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 2017.
Leadership+Design Bootcamp
November 2-3, 2017
INDUSTRY, Denver, CO
Learn to apply design thinking habits and mindsets to leadership and change efforts.
November 5-8, 2017
La Fonda on the Plaza, NM
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L+D Board of Directors
Ryan Baum
VP of Strategy
Jump Associates, CA
Lee Burns
Headmaster
McCallie School
, TN
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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| Heads Will Roll: A Year of Whiplash |
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Carla Silver, Executive Director, Leadership+Design
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Dear Friends!
Welcome back and Happy September! By now you have had at least a couple of weeks back in the saddle, and we hope the ride is smooth - but if it feels a little faster than usual and that summer was shorter than ever, you aren't imagining it, and you aren't alone. Welcome to our world of acceleration and rapid change.
Here at Leadership+Design, our minds are reeling from the recent book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito and Jeffrey Howe. Our love affair began with a mere  suggestion from our friend (and contributor to this month's newsletter) Richard Kassissieh who mentioned it in the back of a cab at the NAIS annual conference last March. Since then our obsession with this book has grown - so much so that we have decided to use it as a container and a foundation for our newsletter this year. Yes. It's that good. We are literally whipped over Whiplash.
Ito, the Director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, and Howe, journalism professor at Northeastern University and author, share a compelling illustration of the paradigm shifts facing modern civilization due to the rapid acceleration of just about everything. Whiplash provides readers a toolkit - a set of habits and mindsets - and offers "nine principles to bring our brains into the modern era." As the pace of technology accelerates and the internet becomes the most powerful communication tool of all time, our world has changed forever. The guidelines set forth in Whiplash offer an optimistic path forward on the ever more ambiguous, dizzying, and confounding road ahead of us.
Our work at Leadership+Design is grounded in three basic goals; to build capacity in schools and in the people who lead them; to create conversation between people and schools; and to make connections with new ideas, habits mindsets and also among people. We hope this "extended book group" will help our readers to do all three things. Although it is not a book explicitly about education, the nine principles of Whiplash are new ideas that are directly applicable to both the way we might consider our work in schools as well as the habits and mindsets we can provide our students. Both Howe and Ito are also members of learning communities above all else. The MIT Media Lab in all it does with its students embraces the "four Ps of creative learning - Projects, Peers, Passion and Play" and places the concept of learning - "something you do for yourself" - over education - "something done to you." This spirit resonates throughout the book as it challenges educators to reframe our roles, our pedagogy, and even the purpose of school. Since reading this book, we have applied the principles dozens of times to the work we have done with schools - from strategic planning to leadership team development, to designing our open enrollment programs for school leaders. We see this as a highly practical read, one that has value in daily life.
To enjoy the articles this year, you don't have to have read Whiplash - although clearly we do recommend it. Each month we will be taking one of the nine principles and using it as a launch pad for reflection and exploration. This month, we start this yearlong book study with the first principle: "Emergence over Authority." There was a time when knowledge, leadership, communication, and innovation was produced and spread from the top down. This hierarchical paradigm has lost resonance as org charts have become flatter and there has been a decentralization of knowledge and authority from the powerful and few to the masses. It's been a long time coming, over thousands of years, but the Internet has provided access to all of the content knowledge one could need at the swipe of a pocket-sized computer and all of the communications tools. Suddenly, BAM! It's no longer the people with the most expensive educations and the exclusive networks who can be the innovators and the influencers. In fact, innovation that ignites and sustains, often comes from the bottom up. Check out this 2015 article by IDEO's Duane Bray in Harvard Business Review who in sharing about the IDEO emergent culture writes, "We've learned that the best new ideas and capabilities are often incubated from the bottom up through someone's personal energy and commitment."
The articles below from Crystal Land, Richard Kassissieh, and Eugene Korsunskiy showcase how "emergence over authority" is alive and well in both K-12 and higher ed, and it's making a difference in employee engagement, teaching and learning, and sustainable change. If you have examples about how you are employing emergent strategies, we'd love to hear from you, so reply to this email with your stories.
We wish you the very best start to 2017-18 and look forward to this engaging journey into the nine principles of Whiplash with you.
Warmly,
Carla Silver
Executive Director
PS And if you want to keep learning with us this fall, check out our two programs - both in the beautiful Rocky Mountains - our Design Thinking Bootcamp in Denver, November 2-3 and our Santa Fe Seminar in NM November 5-8.
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| The Sandwich Approach: Top Down and Bottom Up |
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Crystal Land, Head of School, Head-Royce School
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I've always been intrigued by the Italian educational philosophy called "Reggio Emilia" where young children
choose
what they want to learn through discovery and exploration. If preschoolers are interested
in
the idea of how cities work, for example,
children and teachers observe,
question, build, create and make meaning about cities through creative arts and expression. This approach to constructivist lear
ning reminds me how meaningful education is when coupled with pe
rso
nal connection, intrinsic motivation, and opportunity for deep pla
y and exploration. Who wouldn't want to dive deeply into an area of passion like cities or insects or bridges? As I read
Whiplash
and pondered the application of "emergence over authority," the connection to this child-centered and holistic approach to learning resonated. Interestingly this approach also reflects the approach Head-Royce has focused on in our Strategic Plan development and initial stages of implementation.
Some of you might be ready to stop reading when you read the words "strategic plan." Indulge me. Read a bit further to see how a formal "plan" or vision for the school has morphed into individual and small group connections to the larger vision.
Over the past two years, Head-Royce has embarked on a more holistic approach to Strategic Planning in partnership with Leadership+Design. Inspired by a human-centered design approach, our committee members initially conducted deep dives into the community to discover the needs of various parts of the school, and then formulated goals that we believe are far-reaching and aspirational in the areas of teaching and learning, equity and inclusion, health and well-being, civic engagement, and financial sustainability. I am particularly proud of one of our goals: "Commit to and sustain a culture of balance and well-being". As a college preparatory school--in a speedily changing world--we hope it will help us graduate healthy students ready to thrive in college and life.
These five aspirational goals and initiatives provide me, as the Head of School, with a clear road map for where the school is headed. Yet, I need more than a board-endorsed road map; I also strive for community-wide engagement in order give this plan a sense of urgency and agency.
Whiplash
authors Ito and Howe explain why it's important to empower everyone in the community to have agency in the plan: "....this shift from authority--when organizations charted whatever course those lofty few up on the quarterdeck deemed wise--to
emergence, in which many more decisions are
made
as much as they emerge from large groups of employees or stakeholders
of one type or the other, is changing the future of many organizations."
This year, as part of our initial implementation, we have various "ways into" the Strategic Plan. Structurally, we have eleven working groups leading specific initiatives in the key areas of the plan. While each group is in charge of moving an initiative forward, facilitators are encouraging a "bias toward action." Academic Dean Shahana Sarkar instructed each group to have at least one concrete prototype by the end of this year. I can honestly say that I don't know the exact outcome of each group but I do know that they are guided by aspirational goals and now have room to explore and experiment.
In addition, we are encouraging individuals and groups to find small ways to "hack" the plan with their own individually scaled idea. Some examples:
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The Fine Arts Department is asking every member of our community to create a 3x5 "art card" that illustrates what  equity and inclusion means to them. They plan to share all 500 or so in a formal exhibit.
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The History Department chose social justice as their departmental mission to link to our civic engagement goal.
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A senior elective teacher plans to reach out to our local Muslim community for personal connections to our class on Islam.
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The Civic Engagement committee has connected with a local "Save the Bay" organization to move our environmental sustainability work forward.
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Middle School teachers are developing full day simulations to promote project-based learning focused on real-world problems.
It's the "sandwich" approach: while final decisions on the Strategic Plan were necessarily made at the level of leadership, implementation requires an emergent, bottom-up approach that honors and values community passions. Both pieces of "bread" are crucial to the success of the plan. Much like Reggio Emilia, teachers are leading with their interests and passions rather than being handed a check list for implementation. As Ito and Howe conclude, "Emergent systems presume that every individual within that system possesses unique intelligence that would benefit the group. This information is shared back when people make choices about what ideas or projects to support or, crucially, take that information and use it to innovate."
I'm excited to see what unfolds!
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| Developing Our Best Ideas |
Richard Kassissieh, Academic Dean & Director of Strategic Program Initiatives, University Prep
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"How do we provide students with the most powerful, lasting learning opportunities? Where do we do this well? Where might we do more?" A learning organization is always asking these questions. Today at University Prep, fully half of our faculty and staff voluntarily serve on research and design teams that produce our best new ideas for enhancing the students' educational experience. How did we get here?
To develop our new strategic plan, we asked the school community to answer these questions and thereby set our course for the upcoming years. We held focus group discussions, conducted internal research and design workshops, administered community surveys, and consulted with national experts. Along the way, we found that the seeds for UPrep's future had already been laid. We just needed to create the conditions to help them flourish.
This is one example of what Ito and Howe term "emergence" in their book
Whiplash
. They write, "emergent systems presume that every individual within that system possesses unique intelligence that would benefit the group." Doesn't that perfectly suit a school? One of our teachers commented, "I have had ideas for student learning for years. Now, I feel invited to share them, because they actually get adopted!"
The ideas collected during this listening phase coalesced around five themes. We may have predicted some of these in advance, but others were unanticipated. In emergent systems, Ito and Howe write, "decisions aren't
made
so much as they emerge from large groups of employees or stakeholders." As an added benefit, each project started with the advantage of existing community support, because the community had generated the ideas.
Next Generation Learning at University Prep
- New Models of Time
- Social and Emotional Learning
- Social Justice and Educational Equity
- Interdisciplinary Learning
- U Lab: Student-Directed Learning Connected to Community
We then invited leaders from outside the administrative team to facilitate each team. Ten teacher leaders and program directors stepped into this leadership role. John Kotter describes this as "a dual operating system" in his book
XLR8 (Accelerate).
The first operating system,
hierarchy
, is expert at efficiently managing ongoing operations but also tends to maintain the status quo. The second,
network
operating system, is creative, divergent, and connects ideas across disciplines and departments. In the organization with only the hierarchical operating system, decisions are made at the top and handed down to uninspired employees. With a dual operating system, both the hierarchy and network play to their respective strengths.
By inviting many voices and broadly distributing leadership, we created a dynamic innovation engine that continues to create great ideas, promote involvement, and cultivate its own support.
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Ubox, a product of the student-led Social Entrepreneurship class |
Within the first year, we designed and adopted a new school schedule, added social and emotional learning activities to advisory, ran our first Senior LaunchPad (an enhanced senior project), launched the first two entirely student-led courses (no teacher needed), and committed to design intensives (single courses that run full-time for a three-week term, borrowed from Hawken School). We have also joined other national networks that uphold emergence, such as Independent Curriculum Group, Mastery Transcript Consortium, and Global Online Academy.
How does UPrep prepare students for a world that values emergence over authority? It's easy when we value the ideas of every individual. Students serve on research and design teams, propose new courses and independent study projects, take risks when designing their Senior LaunchPads. Valuing emergence means supporting student voice, choice, and leadership in the classroom and school life. Community partnerships create opportunities for students to pursue their passions through online study, internships, social activism, and entrepreneurship. The principles that have made Next Generation Learning a successful strategic initiative have also made the school more responsive and celebratory of student needs, wishes, and dreams.
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A New Kind of "Flipped" Classroom
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Eugene Korsunskiy, Design Thinking Lecturer, Dartmouth College
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After a few years of teaching an introductory
Design Thinking class
at a university, I had amassed a growing group of students who wanted to keep honing their innovation skills, and  demanded an advanced version of the class. So last semester, disinclined to admit that I had already conveyed just about everything I knew about design thinking in the intro course, I rustled up a website for a new one-very creatively titled "
Advanced Design Thinking
"-and decided to try it as a pilot.
I had no idea what we were going to do for a semester.
On day one, I handed the students a blank course calendar, with a single notation marking the date of the end-of-semester conference at which they were to show the results of their work. The rest, I admitted, we'll have to fill in together.
First up: what are we going to be working on? For the intro class, I would run around town looking for organizations to partner with, working with local non-profits, etc. to define and scope projects for the students to tackle. That worked fine, but it took a considerable amount of my bandwidth, and I always felt on the hook to deliver a "successful" project prompt. Besides, I was also teaching a section of the introductory course during the same semester, and all of my contacts had been spent on coming up with project ideas for that one.
So the first assignment in Advanced Design Thinking was for each student to come to class with three ideas for projects topics. These ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous: "How might we make the voting process easier?" to "How might we make a banana easy to access on-the-go and difficult to forget about?" Everyone got to pitch their topic ideas, and everyone got to vote and select what to work on. The nagging nervousness I felt at the prospect of letting the students choose their own project topics dissipated as the group gravitated naturally toward meaningful and important issues, including mental health, education, and sustainability. Organically and without my meddling, the students arranged themselves into five well-balanced teams based on their interests.
The first assignment that each team had to submit was a project timeline: they were in charge of scheduling their own deliverables and milestones. And while I was there to give them feedback, I knew that the different natures of the five projects would make it impossible for me to concoct a one-size-fits-all timeline that made any sense for any of them. Allowing this structure to emerge from the class, rather than dictating it top-down, made the teaching experience a lot easier for me: each team was in charge of managing their own tasks, and I was there to check in and demand deliverables when the students told me I should be demanding them.
One of the most challenging aspects of teaching for me is establishing and maintaining a safe and supportive culture in the classroom. This, too, I nervously handed over to the students. At their first meeting, I asked each team to write a contract with norms that are to govern their team's functioning for the rest of the semester. They penned rules like "One may not repress the ideas of a teammate," "Deal with problems/frictions as th
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Student work session in Advanced Design Thinking |
ey occur-don't let them build up," and "Be mindful of phone usage
during team meetings." A few times throughout the semester
,
I had the students check in with their contract and have a frank conversation about how they're doing with regard to upholding a positive and productive team culture. As they got into the habit of paying attention to how their behavior affects their teammates, this empathetic attitude transcended each team, and the whole class helped each other maintain an affirming and creativity-fostering culture.
The semester was a balancing act. Even though I ceded a lot of authority over the content and structure of the course, it wasn't all anarchy. I was there for scaffolding, maintaining general order, coaching, and as-needed content delivery. Most class meetings were virtually unstructured work sessions, and when I saw a team coming up to an obstacle that I knew a nice tool for tackling, I taught them that tool at that time. The result was that they paid attention to a lot more of the content than they did in my other classes, because each tidbit was being delivered when they knew they needed it.
At the end of semester, every single one of the five project teams had an implementation plan for carrying their project beyond the semester. One team was getting ready to file a preliminary patent for their product, another was invited to create a new kind of space on campus based on their concept, and another was set to incorporate as a nonprofit. That never happened in my other classes.
Along the way, the students were visibly more engaged, because I think they felt more ownership of their own experience. In reflections and debriefing conversations, they all reported feeling that their experience in this class was something they co-authored, rather than something that was thrust upon them.
And did I mention it was a lot easier to teach this way? I felt so much lighter, not carrying around the burden of being the guywith the answers, or the guy "in charge." By the end of the second week of class, the students all knew more about the topic of their projects than I did, so they knew to come to me only for process guidance, not content wisdom. I felt that my role was that of a facilitator, rather than instructor-I was there to emcee and catalyze the students' efforts, not tell them what to do. I didn't wind up having to plan many lessons; just had to show up every day ready to engage. It was so much fun.
Whiplash
is right, I think-the future is trending toward emergence over authority. And we can probably agree that a great way to equip our students for this future is to simulate it in the classroom. What I shared here is just one vignette of what it might look like when you try this emergence-over-authority flip.
So my charge to you is to consider: what can you relinquish authority over? What can you let emerge from the collective mind of your students? It doesn't have to be a wholesale shift -just one tiny aspect of a course structure or content could be a great way to start experimenting. If nothing else, it might be fun.
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