Courtesy of this interview with Semco’s Ricardo Semler. If you don’t know the story of Semco, take a listen. And imagine if all organizations were similarly organized?
Category: Organizational Change
Your Education Stories (for a price)
It’s suddenly in vogue to gather and tell stories as part of an organization’s larger strategy to build an audience and effect change. On one level, I love this development — indeed, I’ve been gathering people’s stories about their most powerful learning experiences for years, which has resulted in a website, a radio story series, and even a book (proceeds of which do not go to me, by the way).
I’ve done this because I believe that before we can solve the riddle of how to provide every child with a great education, we need to develop a deeper understand of what great teaching and learning really looks like — and requires. That is the motive. Over time I’ve also reflected a lot on the core elements of a great story — one that can inspire and edify — and tried to apply those principles in the current 10-part video series A Year at Mission Hill. Like all things, it’s a work in progress, but we’re clearly onto something — as the appeal of this Prezi attests.
Yesterday, however, I received an email from Michelle Rhee’s organization, Students First, relating to an effort underway there to gather people’s stories about why they choose to put students first. We’re told that Michelle nodded along as she read “the same frustrations and motivations that drive me to action reflected in their responses.” And we’re told that 100 lucky submitters will receive a signed copy of her new memoir, Radical.
I clicked on the link to read the stories, and a couple of things became quite clear: first, these are not stories. People aren’t being asked — nor are they being given space — to share a personal narrative; they’re being given an opportunity to reaffirm the professional rationale of Students First. And second, it’s clear that organizations like Students First don’t actually give a damn about individual people’s stories. They care about selling books, acquiring new email addresses and demonstrating the reach of their current network.
Those things, in and of themselves, aren’t necessarily bad strategy — and they certainly aren’t evil. What they are, however, is indicative of Michelle Rhee’s impersonal approach to systemic change. And I can’t think of anything more ironic than a nationally-known “radical” reformer for schools — the most personal public space that exists outside the family in our society — who believes that, in the end, something as sacred as a person’s personal story is little more than a convenient framing device for giving away free books and building out an email list.
Buyer beware.
(This article also appeared on Huffington Post.)
Creating a School Culture That Works (Podcast)
I’ve just launched a new audio interview series with the good people at the BAM! Radio network, and the link for my first episode is now live.
Listen in as I discuss the core components of a healthy school culture with two of the country’s best educators: Mission Hill principal Ayla Gavins and Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr. And please share your thoughts and reactions.
This is what thinking big about school reform looks like
It’s Sugata Mitra’s acceptance speech for winning the 2013 TED Prize. What do you think of his idea? And what do you think about this criticism of his idea?
How Do You Design a Healthy School?
(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)
What if every school used our founding principles as a nation as its design principles for learning? How would schools need to change? And what would we unleash as a result?
This is one of the riddles at the center of the 10-part video series, A Year at Mission Hill. And although we’re just two chapters in, I’m starting to see an early pattern – and a dialectical pair of design principles at the center of it all.
First, it’s clear that just as the United States sprang from a shared vision of liberty, schools like Mission Hill spring from a shared commitment to individual freedom and autonomy. As a “pilot school” nestled within the larger structure of Boston Public Schools, Mission Hill has the institutional freedom to chart its own course around key issues like governance, curriculum, staffing, hiring, and budget. Its teachers (who are unionized) have great individual latitude in how they plan their lessons and assess their students. Its students are constantly placed in positions to exercise self-regulation and self-control (no hall passes here). And its aspirational habits of mind (which the school believes characterize a well-educated person) are designed to help young people develop the skills and self-confidence required to ask tough questions, discover meaningful patterns, develop empathy and compassion, imagine useful alternatives, and set appropriate priorities – both in school and in life.
What might this design principle look like elsewhere? Site-based autonomy seems important. So does the school having a clear vision of its ideal graduate – and not just in terms of what that person knows how to do, but how that person habitually lives his or her life. Giving children opportunities to practice decision-making is a must. And finally, there is the straw that stirs the drink – assembling a staff of highly skilled, highly collaborative educators, whose heightened expertise can justify a heightened level of autonomy, and whose understanding of learning and growth runs much deeper than academics alone.
But there’s an equally pressing, seemingly contradictory design principle that’s also at work, one that relates to an equally pressing human desire – for structure, safety and a sense of order to the world.
These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are what we must balance in order to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments of the sort we see at Mission Hill. And it won’t work if we forget a basic truism about organizations: that simple structures lead to complex thoughts, whereas complex structures lead to simple thoughts.
At Mission Hill, the simple structures in place are precisely (and ironically) the ones that help people develop the fullest sense of individual autonomy: the habits of mind that provide a North Star for everything the school does; the clearly defined expectations among staff and students about how people are treated and what is expected of them; the explicit rules about how decisions get made, and who gets to make them, and when, and why; and the individual-classroom and whole-school rituals that keep bringing people together to, as Mission Hill’s mission statement puts it, spend time with each other “even when it might seem wasteful hearing each other out.”
In my years as an educator, I have witnessed scores of schools that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. But what schools like Mission Hill remind us is that we do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. The challenge comes in finding the right mix of ingredients. And the opportunity before us is to find a way to get many more chefs in the kitchen – teachers, organizations, communities – each in search of a recipe they can call their own.
How to Tell a Good Learning Story
(This article originally appeared in Education Week).
Last week, at the New Teacher Center’s 15thannual conference in San Jose, I urged more than 700 educators to start telling their own stories about teaching and learning, and to stop letting outside forces pigeonhole public perceptions of the work that they do
The talk went well (view the Prezi below and decide for yourself), but I worried afterwards that all I’d done was suggest a compelling path forward – and provide little else.
A friend in the crowd confirmed this. “Everyone loved the ideas,” she told me collegially, “but I’m not sure anyone understands how to tell their story more effectively now than they did before.”
I think that’s right. So let me do here what I didn’t do there – by offering some specific suggestions about how to provide a more hopeful, solution-oriented lens to our work.
Decouple and Recouple: Let’s face it: most education coverage is boring. That’s because we’re always doing one of two things: we’re either reporting on reports, or we’re trying to explicate promising practices. The result of this is a sea of stories about education that are heavy on the facts and the how-tos – and light on the personal narratives and the professional inspiration.
This “emotion gap” presents us all with a huge opportunity, as long as we realize that a great story needs to do two things well: it must touch us, and it must teach us something new.
In the modern world, we don’t have to touch and teach in a single video or article. Instead, we can decouple the inspiration from the edification – and then recouple them online.
As an example, consider what we’re doing with A Year at Mission Hill. Every other week until June, we’ll release a new 5-minute video that tracks a year in the life of a great public school. The purpose of these videos is to help you feel the power of a healthy school culture by letting you observe how it unfolds and develops over time. Invariably, you’ll see lots of promising practices in the course of the series – teachers co-constructing curricula, children developing higher-order thinking skills, etc. – but any explanations of how to do these things well have been decoupled from the story itself, and then recoupled online via a rich set of wraparound resources for anyone that wants to go deeper and initiate similar efforts in their own school.
We should do more of this in education: elevate the stories of the people in our schools – the children, their teachers, and the larger community that supports them – and then look for the ideas underpinning that work and flesh them out separately.
Serialize and Sustain: Before there was ever a single copy of Bleak House, there were the twenty monthly installments Charles Dickens published across 1852 and 1853. Point being: the appeal of serializing a story goes back a lot farther than “Must See TV.” It is, in short, a great way to build and sustain an audience, and to create enough breathing space to let a set of characters develop and deepen over time.
For some reason, however, the idea of serializing our own stories about education never seems to have taken root (and no, a three-part series reporting on a new report doesn’t count). But it should: indeed, there is no other way to capture the scope of that nonlinear journey of personal transformation that is at the heart of powerful learning.
What if we told more stories about teachers and students and classrooms and schools in this way? Would we find better ways to build an audience, reflect the complexity of modern schooling, and inspire a better set of questions to guide our work. Again, A Year at Mission Hill is planning to find out; other schools and communities should do the same.
Reshare and Repurpose: A great story can and should serve multiple purposes. Case in point: the charter school in DC that contracted with a local filmmaker to produce a 20-minute video about their school.
First, this school decided that rather than produce a general overview video (“Welcome to . . . We are . . .”), they would select an illustrative sliver of their work and use that as the viewer’s point of entry to understand who they are and what they value. Because this school is a member of the Expeditionary Learning network, they chose to have the filmmaker follow its Kindergarten class through a three-month learning process that would culminate in a public presentation of their work.
Next, the filmmaker focused in on a few individuals who could be the human faces of the story: the classroom teacher and two of her students. Others were featured, of course, but these were the people through whose eyes we were allowed to see the work unfold. The goal, in other words, was to touch us as much as it was to teach us.
And finally, this school realized that a video like this could serve multiple purposes at once (it’s being finalized right now for a Spring 2013 release): it could be used to help parents at open houses understand what makes the school special; it could be used in fundraising efforts as a sort of visual calling card; and it could be used to spark larger community conversations about teaching and learning (plans are underway for a public screening and subsequent live radio conversation about the state of teaching and learning in DC).
Clearly, this school understands something the rest of us need to understand as well – that the stories we tell must have an appeal beyond just our own internal audience, or our own distinct community. After all, as John Merrow recently pointed out, 80% of American households do not have school-age children.
How will the opinions of those “inadvertent viewers” be shaped in the months and years ahead? How will we restore a balance to what we value in children and each other? And how can we make sure that the stories of 2013 are about more than just content, conflict, and catastrophe?
I believe these three design principles are a good start. What do you think?
If Murder Can Be Tracked Like An Infectious Disease, Should Failing Schools Be, Too?
There’s a fascinating new story out there, courtesy of NPR, in which a team of researchers pored over 25 years of murder data in Newark, New Jersey and reached a surprising conclusion: murdering someone is not as individualized a decision as we might think. In fact, the study suggests we may need to adopt a different lens when viewing the problem, and start thinking of homicide less as an individual choice, and more as a reflection of a larger infectious disease like AIDS or the flu.
“We looked at homicide as an infectious disease,” said Michigan State University’s April Zeoli, one of the lead researchers. “To spread, an infectious disease needs three things: a source of the infection; a mode of transmission; and a susceptible population.”
Zeoli and her team studied every homicide in Newark over a period of a quarter century — 2,366 murders in all, at a rate three times as high as the rest of the U.S. They tracked down the time and location of every single murder, and then plugged the data into a program that was previously reserved for tracking infectious diseases; it creates a model to show how the epidemic is spreading — and where it might go next. “We hypothesized that the distribution of this crime was not random, but that it moved in a process similar to an infectious disease, with firearms and gangs operating as the infectious agents,” the researchers wrote.
The implications here are that rethinking the causes for homicide could help cities predict how and where the “disease” would spread in the future.
Anyone else seeing the implications a study like this could have for how we think about school reform?
Currently, we tend to (overly) assign individual causes to the symptoms of whole-school or single-child success in school. A growing chorus of educators and communities, however, recognize there is a complex constellation of forces impacting every child’s capacity to learn and grow (see, e.g., Harlem Children’s Zone, Communities in Schools, etc.).
What would happen if we reclassified how we define a failing school — away purely from individual adult ineptitude or child indifference, and more toward the holistic language of infectious disease? As Zeoli explained, “by figuring out what makes some neighborhoods ‘resistant’ to homicide, despite having the same risk factors as areas with high homicide rates, policymakers could apply those insights to “inoculate” other areas in order to prevent homicide from spreading.”
We can do the same in school reform. We should do the same. Don’t you think?
When it comes to a longer school day, something’s gotta give
Now that five states are planning to add 300 hours of class time in an effort to close the achievement gap and re-imagine the school day, I can only come to one conclusion: Something’s got to give.
The Power of Outrospection
Did you get the memo? Apparently, introspection is out, and outrospection is in.
Actually, as philosopher Roman Krznaric explains in this cool new RSA Animate video, what’s really in is empathy, and what’s really required is a systemic effort to drive social change by stepping outside ourselves. See for yourself — and see what you think.
How Do We Fix DCPS?
. . . is the question @amyjwatkins asked me on Twitter this morning, in response to the news that DCPS plans to close 20 neighborhood schools in an effort to concentrate its student populations and provide them with fuller services.
Great question, Amy. To answer it, imagine if DCPS adopted the following as its theory of change (TOC)?
IF we have cultures of transformational learning where we
- create competency-based learning pathways and learning opportunities,
- know and embrace each student’s strengths, challenges, passions, and abilities,
- intentionally design for student agency, coaching and assessing habits of mind and being,
- cultivate communities of collaboration and partnership both inside and outside of school, and
- embed these practices in laboratories of democratic practice,
THEN all students will flourish and achieve to high levels.
Think that TOC (which is the brainchild of the remarkable QED Foundation), would give the district the focus it needs to reimagine urban public education in ways that are both specific and visionary? I do. And the good news is that DCPS has already broached the idea of moving to a competency-based system.
In sum, it’s possible — and essential — to fix DCPS. And it will require a comprehensive theory of change that recognizes the limitations of the current test-obsessed climate, and reimagines the structure and purpose of school.
What do you think?
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