Leadership+Design
"We design experiences for the people who create the future of teaching and learning."
In our work, we build capacity, create conversations, and make connections.
Follow us on:  
|
Plan your professional learning adventures with L+D in 2018.
School and Leadership in an Age of Acceleration, Augmentation and The Singularity
March 7, 2018
NAIS
Pre-Conference Workship with Carla Silver, Christian Talbot, Sam Chaltain and Christian Long
An opportunity to think like futurists
and explore and practice the skills that will be necessary to thrive in this new world.
Leadership+Design Bootcamp
March 29-30, 2018
Minneapolis, MN
An opportunity to expand your human-centered design skills and mindsets and develop your leadership capacity through a real-world, community based design challenge.
June 25-28, 2018
Moses Brown School, RI
Uncover and develop your signature leadership presence.
|
|
L+D Board of Directors
Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy
Jump Associates, CA
Matt Glendinning
(Secretary)
Head of School
Moses Brown School,
RI
Trudy Hall (Board Chair)
Director of Strategic Initiatives
Forest Ridge School, WA
Brett Jacobsen (Vice Chair)
Head of School
Mount Vernon Presbyterian
, GA
Barbara Kraus-Blackney (Treasurer)
Executive Director
Association of Delaware Valley Independent Schools (ADVIS), PA
Brenda Leaks
Head of School
Seattle Girls School, WA
Marc Levinson
Principal, Independent School Solutions, CO
Karan Merry
Retired Head of School
St. Paul's Episcopal School, CA
Natalie Nixon
Founder
Figure 8 Consulting, PA
Kaleb Rashad
Principal
High Tech High School, CA
Carla Robbins Silver (ex-officio)
Executive Director
Leadership+Design, CA
Matthew Stuart
Head of School
Caedmon School, NY
Brad Weaver
Head of School
Sonoma Country Day School, CA
|
 |
|
L+D Fellows
2017-18
Peter Boylan
Dean of Students
Turning Point School, CA
Tim Best
Science Teacher
Science Leadership Academy, PA
Michael Coppola
Academic Dean/Dean of Faculty
Chestnut Hill School, MA
Liam Gallagher
Director of Making and Doing
Upland Country Day School, PA
Jeremy Goldstein
Director of Washington Program
Episcopal High School, VA
Lisa Griffin
Humanities Teacher
High Tech High School. CA
Derek Krein
Director of Professional Growth
Tabor Academy, MA
Mike Molina
English Teacher
Gillman School, MD
Tom Taylor
Upper School Director
Breck School, MN
Kate Turnbull
Science Department Chair
Metairie Park Country Day School, LA
Chelle Warbrek
Lower School Head
Episcopal School of Dallas, TX
Emma Wellman
Director of Extended Day Programs
University of Chicago Lab Schools, IL
|
|
|
|
| Practical Excursions into the Arctic Unknown |
|
Erin Park Cohn, Senior Partner and Experience Designer, Leadership+Design
|
It may be because it's February, and I've spent the past couple of weeks heaving snow up into towering mounds along the edges of my driveway, but I've been thinking recently about polar expeditions. As I encase my neck and head in wool, pull on heavy boots still a little wet from my last outdoor excursion, I wonder: what ever possessed anyone to
elect
to venture out into the Arctic or Antarctic unknown, and how did they ever know what to bring?
So I looked further into the history of those expeditions and discovered a hilariously tragic tradition of miscalculation, failure, and frostbite. To wit:
-
In 1845, Sir John Franklin set out with two ships and crew to find the Northwest Passage across the Canadian Arctic. They carried with them only twelve days worth of coal for the 2-3 year journey. The additional cargo included a 1,200-volume library, fine china place settings, a hand-organ that played fifty songs, ornate wine goblets, and heavy sterling silver flatware with officers' initials and family crests engraved in them. Dead bodies from the expedition were later found with the following objects that they'd chosen to take when they abandoned ship and set off across the ice: flatware, chocolate, tea, and a portion of a backgammon board.
-
In 1897, Salomon August Andree thought it a fine idea to  attempt to fly a hydrogen balloon across the North Pole. Despite limited space for provisions, he brought several heavy crates of beer, port, and champagne, as well as some pigeons he hoped would serve as a communication medium. Spoiler alert: the balloon crashed and neither the crew nor the pigeons made it.
-
In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott set out to reach the South Pole, but brought ponies (and hay to feed them) because they seemed more noble, grand, and adventurous than the dogs that had proven to be well-suited to Antarctic exploration. Most of the ponies died or drowned in disintegrating sea ice, and Scott's team was beaten to the pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen by a full five weeks. "Great God! This is an awful place," Scott wrote in his diary.
These are, of course, only a sampling of expeditions that were doomed from the start, poorly planned and subject to the whims of an unforgiving and unpredictable natural environment. They're easy to poke fun at, but they also offer food for thought as we consider the theme of this month's
Monthly Recharge
: Practice Over Theory. In this chapter of
Whiplash
, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe dig into the folly inherent in our tendency to wait and plan something out entirely before we execute it, theorizing it to death before putting it into practice. "Some organizations will spend more time [and resources] studying a proposal and deciding not to fund it than it would have cost to build it," they write.
How often do we find ourselves doing this in schools? How frequently do we huddle together in conference rooms, debating the finer details of a plan, theorizing for days, tinkering with our ships' manifests to determine how much china to bring and in what pattern, or which variety of pony will best withstand the ice? Planning oftentimes feels safer than implementation - theory is less painful than practice - but we expend precious resources (time, energy, morale) in theorizing about questions that could be solved quickly through experimental practice. Oftentimes our planning never reaches implementation at all, and we've spent a lot of time theorizing about nothing, much to everyone's chagrin.
The problem with privileging theory over practice also lies in our inability to know what is ahead of us. In all of its chapters,
Whiplash
's mission is to provide us with tools to "survive our faster future," as we enter a world that will always be unrecognizable to us, just by default. We will always be polar explorers, entering unforgiving landscapes, bringing outmoded mental models of what provisions we need to survive. Ito and Howe write that, "Putting practice over theory means recognizing that in a faster future, in which change has become a new constant, there is often a higher cost to waiting and planning than there is to doing and then improvising." What do we do when we find ourselves shipwrecked with a pile of monogrammed silver? Will we shrug and play backgammon as we freeze to death? Float away on an ice floe cranking our hand-organ? Or what if we camped on the edge of the continent and tested our assumptions in small scale - sent out a friend on a pony for the day, for example, to report back on the ride. As the climate changes and the ice melts, that friend might just discover what we really need are boats. Then we'll build them, take them for a spin, and a pony's life is saved.
It's no mistake that Ito and Howe begin
Whiplash
with an epigraph that is a quote from the Donner Party, predicting a smooth journey across the mountains (and we all know how
that
turned out). I'm not suggesting that if we don't get a little more experimental we're going to resort to cannibalism, but I do think that if we're going to adapt to the exponential changes we're facing, we'll need to do a little less theorizing and a lot more prototyping and testing ideas in order to be nimble and adaptable. As we press our students to gain some of these skills - failing forward, taking risks, learning by doing - we would do well to adopt them ourselves.
This month's articles offer some very practical examples of how schools might let go of a tendency toward theory and become a little more experimental, both with students and as adults leading schools into the faster future.
L+D Co-Founder and Head of Watershed School Greg Bamford, L+D Board Member and Head of Sonoma Country Day School Brad Weaver, and Hillbrook School Director of Technology Bill Selak all speak to ways we can emphasize - and transform - practice in our schools.
And if you're interested in getting a good dose of practice of your own, you might think about attending one of our upcoming professional development experiences, which are geared toward offering ample opportunities to experiment, prototype, and test out new ideas (rather than listening to us theorize for hours about "best practices" for school leadership). Coming up in late March is our Minneapolis Leadership+Design Bootcamp, which will get you out into the community solving a real-world problem and trying out new ways to engage your team and/or your students in authentic, meaningful work. This summer, we're offering Wonder Women!, a chance for women leaders to actively discover and experiment with their own signature leadership presence. And we've just opened registration for the November 2018 Santa Fe Seminar, which provides an introspective and supportive space for school leaders to examine their own practice and plot a course for experimentation in their lives and careers.
Wishing you warmth in the depths of winter, the best time to try something a little wacky, a little different, and see what happens.
Happy reading!
Erin Cohn
Senior Partner
|
| Test, Learn, Scale: Leading With A Bias Toward Action |
|
Greg Bamford, Head of School, Watershed School
|
|
Our schools have academic cultures, so it's no wonder we foster a passion for research, analysis, and debate. When it comes time to plan a new initiative, that can mean a year of meetings and research to create one perfect plan - whether it's a new schedule, program, or policy.
But how can we get the best out of that kind of critical thinking, while avoiding the pitfalls of "death by debate"?
One answer lies in the book
Whiplash,
which calls for a
 commitment to "practice over theory." I agree. One "perfect" plan will be never be as good as what emerges from many imperfect plans, provided that they start on a small scale, change in response to reality, and grow in scale as they get better.
Not that theory in itself is bad. But I'd argue the best theories are empirical, rooted in a careful attention to practice. And we can accelerate the benefits of that learning by launching prototypes that allow people to see, touch, and respond to new ideas for our schools.
One example:
Watershed, my current school, faced a challenge in communicating the value of our unique middle school program. Rather than hiring a marketing firm to research the needs of middle school parents (theory), we launched two web pages with two different sets of messages (practice). These two pages were hidden for people who didn't know how to find them, but were live for the people we shared them with - allowing us to solicit feedback and iterate until we landed on a single page that hit the most emotionally resonant messages for our audience.
|
| Can Schools Iterate Toward a Nimbler Future? |
| Brad Weaver, Head of School, Sonoma Country Day School |
"Fail often to succeed sooner" is an oft-quoted design thinking axiom attributed to IDEO founder David Kelly. An article from
The Economist
that I like to reference explores how often failure is a part of business with these statistics compiled from Deloitte's Center for the Edge:
-
The average time a company spends in the S&P 500 index has declined from 75 years in 1937 to about 15 years today.
-
Up to 90% of new businesses fail shortly after being founded.
-
Venture-capital firms are lucky if 20% of their investments pay off.
-
Pharmaceutical companies research hundreds of molecular groups before coming up with a marketable drug.
-
Less than 2% of films account for 80% of box-office returns.
Joi Ito and Jeff Howe suggest in
Whiplash: How to Survive Our
Faster Future
that
Practice Over Theory
is the direction organizations should head. Rapidly iterating and practicing through implementation of ideas produces better and faster learning than longer, slower development of theory. Failure isn't just a risk of doing business, it is an essential ingredient of organizational learning in our lightning-paced world.
Imagine if schools piloted ideas at rates described above. I suspect failure at that pace would not result in much success at enrollment time. As The Economist staff assert: "simply 'embracing' failure would be as silly as ignoring it. Companies need to learn how to manage it." Educators exclude themselves from learning to manage failure at their peril. We need to improve in our capacity to allow for f
ailure as an integral part of
student
and
organizational
learning and how to manage and articulate our way through failure.
|
Let's Fail! Why Iteration and Failure Are More Important Than Ever
|
Bill Selak, Director of Technology, Hillbrook School
|
I loved math in school. In middle school and high school, I looked  forward to the routine of math class during the school day: copy notes on a board, do a few practice problems in class, and then get stuck. I also looked forward to the homework each night: look at the back of the book for answers to the odd prob
lems, figure out which steps were needed to get those answers, and then complete the homework. It was fun in the same way that a Sudoku book is fun--figure out the pattern, and slowly make your way through the book.
I continued to love math in college. By the end of my freshmanyear, I was already at Calculus IV. It was during that spring class that
I realized math, as it was taught to me, was completely useless. The "game" of math--figure out how to do the homework, and repeat those steps on a test--was suddenly complex and useless. I still remember the precise moment when I became disinterested in math: my calculus instructor announced to the class, "We are going to spend the next three weeks working on this problem. The answer could never exist, but if it could exist, we'll know the answer." It was then that I began to question every moment I ever spend doing math.
As an educator, it's fascinating to think back on my experience with this subject in school. By all metrics, I was advanced and successful in math. Any yet, I stopped pursuing it. More importantly, I never saw the importance or relevance of math, beyond the cliched balancing a checkbook argument. And now, as I reflect on this experience, I think I know what was most lacking in my experience: I did a lot of math problems, but never actually did any math. Schools in the United States do this
all the time-
-they teach a skill or an algorithm or a set of facts, but never ask students to do anything with it. So how do we make learning meaningful?
|
|
|
