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.
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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.
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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
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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
Chicago Lab School, IL
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| Disobedience School: A New Model for Mavericks, Rule-breakers and Trailblazers |
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Carla Silver, Executive Director, Leadership+Design
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"Nobody has ever won a Nobel Prize by doing what they're told, or even by following someone else's blueprints."
- Joi Ito and Jeffrey How in Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
Happy New Year! 2018 is upon us and we are anticipating our best year yet!
Over the holidays, my family acquired two new puppies. Having no idea what we were doing as "new parents", we signed up for puppy class - otherwise known as obedience school. Here we are "socializing" our dogs and also learning how to teach them to sit, stay, lie down, and walk well on a leash. Most of this training is accomplished through a system of rewards. When we say "sit" and our puppies follow the command, we exclaim, "Yes!" and deliver a delicious treat. It's going well. Our puppies are excellent students and quick learners. In just one week, we have mastered "sit" and are eager to see what's next for our pups. I'm proud of our dogs, and there is also a part of me that feels pretty confident about my own ability as the trainer. I'm no dog whisperer, but every time my puppies sit, I feel a little bit more adequate in my ability as a teacher.
It is hard for me not to compar
e puppy school with people school. Both combine teaching social skills with more concrete knowing and doing skills. Both use a system of treats and rewards to encourage and motivate subjects to perform the "right" way. And both seem to perpetuate and
reinforce the idea - true or not - that good students are the result of having good teachers. When my oldest daughter describes her AP European History class, it sounds eerily like obedience schoo
l. She reads a chapter and takes copious notes. She goes to class where she is rewarded with participation points for every answer
she gets correct during the period. She loses points for answers she gets wrong. At the end of the year, she will take the AP exam, preparing by memorizing an epic amount of information, and will receive a score that will tell her how much information she knows. Her teacher (and I know this because he told us at Back to School Night) will also assess his own performance based on how many of his students gets 4s and 5s on the exam. I'd like to report that she has shown a new found interest in European History, but she rarely talks about what she finds intriguing. When asked, she mostly shares how much reading she has to do, or how many points she got in a given class and how much she has to study and how stressful it all is. All signs point to a glorious outcome; she'll get a high score on the exam, we'll feel proud, and her teacher will feel vindicated. But when all is said and done, this feels more like a measurement of compliance than real learning.
This month's
Recharge
articles speak to the fifth chapter of our year-long reading of
Whiplash.
In the chapter "Disobedience over Compliance," the authors Joi Ito and Jeffrey Howe make the case that new ideas, innovation, and breakthrough solutions to seemingly intractable problems are usually the result of someone breaking the rules, not following them. Yet school as we experience it is, for the most part, an exercise in obedience and compliance. The more a student follows the rules, the more likely he or she is to receive rewards - in the form of good grades, yes, but also in the form of encouragement and praise. Teacher performance is often measured by student test scores. And how many times have you heard a teacher saying that their greatest satisfaction is when they see a student "get it!" - as if they have somehow been the one to turn on a light in that student. And what is the "it" exactly? The right response? That might have worked in an industrial age or as Ito and Howe describe it, " a mass production society of the nineteenth and twentieth century where only a small number of people were supposed to be creative - the rest were expected to do what they were told." Today is a different story. Creativity is a crucial skill of our time - if you don't want to be outperformed by a machine. Right answers are a dime a dozen. Being able to parlay those right answers into creative and new ideas is the real goal. And for that, you need at least a kernel of disobedience.
Most of us remember the more disobedient members of our school community. They could take up a lot of the teacher's time and could be a real distraction to the lesson, but usually they provided some good entertainment. One such classmate of mine, routinely a cheerful troublemaker in my freshman geometry class, decided one day to hoist his desk above the doorway of the classroom where there was a three-foot overhang. His plan was to attend class perched above the rest of us - at least until the teacher noticed. In the moments before class started, this student and some other classmates managed to lift the desk and the student up onto the overhang. The teacher arrived and proceeded to teach class until the snickers of the students finally caused him to look up and see the student waving down from above. I can't remember what happened to that student that day or whether he faced any infractions for his behavior, but I can tell where he is now. David Eagleman is a renowned professor of neuroscience at Stanford with his own PBS show on the The Brain with several books under his belt - his most recent book
The Runaway Species
is on creativity.
Clearly, we can't just unleash an entire school of students and teachers and tell them to "misbehave", but we can encourage beneficial, rule-breaking and creative disobedience with students and faculty. In 2016 the MIT media lab announced the creation of a $250K cash prize award for responsible disobedience. The award is meant to highlight "effective, responsible, ethical disobedience across disciplines (scientific research, civil rights, freedom of speech, human rights, and the freedom to innovate, for example)."
What a refreshing way to celebrate the rule-breakers who change the world!
What if your school offered a "disobedience award" to a member of the community who broke a rule for social good? How might that change habits, mindsets, assessments, and make school a little more sophisticated than dog obedience school?
At L+D we offer programs and services for school that spark the kind of creative disobedience and benevolent rule breaking that allow for breakthrough thinking. Coming up we have some programs that appeal to the trailblazers, mavericks, and pilgrims in our schools - or those who aspire to be just a little more adventurous. If so, check out the list of programs on the side bar - School and Leadership in an Age of Acceleration, Augmentation and The Singularity (at the NAIS Annual Conference March 7, 2018), L+D Design Thinking Bootcamp Minneapolis (March 2018) and Wonder Women!
(June 2018). And reach out to us if you think your school is ready to break some rules, question big assumptions and enjoy some creative disobedience in 2018!
Warm Regards,
Carla Silver
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| Who Benefits from Our Disobedience? Students. |
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Marc Levinson, Principal, Independent School Solutions
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The word 'disobedience' conjures up thoughts of the Boston Tea Party, Mahatma Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and more. It also makes one of a certain age recall the strictness of education especially in the elementary years. Perhaps it invokes memories of your childhood and the authority of your parents (see the
definitions below):
DISOBEDIENCE, n.
dis and obedience.
1. Neglect or refusal to obey; violation of a command or prohibition; the omission of that which is commanded to be done, or the doing of that which is forbid; breach of duty prescribed by authority.
DISOBEDIENT, a.
1. Neglecting or refusing to obey; omitting to do what is commanded, or doing what is prohibited; refractory; not observant of duty or rules prescribed by authority; as children, Ito says disobedient to parents; citizens disobedient to the laws.
I like to think about disobedience in a more positive light - take the lyrics from
Laura Alaina - "Road Less Traveled":
You won't make yourself a name if you follow the rules,
History gets made when you're acting a fool.
So don't hold it back and just run it,
Show what you got and just own it.
No, they can't tear you apart,
If you trust your rebel heart, ride it into battle.
Don't be afraid, take the road less traveled,
Wear out your boots and kick up the gravel.
Don't be afraid, take the road less traveled on.
The obvious suggestion here is that we are obligated to break the rules in order to succeed. The authors of
Whiplash, Joi Ito & Jeff Howe, devote a chapter to this discussion. "Disobedience, especially in the crucial realms like problem solving, often pay greater dividends than compliance. Innovation requires creativity, and creativity - to the great frustration of well-meaning (and not so well-m
eaning) managers - often requires freedom from constraints." (page 139)
Our current education systems which are the results of the changes to the economic structure in the late 19th century and early 20th century - the Industrial Revolution - are not designed for creativity, and disobedience, but are built for efficiency, and compliance. When large numbers
of families moved from the rural areas to the new, and quickly growing cities, new schools and new systems of educating children needed to be quickly developed. The old model of the single room school house (a very student centric model for education) would not work in the new industrial era. Children were grouped by age, not ability - this was easy and efficient. All students in a grade were taught the same curriculum, given the same assessment, given grades, and then moved to the next grade. There was little thought of mastery. This system continues to be pervasive throughout the United States in 2018, well over 100 years after its inception.
Educators, by their nature for the most part are averse to change. Schools today continue to promote a siloed approach to teaching and therefore learning - teachers - even the best teachers - tend to be most comfortable in their own classrooms, working magically at times with children, but struggling to collaborate, and innovate (change) with other adults. Most school leaders have a career path that begins with being a classroom teacher, therefore do not have the experiences and skills to effectively lead change or to create an innovative culture.
In recent years, many authors, and educators have provided thoughtful guidance on the need to be 'disobedient' in our approach to education. There are many versions of the 21st century skills that most agree are required for our children to succeed in a new and rapidly changing world. The books of Tony Wagner (
Global Achievement Gap and
Creating Innovators), Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn (
Disrupting Class), Salman Khan (
The One World School House), Grant Lichtman (
#EdJourney), and so many more provide us with new ideas and a new framework for successful education. Technology is providing new opportunities to rethink education. The old model and role of a teacher is no longer valid. Content is available at our finger tips, anywhere, and anytime.
From the book jacket of Wagner's Creating Innovators: "Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identified a pattern - a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: These are the forces that drive young innovators." It is no coincidence that PLAY - PASSION - PURPOSE has been the driving force of the success in recent years at The Children's School, Atlanta, GA,
led by Head of School Nishant Mehta. One way that Nishant has led this change is to ensure that all of the adults at the school were comfortable with change and have the skills to lead a new type of learning for the students.
In my opinion, real change in our education systems require disobedience - as Ito says in
Whiplash; "Nobody has ever won a Nobel Prize by doing what they're told, or even following someone else's blueprints." (page 139) The challenge for educational leaders is that most do not have the same DNA as an entrepreneur who is constantly challenging the status quo. We need all educational leaders to think of themselves as disruptors - Heads, Division Directors, Business Officers, Enrollment Management leaders, etc. Additionally, these leaders must learn to work together - not in silos - for their institutions to continue to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of 21st century education.
My own experience as a new business officer at a K-12 independent school many years ago has shaped my thinking and understanding of the need for change. I had never worked in a school and needed to learn about education. Fortunately, the Head of School was fully supportive. Leading experiential trips, having a role in the school play, advising seniors on their final projects, teaching a class, and more are all examples of how I learned about our school, and our educational processes. I did not learn for some time that this was highly unusual for a business officer - little did I know that I was being disobedient in order to help lead change at our school. For years I have encouraged business officers (typically the only person at an independent school with some entrepreneurial DNA) to get completely immersed in the educational programs so they can be educational leaders for effective change at their schools. All administrators should do the same - regardless of their position.
Fortunately, through the work of some brave and innovative leaders, we are beginning to see the landscape change. More leaders, and therefore more schools are being disobedient - taking risks -
accepting failure - learning, and moving forward. Ultimately, our children will gain from our disobedience.
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| Blessed are the Disobedient... |
| Christian Talbot, Founder & Principal, Basecamp School |
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If you can't live without Netflix, you should probably thank Barry Diller. In the 1960s, when Diller was a young professional at ABC, he did the first of many things that would alter the way that we consume stories on TV.
On Reid Hoffman's podcast, Masters of Scale, Diller tells the story of his arrival at ABC, when he seized the opportunity to purchase rights to broadcast Hollywood movies on TV. Quickly he learned that the movies that studios wanted to sell were not the movies that Diller wanted to buy.
Which got him wondering...
Why did Hollywood producers get to decide what stories become movies in the first place?
Then he wondered something else...
Why did stories on TV operate outside the world of time?
As Diller tells Hoffman: "I started to think: All television at that time were series, either comedies or dramas, and in both forms, everything was present-day. In other words, those series would go on for seven years, Lucy [from "I Love Lucy"] still lived in her same apartment. She never moved. Everything was in present time. There was all middle. There was no beginning, there was no end. And I thought, 'You know what? Why don't we tell stories that have a beginning, middle, and end?' Like they do in movies. And why shouldn't television do that?"
As it turns out, conventional wisdom abounded about why TV didn't do it. But for Diller, "conventional wisdom" meant "compliant thinking." So he exercised some creative disobedience and pitched the idea of a "movie of the week." The made-for-television movie had been considered impossible until Diller pioneered it. Not long after, Diller invented the mini-series form ("the novel for television," as he called it).
Movies and miniseries made originally for television, not the big screen--where would Netflix be without Diller's disobedient thinking?
This episode of Masters of Scale highlights the many ways in which Diller was disobedient and non-compliant as an "infinite learner" (which is the title of the episode). His disobedience is beautifully captured in his favorite questions:
- What if...?
- Why don't we...?
- Why couldn't you...?
In schools, such questions can be disorienting and upsetting for students and adults who have been conditioned to expect a culture of compliance.
In Whiplash, MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito says, "In order to maximize the creative output of each person in the Lab, people  often have to be deprogrammed from needing to know what the 'right' answer is, what is being asked of them, what they need to comply with in order to 'pass.' Sure, there are guidelines, and as part of a large institution, there are some rules that people must follow. The point is that these rules are not the focus. It's the freedom to act without asking permission."
That sounds great, but isn't that easier said than done? Isn't Barry Diller on Masters of Scale because he is an outlier (and an exceptionally successful one at that)? Doesn't MIT Media Lab promote disobedience over compliance because they admit only the most elite learners? Why would a typical school want to create an environment in which teachers and students are encouraged "to act without asking permission"?
Here we can learn another lesson from Barry Diller. In his time at ABC (and later Paramount, then Fox), he knew exactly what success looked like: provide compelling stories to audiences.
He achieved that goal time and again precisely because he practiced the art of "disobeying" the conventional thinking around how that could be done.
Schools also need to be crystal clear about what success looks like. During my time at Malvern Prep, we thrashed (creatively) for a long time before distilling our Vision for great learning into a Venn diagram.
That Venn diagram operates like a target. Teachers know that the ideal learning experience will hit the bullseye by asking students to be Augustinian in their hearts, Globally Literate in their minds, and Entrepreneurial in their actions.
Not only does that Venn diagram make it clear where learners  ought to go; it also functions as a rubric. A teacher can look at any learning experience and ask, "Are we hitting the bullseye? If not, how might we move from the perimeter to the center?"
For example, imagine that a Math teacher has developed a project-based learning experience about the school's overcrowded parking lot. The learning experience clearly asks students to be Globally Literate (e.g., apply algebraic thinking to a real world problem) and Entrepreneurial (e.g., collaborate on a prototype solution). But what about the third element of the Venn diagram? How might the teacher move the experience into the bullseye by redesigning the lesson to include an Augustinian element?
The school's Augustinian mission calls upon the community to attend to the needs of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed. A crowded parking lot might present a genuine human need at her school, but it is not an Augustinian concern. By contrast, trying to solve for the peaks and troughs in the food supply at a local food desert, where low income families shop, gets right to the heart of Augustinian concerns.
How else might this teacher redesign the lesson? To borrow a page from Barry Diller:
- What if... the teacher were to invite students to co-design the lesson to hit the bullseye?
- Why don't we... ask students to design their own learning experiences aligned to the bullseye?
- Why couldn't you... celebrate the most "disobedient" learning designs that hit the bullseye?
It is easy to "comply" with the expectations of, say, the AP curriculum. But how much more powerful is the learning experience when teachers and students are encouraged to exercise freedom in getting to the bullseye creatively?
In our age of Whiplash, promoting disobedience over compliance is enormously practical. The world no longer rewards compliance. In the industrial mechanical era, compliance was a reasonable way to achieve job security. Now, doing what you are told to do, exactly as you are told to do it, marks you out for replacement by a machine, which will be compliant more cheaply and reliably.
By contrast, exercising your creative freedom--your "disobedience"--to journey toward success will ensure that you are an "infinite learner." And infinite learners are perfectly positioned to thrive in an age of accelerating change.
Blessed are the disobedient, for they will inherit the future.
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| Disobedience for Social Good |
Emma Wellman, Director of After School Programs, Chicago Lab Schools and L+D Fellow
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I'm writing this on January 15th - a day we make time to honor and celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of MLK's great legacies is his version of civil disobedience. As opposed to those who came before, King viewed civil disobedience as a kind of love letter to the nation's laws and institutions. On
Meet the Press
in 1965, he said, "Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly  accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscious of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for law."
That is, King empowered citizens to be respectfully clear about their indignation and aspirations-even in the face of tradition, uneven power, and terrible suffering-because he thought there was something deeply right about America. He championed disobedience, not merely as an expression of anger and frustration, but as a pathway to equality. MLK set out to solve problems in a new way; he understood that complying with the then current rules wouldn't fix things, but also believed that indiscriminate and destructive disobedience wouldn't either. This balance is a delicate and tense one to strike. Joi Ito describes it in
Whiplash
as "a difficult line-sometimes obvious only in retrospect-between disobedience that helps society and disobedience that doesn't" (p. 152).
Reading this chapter and reflecting on Dr. King got me thinking about how we can foster a culture which not merely tolerates but encourages productive disobedience in schools-places which are traditionally rigid and authoritarian. In chasing this goal, one will inevitably bump up against the core tension between problem-finding and problem-solving. In my experience, we seem to have a natural talent or inclination towards one or the other of these two: some folks seem always to be noticing and naming the ways things are lousy, while others are more apt to ride in on proverbial white horses to save the day. The sticky thing is, neither of these approaches is sufficient on its own. We need to empower all members of our school communities to express their dissatisfaction, to give frank feedback, to poke holes in our favorite ideas, and to scoff at our time-honored traditions, while also fostering a freedom to bootstrap, experiment, prototype and occasionally even go off half-cocked. I'd argue that MLK, Ito, and Howe teach us that if it is to be beneficial for our schools and society, all of this problem-finding and -solving, disobedience and deviance, must be grounded in love and genuine curiosity, even if it's uncomfortable. Without that, we risk merely being contrarian, or generating solutions that don't really fix the problems. If we are to learn to use the future's "new operating system" as Ito and Howe describe it, we desperately need those people who will identify problems and as well as those excited to find solutions--both of whom can be experienced as disobedient--and that's a good thing. We need these people to work together, as uncomfortable for them as this may be, for embracing this type of productive disobedience will help schools stay connected to what is deeply right about their communities.
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