Category: Organizational Change

Nature’s Design Principles: Identity

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

More than four hundred years after it was written, people around the world are still reading, performing, and wondering about Hamlet. 

Why?

The simple answer is because it’s the world’s most famous playwright’s most famous play. But the complex answer is because the title character and we, no matter our culture or our age, are kindred spirits. 

Like every young person everywhere ever, Hamlet has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist and a dreamer — a person more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of actions. And he is in love.

But Hamlet is also the future king of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder — a duty that leads to his own untimely death in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read Hamlet is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his own sense of self and accepting the role society has assigned him to play. And so Hamlet’s struggle illuminates a central question we all must wrestle with — a question not coincidentally posed by the first two words in the play:  

“Who’s there?”

This is a new question for us, homo sapiens sapiens — the being who knows, and who knows he knows. That’s because for the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” 

As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death. 

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. 

Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, coursing through all of Shakespeare’s plays, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – for better and for worse.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to understand “who’s there” is more than just an exercise in navel-gazing; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“We are learning,” says the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy — to become an island to oneself — but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. The conventional belief that equates self-development and self-consciousness with increasing autonomy has begun to lose its intellectual cachet. A growing number of child development psychologists now argue the contrary — that a sense of selfhood and self-awareness depends on and feeds off of deepening relationships to other people. Empathy, in turn, is the means by which companionate bonds are formed.”

“The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Dan Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

As far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: 

It’s not the world that makes us wonder; it’s our wondering that makes the world. 

Or, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana put it, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Going a step further, scholars like Siegel have even suggested that the very thing at the center of our most personal sense of self — the mind — may not be as distinct as we’d thought. “Mind emerges as much in relationships as it does from physiological, embodied processes including brain activity,” he explains. 

“Relationships are the crucible in which our lives unfold as they shape our life story, molding our identity and giving birth to the experience of who we are, and liberating — or constraining — who we can become. . . If we consider that our minds are a part of an interacting, interconnected system that involves our bodies and our brains, as well as the environment in which we live, including our social relationships, we may be able to reconcile how the mind is part of one system that seems to be in two places at once.”

That isn’t just flowery prose; it’s how living systems operate in the natural world — by existing and creatively organizing within and between a boundary of self. Although this boundary is semipermeable and ensures the system is open to the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, the boundary itself is structurally closed. 

A cell wall is a good example. It’s the boundary that establishes its system’s identity, distinguishes it from and connects it to its environment, and determines what enters and leaves the system. But because this meaning of “boundary” is as much about what it lets in as what it keeps out, the end result of this arrangement, according to the German biologist Andreas Weber, is a notion of self in which “every subject is not sovereign but rather an intersubject — a self-creating pattern in an unfathomable meshwork of longings, repulsions, and dependencies.” 

The Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela agrees. “Life is a process of creating an identity,” he says. Every organism is “a meshwork of selfless selves.” And these principles of life are universally applicable.

What’s true for the microorganism, in other words, is just as true true for the megalopolis.

But what does that really mean in the daily whir of our personal and professional lives? And how do we intentionally build our empathetic muscles in the service of building a living, thriving school? 

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, our work begins with a commitment to hold the space, and make the time, to allow all members of a learning community — from the youngest to the oldest — to understand that each person’s sense of an individual self emerges, as Siegel puts it, from not only our inner life, but our “inter-life” as well.

The science of the human brain — particularly its bi-hemispheric structure — has allowed us to integrate two very different ways of making sense of the world, and our place in it. 

The art of the American writer James Baldwin is a direct challenge to the myths that have shaped our shared sense of what it means to be an American. 

The insights of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn offer a window into the ways our understanding of the mind shape our capacity for well-being. 

And the genius of the June Jordan School for Equity, a public school in San Francisco, is in its ability to foster a strong sense of collective identity that can provide clearer support to each student’s more precarious individual search for who they are, and what they value.

In the past, says Weber, “with our craving to build a new and better world we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our Siamese connection with all other human beings. We have tried to escape from ourselves.”

In truth, we need to be many to become one — and one to become many.

The Science of Feedback Loops

Posted on | by Sam

Our world is made of circles: 

Living and dying. Energy and entropy. Cause and effect. 

Why, then, do we so often see straight lines?

According to systems theorist Peter Senge, “one of the reasons for this fragmentation in our thinking stems from our language. Language shapes perception. What we see depends on what we are prepared to see.” And Western languages, with their subject-verb-object structure, are biased toward a linear view. 

“If we want to see systemwide interrelationships,” says Senge, “we need a language of interrelationships, a language made up of circles.”

This is the language, and the science, of feedback loops.

Most commonly, we use the word feedback to describe the process of gathering opinions about ourselves — all too often, unidirectionally (“How did I do?”). In systems thinking, however, feedback is a broader concept that means a reciprocal flow of influence. 

We are always a part of the process, in other words, and never an impartial observer. 

Everyone shares responsibility for the problems created by the systems they inhabit. 

And every influence is both cause and effect.  

This represents a profound shift in awareness, one that requires us to acknowledge that we are both influenced by and influencing our reality (and one another’s) all the time. 

Feedback loops provide a language to map and explain that activity, biologically.  

There are two types of loops, the first of which is called regulatory or negative feedback. The balancing feedback these loops provide exist whenever and wherever there’s a goal-oriented behavior required.  The work of a thermostat is an easy example — but so is the myopia of a school district oriented around its test scores. 

In these sorts of systems, if the goal is one you like, you’ll be happy — and if it isn’t, you’ll be thwarted at every effort to change things until you either change the goal or weaken its influence. 

Negative feedback loops, therefore, keep systems on track once the course has been established, and use information to help the system achieve its predetermined outcomes — even if those outcomes are not explicitly named or understood. 

This sort of system is great for machines — and lousy for human beings.

But there is a second type of feedback loop, positive or amplifying. These loops use information differently — not to maintain the status quo, but to notice something new and amplify it into messages that signal a larger need to change.

Positive loops do not promote order, but disequilibrium, which is the hallmark of a true living system — to continuously import energy from the environment and export entropy in order to constantly change and grow. Our understanding of them grows out of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s work on thermodynamics, which demonstrated that, prior to the conventional wisdom up to that point, disequilibrium is in fact the necessary condition for growth in a living system. 

As he explained, they’re called dissipative structures because of their paradoxical nature — they give up their previous form(s) in order to become something new, over and over. This is why they’re called self-organizing systems. As Margaret Wheatley puts it, “The viability and resiliency of a self-organizing system comes from its great capacity to adapt as needed, to create structures that fit the moment. Neither form nor function alone dictates how the system is organized. Instead, they are process structures, reorganizing into different forms in order to maintain their identity.”

They are, in other words, precisely what our human systems are not — and need to be. 

Adaptive, not rigid. 

Resilient, not stable.

In sum, if stability is the goal, runaway amplification can be very threatening — think of a shrieking microphone — and we may be wise to quell it before our eardrums burst. But if what we seek is something more emergent in its response to new information, positive feedback is essential to life’s ability to adapt and change, whether it’s your own backyard, a healthy workplace culture, or the Twitter storm that helped fuel the Arab Spring. 

It is, quite simply, nature’s way of saying that the system needs to change.

 

WHY DO WE STILL TREAT EDUCATION LIKE IT’S 1906?

Posted on | by Sam

Why do we still use a 19th-century invention— The Carnegie Unit—to determine if our kids are ready to graduate in 2019?

Also, what the heck is a Carnegie Unit?

Watch the latest video in our #AskWhy series  — a series that has now been viewed by more than ten million of you — to find out.

The same way may not be the best way.

Diverse by Design: Episode 3 (Never Teach Alone)

Posted on | by Sam

Powerful learning is a relational act; it never occurs alone.

Why, then, do we expect our teacher to hone their craft in isolation?

In episode 3 of the four-part series, Diverse by Design, we meet two of Crosstown High’s inaugural class of teachers, and learn why they believe that co-teaching is the only way to go. So be prepared: their perspective may change the way you think about the future of learning — and what it will require.

Diverse by Design: Episode 1 (The First Day of School)

Posted on | by Sam

How do you reimagine something that has looked the same for generations? And what does a diverse society require — and need — in order to support a shared commitment to the common good?

In a new four-part series from 180 Studio, we witness one community’s efforts to answer both questions.

In the city of Memphis, in a formerly abandoned Sears warehouse, a new school, Crosstown High, is aspiring to model something that hasn’t been seen before — a version of school that looks nothing like the schools most of us attended or experienced, and an explicit commitment to weave together a community of young people who embody the full range of Memphis’s social, economic, and ethnic diversity.

This is Diverse by Design. I hope you’ll watch, share, & comment . . .

Seeds for a Better World

Posted on | by Sam | 8 Comments on Seeds for a Better World

I’m writing a new book with some cool folks — a field guide for a better world. The goal is to translate the core design principles of the natural world, and show readers how to apply those principles in the service of creating better human systems (including, and not limited to, our schools).

To do it right, however, we need your help. So here’s the idea, and the challenge:

Imagine a small metal tin filled with colorful index cards — sort of like your Grandma’s old recipe box, but in this case, instead of each card showing you how to make peach cobbler or yummy meatloaf, they’re showing you how to build a better world.

Now, imagine that each seed/card outlines something tangible to do — the sort of thing that anyone, anywhere, can apply and “plant” in their own life and work immediately (since our own behavior is the only thing we can actually control).

Next, imagine that these seeds are scattered across the following six categories of individual action: TEACHING, LEARNING, PARENTING, LEADING, CREATING, and BEING. And imagine that every seed/card has a front and a back that outlines the what (do I do), the how (do I do it), the who (gave me this seed), and the why (should i make time to do this?

By way of example, here are three, properly titled and categorized, along with their authors and a way to go deeper.

But the real question is, what would be your seed(s) of contribution to the tin?

Maybe it’s an idea/recipe original to you, or maybe it’s an excerpt from some super useful thing you read by someone else. But if you could only provide a single seed/idea/recipe to be planted in the service of building a better world, what would it be?

Standing by for all clarifying questions and ideas, and thanks in advance for your thought and creativity!

EXAMPLE 1
FOCUS ON BETTER, NOT MORE (TEACHING)

One of the most important questions any school or teacher can ask is simple: “How can we be more thoughtful about what we do?”

Unfortunately, it’s not the question we ask most frequently. The question schools and teachers have fallen in love with — “What more should we be doing? — is much more dangerous. It also leads to the creation of unsustainable systems.

The better question, the sustainable question, the question that frees up resources for schools to do more is the question of reflection and refinement.

Schools are better when they create spaces and expectations for reflection.

Formalized protocols for the adoption of reflective practices abound — though a good place to start is schoolreforminitiative.org/protocols. What’s most important, however, is simply creating the space and support for reflecting on the work that is already being done. And while it would be ideal if this reflective practice started with the principal, it could start anywhere.

In fact, it should start everywhere. Department chairs, classroom teachers, sports coaches — we can all be models of reflection to those with whom we work. That’s why reflective practice means asking not, “What more can we be doing?” but “How can we do what we’re already doing. better?”

AUTHOR(S): CHRIS LEHMANN & ZAC CHASE

GO DEEPER — READ BUILDING SCHOOL 2.0: HOW TO CREATE THE SCHOOLS WE NEED

EXAMPLE 2
CONNECT AND REDIRECT (PARENTING)

All parents experience times when their children say things and get upset about issues that don’t seem to make sense. At moments like this, however, one of the least effective things we can do is jump in and argue with our child’s faulty logic. Instead, we need to recognize that our children are experiencing a right-brain, nonrational, emotional flood, which guarantees that any sort of logical, literal left-brain response will only make the situation worse.

Instead, try this: Connect with the right. Redirect with the left.

When a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.By letting our children know that we hear what is upsetting them, we show that we are tuned into how they are feeling. Instead of fighting against the huge waves of emotion, we surf them.

After responding with the right, we can redirect with the left through logical explanation and planning. It won’t always do the trick, but Connecting and Redirecting will almost always work better than Commanding and Demanding. It’s as if you’re a lifeguard who swims out, puts your arms around your child, and helps him to shore before telling him not to swim out so far next time.

AUTHOR(S): DAN SIEGEL, M.D. & TINA PAYNE BRYSON, Ph.D

GO DEEPER: READ THE WHOLE-BRAIN CHILD: 12 REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES TO NURTURE YOUR CHILD’S DEVELOPING MIND

EXAMPLE 3

TAKE FIVE (BEING)

  1. Sit in a comfortable position.
  2. Take 3 slow, deep breaths.
  3. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
  4. Relax into your body.
  5. Clear your mind.
  6. Keep going.

Meditation is all about the practice. Don’t get too focused on whether or not you’re ‘doing it right’. The process of redirecting your focus to the present moment is where the benefit comes.

One of the most valuable aspects of it is that it builds resilience over time, not only during a meditative sit, but during stressful moments in your daily life as well. With regular practice, you’ll begin to notice more space between events and your reactions. You’ll find that you are more able to make choices in how you respond rather than acting on impulse.  

Breathing out slowly through your mouth stimulates the Vagus Nerve which connects with almost every organ in your body and immediately sends signals to your brain to relax. Your heart rate slows, as does the release of cortisol (the stress hormone) into your brain.

Though it can be intimidating to begin, even this short five-minute meditation, practiced frequently, can bring noticeable stress relief and peace into your life over time. For best results, try longer meditation sessions (20 minutes or more) a few times per week. Then, these five-minute sessions will have more of an immediate impact when you need them!

GARDENER: STEPHANIE BUNTON

EXAMPLE 4

(YOUR SEED HERE)

What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

Posted on | by Sam | 16 Comments on What (& Where) Are the World’s Most Transformational Schools?

OK, people, let’s get specific: Out of all the schools in the world, which ones are the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?

There are a lot of inspiring schools out there, so I want to repeat: which are the most transformational?—?by which I mean schools that are demonstrating, by policy and practice, 10 or more of the 22 core categories from QED Foundation’s Transformational Change Model?

 

What I find so useful about the QED model is the way it identifies the central pillars of a high-quality education, and then demarcates what each pillar looks like in a traditional, transitional, and transformational setting.

In a traditional school, for example, we tend to assume the student bears the primary responsibility for learning; in a transitional environment, that responsibility shifts to the teacher (see, e.g., just about every recently proposed accountability policy in the U.S.); but in a transformational context, the responsibility is shared via a learning team that includes, and extends beyond, teacher and student.

Of course, learning teams are just one part of a holistic system of environmental conditions. That’s why, taken together, the QED change model helps clarify what we need, and which stages our own evolution will need to pass through, in order to pull K-12 schooling out of the Industrial-era model and into a new Information-era paradigm.

Because that sort of clarity is in short supply, too often we hold up models of school reform that are, at best, examples of transitional progress, not transformational change.

With that caveat in place, please help me find the best set of transformational schools the world has to offer. Where are the schools that are demonstrating a transformational approach to teaching and learning? And in which specific ways are they doing so?

I look forward to your recommendations and ideas.

(This article also appeared on Medium.)

2019: The Year of Living Emergently?

Posted on | by Sam

We’re doing it again.

2019 is barely a week old, yet everyone seems to be searching for the singular person, policy or program that can restore order and usher in the better world we seek. From the excitement over the looming presidential race (and the promise of a return to normalcy) to the anticipation of the pending Mueller report (and the vision of a president in handcuffs), we are hardwired to hope for the sweeping solution, the quick fix, the reset button.

In reality, life works differently. What if we started to work in closer accordance with life?

What if we made 2019 the year of living “emergently?”

Emergence is not a word we hear or use often, yet it is the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution, and we see evidence of its existence in everything from our cells to our cities. Indeed, the conditions for emergence flow from the reciprocal relationship that exists between any living form and its environment. A single ant, following the chemical trail of its neighbors to carve out a vital, completely decentralized role in a teeming colony. An adaptive software system, seeking patterns in individual behavior that shape which banner ad you see. A human stem cell, self-organizing into increasingly more complicated structures based on the behavior of its neighbors. Or even a solitary Tunisian fruit vendor, whose decision to set himself ablaze eventually sets the entire Arab world on fire.

As Steven Johnson writes in his book on the subject, the capacity for emergent systems to learn and grow “derives from their adherence to low-level rules. . . Emergent behaviors are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

In that sense, the central features of emergent systems outline a set of rules from the natural world that are both timeless and timely:

Give and receive feedback.

Pay attention to your closest neighbors.

Seek order, not control.

Start anywhere, and follow it everywhere.

It’s the songline of life itself — the deeply resonant story that flows through all living systems, including our own. And in a world that is becoming increasingly interwoven, and at a moment in history when the promise and peril of artificial intelligence are becoming more than just a sci-fi script, our ability to shift to a more emergent way of thinking may just be the difference between survival and extinction. As Johnson puts it, “our ability to capture the power of emergence will be closer to the revolution unleashed when we figured out how to distribute electricity a century ago. Almost every region of our cultural life was transformed by the power grid; the power of self-organization — coupled with the connective technology of the Internet — will usher in a revolution every bit as significant.”

Like the natural systems that surround us, the human systems we inhabit — from our schools to our cities to our political parties — are in a state of continuous dynamic balance. These systems are not done to us — we are the ones who create and perpetuate them, despite our protestations of innocence. (As the theoretical physicist David Bohm once put it, “Thinking makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”)

And so we cannot underestimate our individual and collective power to consciously create the conditions that make our system’s transformation in the direction we desire more likely.

It is literally that simple — and that complicated.

What, then, would it mean to make 2019 the year of living emergently?

For starters, it would mean resisting the urge to pin all of our hopes on any “singular solution.” Stop pretending that removing Donald Trump from office will restore a set of moral principles to American culture. Stop viewing ourselves as blameless pawns in someone else’s end game. Stop waiting for someone else’s policies to empower us to do our best work. And start working where you can, how you can, and with whom you can.

Although a better world depends on all of us, the work towards its creation begins with each of us. Transformation is first and foremost an inside job. And how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.

We see evidence of these principles in practice throughout the natural world — although perhaps in no more stirring form than a murmuration of starlings. What words can do justice to the magic of as many as a million birds, flying and weaving as one?

Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?

There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what they do and how it makes us feel when we see one.  Yet this flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior,  and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember. And thanks to the work of researchers, we now know that individual starlings all obey the same few flight rules:

Watch your seven nearest neighbors.

Fly toward each other, but don’t crowd.

And if your neighbor turns, turn with them.

Why do they do this? According to one of the studies, “when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” By following this rule of seven, the birds become part of a dynamic system in which each individual part combines to make a whole with emergent properties. This collective behavior allows the birds to gather information on their surroundings and self-organize toward an ideal density, one in which optimal patterns of light and dark are produced that can deliver information to the entire flock (and protect them from predators). The closer each bird pays attention, the safer — and more cohesive — the entire flock becomes.

Of course, this sort of swarming behavior is not unique to starlings. Many different animals, from birds and insects to fish and mammals, have been observed in their own form of a swarm. So what can this behavior teach us about ourselves, our organizations, and our ability to change the story of the way we work and learn?

According to Andreas Weber, author of The Biology of Wonder, “the spirit of poetic ecology is the spirit of swarms. To understand the individual, we need to understand its environment, and each through the other. We have to think of beings always as interbeings.

“We are a swarm ourselves,” Weber writes, “and we form swarms. A swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence. In this respect, a swarm (or a murmuration) is an intensified counterpart of ourselves. It is what we are and what we try to imagine with our conscious thinking. Swarms are solidified feeling. The swarm is — and in its being living dynamics and their expression are welded together in one single gesture.”

A murmuration, then, is more than just a metaphor for thinking differently about organizational behavior; it’s a reminder, in physical form, that our own bodies, cultures and classrooms are governed by the same rules.

As Weber puts it, “we see gestalts of the living that behave according to simple organic laws mirroring the great constellation that every living being has to cope with: to persist, to be close to the other, but not so close as to collide with him. These are the principles of poetic forms that are so thorough we can even teach them to a computer. They are the primary shapes of a poetics of living things.”

So let’s stop waiting for Godot. Let’s make 2019 the year in which we plant a thousand Trojan horses — future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about the systems we inhabit, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.

Applying these principles to the way we organize ourselves will change the way we feel and act. It may even change the way we dream. “My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration,” says author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown. “The way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, and dance collectively through the air. Each creature tuned in to its neighbors. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them — too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.”

We can imagine. And we can flock more strategically — but only when we recognize that the work begins with each of us, at the scale of the individual, now.

The Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World — And What They Can Teach Us

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Most Famous Nursery Schools in the World — And What They Can Teach Us

Reggio Emilia, a mid-sized city that sits roughly halfway between Milan and Bologna, is not your grandmother’s Italy.

For starters, it’s more hardscrabble than picturesque — heavily graffitied, with streets and buildings that feel weathered and worn from everyday use. And although you’ll still find the charming clock tower, the cobblestone streets and the Renaissance-era churches in the city center, you’ll also find a city in which one out of five residents is not from Italy itself, but places as far-flung as Ghana and Nigeria, Morocco and Albania, Yemen and Syria.

It is, in short, a microcosm of the changing face of Italy, and of the wider world: nascent, uprooted, and precariously perched between worlds and worldviews.

Why, then, is it also the home to the finest nursery schools in the world?

Recently, I traveled there to find out — along with more than 300 other educators from around the world. We were part of an international study group, scores of which regularly visit Reggio’s integrated public system of more than eighty infant/toddler and early childhood centers to bear witness to what has been created here — and wonder how it can be replicated elsewher

Because Reggio schools don’t exist anywhere else in the world — the closest you’ll find are schools that say they’re “Reggio-inspired” — they’re not well known outside of progressive education circles. But for those that do know, a visit to Reggio is akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca. And after spending five days there, walking the city’s streets, listening to lectures, and visiting several of its schools, I can see why.

Reggio Emilia is a city of altars — to childhood, to imagination, and to the spirit of shared governance and democratic participation. It is magical, but not in a precious way; it is revolutionary, but only because it has had the time and space to evolve; and it is illustrative, but not because it is prescriptive or straight-forward. In Reggio, the whole is always more that the sum of its parts. There are no shortcuts. And yet the path is as clear as can be.

To understand why, you must first travel back to 1945, when, after four years of worldwide war and two decades of domestic terrorism, a group of local residents made an unexpected (and unintended) discovery: one tank, six horses, and three trucks that were left behind by fleeing Nazi troops.

After some discussion, it became clear that by selling what they had found, the townspeople could underwrite an initial investment in their post-war future, and begin to write a new history in the wake of all that had been lost.

The men wanted to build a cinema. The women, a school.

Fortunately, the women won, and within weeks, the construction was underway. A young man named Loris Malaguzzi heard what was happening, and hopped on his bicycle to see for himself. “There were piles of sand and bricks,” he recalled, “a wheelbarrow full of hammers, shovels and hoes. Behind a curtain made of rugs to shield them from the sun, two women were hammering the old mortar off the bricks.

“We’re not crazy!” they exclaimed, unprompted. “If you really want to see, come on Saturday or Sunday, when we’re all here. We’re really going to make this school!”

For Malaguzzi, an elementary school teacher in a nearby town who would in time become the ceremonial leader of the the Reggio network, it was a life-changing moment. “It forced everything back to the beginning. It opened up completely new horizons of thought. I sensed that it was a formidable lesson of humanity and culture, which would generate other extraordinary events. All we needed to do was to follow the same path.”

The bedrock of that path was illuminated by a disturbing wartime lesson about humanity. “Mussolini and the fascists made us understand that obedient human beings are dangerous human beings,” he explained. “When we decided to build a new society after the war we understood that we needed to have schools in which children dared to think for themselves, and where children got the conditions for becoming active and critical citizens.”

Consequently, after seven decades of tinkering and revision, what a visitor will see in Reggio’s schools today are a series of design choices and principles that run counter to the way most of the world does ‘school.’

The goal is not knowledge; it’s communication

In Reggio schools, all adults believe that all children have at their disposal a hundred different languages — and that typically, “the school steals ninety-nine.” By languages, these adults do not mean merely the use of words, but also clay, paper, color, joy, imagination — anything that can help a child communicate his or her inner thoughts with the people around them. “We have not correctly legitimized a culture of childhood,” says Lella Gandini, a longtime Reggio teacher, “and the consequences are seen in all our social, economic, and political choices and investments.”

To counter this, Reggio’s schools are relentlessly child-centered — not to achieve notable results in literacy and numeracy, but to achieve notable qualities of identity formation and to ensure that all children know how to belong to a community. “Our approach offers children the opportunity to realize their ideas are different and that they hold a unique point of view,” said Gandini. “At the same time, children realize that the world is multiple and that other children can be discovered through a negotiation of ideas. Instead of interacting only through feelings and a sense of friendship, they discover how satisfying it is to exchange ideas and thereby transform their environment.”

I know, I know. It sounds amazing, but how do you actually teach that? What’s the curriculum in a Reggio school?

The curriculum is not fixed; it’s emergent

By design, Reggio schools were created to protect children from what Malaguzzi called the ‘prophetic pedagogy,’ or an education built on predetermined knowledge that got delivered bit by bit — a format Malaguzzi felt was humiliating for both teachers and children because of the ways it denied their ingenuity and emergent potential.

Consequently, Reggio teachers have no predetermined curricula (as the behaviorists would like), but neither do they work as constant improvisers. Instead, every year each school delineates a series of related projects, some short-range and some long. These themes serve as the main structural supports, but then, as Malaguzzi says, “it is up to the children, the course of events, and the teachers to determine whether the building turns out to be a hut on stilts or an apartment house or whatever. The teachers follow the children, not plans.”

To see this in action is part of what makes Reggio so magical, and the central feature it requires is a very different notion on the part of adults as to what their central role is, and is not. In this sense, teachers (and there are two in every classroom) are not there to deliver content, but to activate the meaning-making competencies of all children. As Malaguzzi put it, “they must try to capture the right moments, and then find the right approaches, for bringing together, into a fruitful dialogue, their meanings and interpretations with those of the children.”

Context, in other words, matters more than content. And the physical environment, after adults and peers, is the third teacher.

The space is not ancillary; it’s exalted

This is why every Reggio schools feels like a collection of altars. Great care is given to the construction of space, and to the conditions into which children will explore their hundred languages. Intricate patterns of stones snake through an outdoor courtyard, inviting children to continue the pattern, or to begin a new one. A bright orange slide cuts through thick stalks of bamboo, just because. The art materials are ubiquitous, and organized, and easily accessible. And the boundary between inside and outside is always as permeable as possible.

Here, the light is always able to come in.

It’s why Malaguzzi called the physical environment the Third Teacher. And it’s what led the celebrated psychologist Jerome Bruner to take particular note of a group of four-year-old children who were projecting shadows onto a wall on the day of his visit. “The concentration was absolute, but even more surprising was the freedom of exchange in expressing their imaginative ideas about what was making the shadows so odd, why they got smaller and swelled up or, as one child asked: “How does a shadow get to be upside down?” The teacher behaved as respectfully as if she had been dealing with Nobel Prize winners. Everyone was thinking out loud: “What do you mean by upside down?” asked another child.

“Here we were not dealing with individual imaginations working separately,” Bruner concluded. “We were collectively involved in what is probably the most human thing about human beings, what psychologists and primate experts now like to call ‘intersubjectivity,’ which means arriving at a mutual understanding of what others have in mind. It is probably the extreme flowering of our evolution as humanoids, without which our human culture could not have developed, and without which all our intentional attempts at teaching something would fail.”

 

The community is not apart; it’s integral

That sense of intersubjectivity is everywhere in Reggio Emilia; it is, in fact, the clearest measure of the school’s longitudinal success. As former mayor Graziano Delrio put it, “We in Reggio Emilia believe that we should manage our cities with the objective of building an equal community, acting for the common good of citizens to guarantee equal dignity and equal rights. We assert the right of children to education from birth. The child is therefore a competent citizen. He or she is competent in assuming responsibility for the city. I often quote this statement by John Adams, the second president of the United States: “Public happiness exists where citizens can take part responsibly for public good and public life. Everywhere, there are men, women, children, whether old or young, rich or poor, tall or short, wise or foolish . . . everyone is highly motivated by a desire of being seen, heard, considered, approved and respected by the people around him and known by him.”

Indeed, the success of Reggio schools would not have been sustained without meaningful partnership and support from its elected leaders. Today, almost 20% of the city’s budget goes towards its early childhood education programs. There is no neighborhood more desirable than another because of the schools; the system has equity throughout. Parents are integral to the success of each school, and play an active role in shared governance. And the spirit of civic participation here, in a city founded by the Romans in the second century B.C., and in a community that can trace its collectivist tendencies back to the craft guilds and communal republics of the medieval 14th century, is what led a mayor of an Industrial city in Northern Italy to proclaim that the infant-toddler centers are “public common spaces where the multitudes aim to become a community of people growing together with a strong sense of the future, a strong idea of participation, of living together, of taking care, one for others. The school expresses the society through which it is generated, but school is also able to generate a new society.”

The bedrock is not love; it’s respect

Finally, this.

It is easy to imagine that all we need to do is love children more, or give them more space, and the rest will take care of itself. But what I witnessed in Reggio was less a case of adults loving children — though surely, they did. Instead, what I witnessed was a level of listening, attention, and care that came from an unwavering belief that all children, even the newest among us, are social beings, predisposed, and possessing from birth a readiness to make significant ties with others, to communicate, and to find one’s place in the world of others.

“We think of school for young children as an integral living organism,” said Malaguzzi, “as a place of shared lives and relationships among many adults and many children. We think of school as a sort of construction in motion, continuously adjusting itself. Either a school is capable of continually transforming itself in response to children, or the school becomes something that goes around and around, remaining in the same spot.”

This is the path. These are the ingredients. But none of it is possible until, as the great theorist David Hawkins once said, we realize that “the more magic gift is not love, but respect for others as ends in themselves, as actual and potential artisans of their own learnings and doings, of their own lives, and thus uniquely contributing, in turn, to their learnings and doings.

“Respect for the young is not a passive, hands-off attitude. It invites our own offering of resources. It moves us toward the furtherance of their lives and thus, even, at times, toward remonstrance or intervention. Respect resembles love in its implicit aim of furtherance, but love without respect can blind and bind. Love is private and unbidden, whereas respect is implicit in all moral relations with others. Adults involved in the world of man and nature must bring that world with them to children, bounded and made safe to be sure, but not thereby losing its richness and promise of novelty.”

Amen.

To learn more about the Reggio Children Foundation, and/or to register for an International Study Group, visit https://www.reggiochildren.it/?lang=en

At Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on At Blue School, the Learning is Alive (Literally)

Gina Farrar is not your typical New York City school leader.

For starters, she’s from the deep South — although any remnants of a Southern twang have long since disappeared. She’s also quiet and friendly  — the sort of person who likes going to restaurants in the middle of the afternoon, or smiling at kids on the train.

Then there’s her formal education:  a double major in Dance and Mathematics, followed by a PhD in Psychology. Although this is where, if you follow the pattern, Gina Farrar’s career path starts to make sense. “What attracted me to math and dance is that each is a puzzle,” she told me one recent fall morning. “The ways that math is a puzzle are obvious, but ballet is a puzzle, too — how your body fits together, how the steps fit together. And there’s a lot of technique involved, but it’s only when you master the technique that you can soar.”

The same can be said for Blue School, a decade-old independent school in lower Manhattan that Gina leads, and which was created by the founders of Blue Man Group, the global theatrical phenomenon that was designed to inspire creativity in both audience and performer.

To many, that riddle — how to inspire creativity — is the Holy Grail of school reform in 2018. Back in 2006, however, it was little more than a nugget of an idea that turned into a small parent playgroup in lower Manhattan. Soon thereafter, it grew into a full-blown school — albeit one whose theories about teaching and learning were both intriguing and unproven. And now, Blue School has evolved into something I’m not sure I’ve seen anywhere else in my travels — a school community that is, both literally and figuratively, a living organism, and a theory of learning that has, over a decade of strict scrutiny, constant tinkering, and loving care, developed a full-blown pedagogy as worthy of replication as its more famous single-name forebears:

Montessori. Reggio. Waldforf.

Blue?

To understand how it happened, you need to begin with the idea that anchors both the Group and the School: a colorful wheel of archetypal lenses for how human beings see and make sense of the world.

As Blue Man Group and Blue School co-founder Matt Goldman puts it, these lenses evolved as the founding Blue Men designed their characters. Each pair of lenses, which are positioned opposite one another on the wheel, represent polar ways in which we are likely to see ourselves (and be seen by others). Our culture is rife with examples of the archetypal Hero, for example, yet almost barren when it comes to equivalent celebrations of the Innocent. We are more likely to value the mindset of the Scientist over that of the Artist. And despite our country’s revolutionary origins, you’re still more likely to gain points in your local community as a Group Member than a Trickster.

This is why the Blue Men, over the course of a two-hour show, spend time inhabiting all six lenses, and modeling for people what it looks like when you check All of the Above in the multiple choice question of What Does It Mean to be a Human Being. As Goldman puts it, “We wanted to speak up to the intelligence of our audience members while reaching in to their childlike innocence. We wanted to create a place where people continually learn and grow and treat each other with just a little more consideration than is usually evident out in the real world. We wanted to recombine influences to create something new. And we wanted to have a good time doing it.”

That sensibility is also at the center of Blue School, which is equal parts ritualistic, research-y, and rebellious. At weekly community meetings, for example, kids and adults take time to celebrate these different ways of being, as a way to reinforce the extent to which all six are equally valued. “I saw the Trickster in Dana yesterday,” said one young student on the day I visited, “when we walked to the park and she asked us if we had heard of any mysterious mishaps in the area.” Moments later a teacher added that he “saw the Innocent and the Artist in Mati when she was working really intently and precisely to draw negative space.”

Beyond culture-building rituals, Blue School also works proactively to translate the latest research on cognitive science and child development into all classroom practices and professional development courses. Its teachers are deeply experienced practitioners. And its initial emphasis on archetypal lenses, playful mischief, and joyful learning has since grown into what Blue School calls the Balance Model — a richly visual comprehensive learning framework that is equal parts Academic Mastery, Self & Social Intelligence, and Creative Thinking; that proclaims the school’s determination to cultivate Adaptable Thinkers, Collaborative Problem-Solvers, and Irrepressible Innovators; and that outlines Blue School’s intention to cultivate a specific set of habits of mind in its students, from Openness and Empathy to Literacy and Self-Expression.

“There are so many ingredients that have gone into making this school work,” said Farrar. “And now we find ourselves in a position where we’re able to provide all these different conditions in which different kids can flourish. That’s the thing about schools — they don’t hold a static amount of energy; the energy is exponential. And when you’re feeling creative and relaxed socially, and when there’s real clarity of expectations, that’s when it becomes magical.”

One day after school, just a few weeks into the 2018-2019 school year, I asked Blue School’s three divisional directors — Laura Sedlock (Pre-Primary), Pat Lynch (Primary School), and Laurie Kardos (Middle School) — exactly how these different pieces had come together to wield such a place. After all, it’s one thing to know an expensive private school in New York City has found a way to be magical. The real question is, to what extent is that magic transferable — to all schools, and all types of communities?  

“All the things that look un-magical are what creates the space for the magical things to happen — here or anywhere else,” said Sedlock, a New York native with nearly two decades of experience in early childhood education. “Almost everything flows from our ability to answer two questions: What does it mean to really observe children? And how do we document each child’s learning more meaningfully?”

As an example, Sedlock pointed to an essential element of Blue School’s Primary program: “Big Study,” in which the children go deep on a particular subject over an extended period. Many schools have something similar, and usually, the subject of study is set in stone: the 5th grade will study ancient Egypt, the 2nd grade will study Ants, and so on. “But if we’re serious about listening deeply to children, we can’t project out that far. We have to remain nimble and go where they take us. It’s the children’s excitement that will lead to the big study, not a predetermined topic by the adults. But that requires a different skill-set than we’re used to as teachers.”

Pat Lynch agreed. “Our teachers have worked to become highly skilled at knowing that the best instructional fodder is right in front of them, and it’s unfolding in real time. Our role as leaders is to protect the space that allows our teachers to do that work. It’s very emergent.”

Indeed, emergent is a word you hear often at Blue School, and it’s illustrative of what makes the Blue School Pedagogy distinct. Spend a day there, and at all levels you’ll see students and teachers working on established courses of study — and wandering off in spontaneous directions. It’s an intellectual high-wire act — more jazz than classical — and it made me wonder what Blue School’s teachers have done to build the confidence that is required to teach this way.

“I think a real danger is to think that the solution is simply not to plan or have goals or to just give yourself over to the whims of whatever the kids want to do at any given moment,” said 4th grade teacher Ashley Semrick. “It’s the opposite, actually: it won’t work unless you have really clear goals for both individual kids and the larger group. The ability to be emergent as an individual flows from our ability as a group to have clear schoolwide intentions. Our job is to read what’s happening on any given day, and then to flexibly adjust as needed.”

How long did it take you to feel comfortable teaching this way, I asked her. “I remember back in grad school,” she responded, “someone told me that when things get rough as a teacher, you’ll just revert back to the educational standard you experienced as a student — even if that standard didn’t serve you well. Well, I can safely say that a decade into teaching, I am only now escaping that truth. It’s taken me that long to really trust that my kids always have something meaningful to say. That has made all the difference.”

“It’s taken several years for us to reach that point collectively as well,” added Laurie Kardos, who leads the school’s brand new Middle school division. “This is the first year I’ve felt like we aren’t in start-up mode. I don’t think there’s any way around that as an organization — you need to struggle with it — but for us, the work was in picking the things we wanted to align around, and then using each other to work on those things. What we’ve created is a space with the right balance of flexibility, choice, theatricality, precision, trust, compassion and autonomy. And with our experience has come a deeper ability to plan for the unexpected, not just for kids to learn something new but to become more effective at building off what they already know — and then to assess what they know not just at the end of the year but at every moment. That’s what gives this place life.”

It’s true — Blue School is alive, both literally and figuratively; even the scientists would agree. “We have discovered that the material world is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships,” writes physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “and that the planet as a whole is a living, self-regulating system. Life, then, is an emergent property. It cannot be reduced to the properties of its components. Social networks exhibit the same general principles as biological networks. What is valid for cellular life can be considered valid for any form of life. And the essence of life is integration.

“Organisms do not experience environments. They create them.”

As a result of these insights, Capra and many others — from a wide range of scientific fields — have concluded that “cognition operates on many levels, and as the sophistication of the organism grows, so does its sensorium for the environment, and so does the extent of co-emergence between organism and environment.”

There’s that word again. But what does being emergent have to do with making magic — and what needs to happen so that the magic might travel beyond Blue School’s walls?

If you ask the educators of Blue School, they’d say any recipe is a result of the sophistication of the learning culture they have steadily grown over time — the gradual mastery of technique, perhaps, that has allowed them to soar. They’d say it’s the intentional creation of a physical environment that is meant to reflect the values of the community that inhabits it.  And they’d say it’s their paradoxical willingness to be both highly structured and completely free — to ground the learning in a discrete set of lenses, or to craft a a Balance Model — and at the same time to protect the space and autonomy of the teachers to go wherever the children lead them at any given moment. Consequently, to visit Blue School is to experience it not just as a school, but as an actual living organism — an ecosystem unto itself, one that is both self-organizing and self-aware.

Which leads to the most radical, and replicable, observation of all. “In a nutshell,” Capra says, “nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature.

“The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community” — no matter where those communities may be.

This, then, is the work.