Tag: movement-building

Why We Need To Kill Our Darlings

Posted on | by Sam

Every writer knows what it means to “kill your darlings.”

It’s a reminder that there will be times when you’ve written a beautiful sentence, or a paragraph — perhaps even a whole character or scene — and yet you may need to leave them on the cutting room floor, if it turns out they no longer fit into the larger picture of what you’re working on.

That’s what editing does — it forces you to make tough decisions in service of crafting a final piece in which everything finds its rightful place.

I see this same problem everywhere in modern school reform. Ours is a crowded landscape of sacred cows — filled with competing beliefs, priorities, and acronyms. But here’s the thing: if we’re serious about collaboration — and the good news is I see a greater willingness to think collaboratively right now than any other time in my career — then all of us, to some degree, are going to have to kill our darlings.

That doesn’t mean we sacrifice what defines us, it doesn’t mean we compromise on our values, and it doesn’t mean we keep nothing of what we’ve built up to this point. But it does mean that if you’re serious about building a diverse coalition, and you’ve reached a point of having a pretty fabulous five- (or four- or six-) point vision of the future, then you need to be willing to break down — and then rebuild — your core vision and strategy with others.

That won’t work if the people you want to collaborate with aren’t fundamentally interested in the same set of core questions to drive their work. And it won’t work if anyone falls too deeply in love with their own ideas or language.

It will work, however, if we believe strongly enough in the processes we went through to make those darlings in the first place. It will work if we are willing to answer anew the questions we feel are most important to reimagining education for a changing world. And it will work if we realize that what matters most is not our list or our language or our framing — but our willingness to re-engage in the work with a wider net of partners.

That’s how movements are born. The goal is not to show people your own most beautiful pictures; it’s to hold up a mirror together and each be prepared to describe what we see.

 

How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

Posted on | by Sam | 14 Comments on How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How do we transform the quality of teaching and learning in America?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wrestling with that riddle for the bulk of my career. And this month, three separate events are making me wonder in a new way about how to bring about such a shift – and sustain such a movement.

The first two were meetings that represented parallel, powerful constituencies and ideas – an Imagination Summit hosted by the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City; and an Empathy in Action working group, hosted by Ashoka in Washington, DC. At each gathering, I heard stories and insights from some of the world’s most influential thinkers – from Sir Ken Robinson to Deepak Chopra to Kiran Bir Sethi. I heard compelling cases for helping our education system become more effective at ensuring that all children become empathetic, and develop the ability to think imaginatively, act creatively, and behave innovatively. And I left feeling impressed by the energy and the motivation that was driving each group to push its work forward.

In a few days, I’ll also be attending the Save Our Schools (SOS) March, a grassroots-led movement of teachers and parents from across the country that disagree with the Obama administration’s current reform path – and plan to peaceably assemble in DC to indicate their displeasure. Since I’ll also be covering the march for CNN, I’ve been reflecting on the goals of those private meetings, the goals of this public march, and the essential questions that must be answered for any movement to be successful: Who or what is the movement’s opponent? What is its core idea, and how can that idea be expressed as simply and compellingly as possible? And how can a complex network of individuals, organizations and alliances come together to forge a common agenda?

Our own history tells us just how possible, and difficult, it is to turn ideas and energy into transformational change. That’s because reforming a system requires not just the capacity to know your enemy and forge a compelling narrative, but also a systemic approach to the problem – an articulation of the whole. Too often, what happens instead is we lose sight of the whole out of our preference for a specific piece of the puzzle – I call it the sacred cow syndrome. Instead of a unified movement, we get a cacophony of parallel efforts. And instead of paradigm shifts, we get Groundhog Day.

If you’re a principal, you know this all too well. In addition to everything else you do, you have to regularly sort through the literature from a range of school-improvement approaches and programs that, to your eyes, seem to have similar objectives and research bases: is it a service-learning focus you want to adopt, or a character education program? Is civic education where you will choose to hang your hat, or will you double down on social and emotional learning?

To be certain, each of these field’s approaches to learning is distinct, and each field has its own unique advantages. Each would also clearly benefit from a larger movement that brings about a shift from our Industrial Age model of schooling to one that is suited for the Democratic Age. And yet for years the different leaders of these different fields have sought, genuinely, to unite their efforts – only to fall back, eventually, on their respective sacred cows.

Which returns us to the present. What will the future hold for these nascent Imagination and Empathy networks, and for this weekend’s DC protest? Since all three tribes talk of movement building, will one be able to craft a big-enough umbrella to unite the aspirations of the many? Will we develop the capacity to understand the whole? And is it possible to sustain a movement of sacred cows that, by definition, no one is willing to eat?