back to the local library being the place for information. It is not just book publishers and journals that are publishing and creating knowledge. They key difference to note here is that although anyone might recognise that trends come and go, what everyone does not recognise is that they way the world works is fundamentally shifting. Where things might have stayed largely the same with a few trends changing around the peripheries, we are moving to and already largely living in a world where things are constantly changing and a few things are staying the same around the peripheries. 

You might recognise some other events in history that caused fundamental changes in the way the world works and how people view it. Namely, world war one and world war two. You can imagine the massive paradigm shifts that people experienced when women all of a sudden had to work. You can imagine the personal conflicts that many would have experienced, debating whether some individuals were taking too many risks, letting their daughters go to work! Can you imagine the outrage. Yet, compare that with how we view woman in the workplace today. Can you imagine the personal conflict, the emotional lashing out against those who challenged world views? 

Granted, and thankfully, we are not experiencing another world war. But we are experiencing another fundamental change in the way the world works, in how people view and create their identities in the word. We are experiencing fundamental changes in how and where people work. We are experiencing changes in the skills needed to do our jobs. An example being a conversation I have heard time and time again, "I was hired to be a teacher, not to build a website" - this is in reference to adding resources onto a student learning system for learners to access. Where one used to be hired to do a job, chances are, you are now hired in an 'evolving' role. To prove my point, use a job search website and search for the word 'evolving'...  Does evolving really just mean that we can not guarantee that your job is going to stay the same, because the world is changing? Given that there were literally hundreds of search results for this...

These screenshots were taken from Seek.co.nz today...

Change is the new normal. No wait, break neck, constant, large scale change is the new normal. In other words, the way the world functions is and has changed. Hence, when we still maintain our old paradigms about how the world works, it is likely that we will struggle to embrace change. It is likely that our organisations and companies will struggle. But also, if we do embrace change, unless we realise that the way we view the world is different, it is likely that we will encounter dissonance with our ideas. Our new New Zealand curriculum states "New Zealand needs its young people to be skilled and educated, able to contribute fully to its well-being, and able to meet the changing needs of the workplace and the economy." Has the way you view the world meant that you assumed that the world is changing and students need be prepared for this 'new world', or, has it meant that you assumed that every job that a student will do, will constantly evolve? Even check out operators at supermarkets work differently nowadays...