Leadership+Design
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Plan your professional learning adventures with L+D in 2018.
Design Studio
October 29-30, 2018
Baltimore, MD
Human Centered Design for Admissions (with AISAP)
The Santa Fe Seminar
November 4-8, 2018
Santa Fe, NM
A leadership journey about purpose and direction
Design Studio
March 20-21, 2019
Washington, DC
Designing for Student Civic Engagement
Design Studio
April 19, 2019
Tacoma, WA
Equity and Inclusion Action Lab
Wonder Women
June 24-27, 2019
Oakland, CA
Uncovering your Superpowers and 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
Karan Merry
Retired Head of School
Brooklyn, NY
Jeanette Moore
CFO
The San Francisco 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
2018-19
RIPL Designer
McGillis School, UT
Michael Ecker
Principal
Calaveras, Middle School, CA
Kristen Erickson
History Department Chair and Art Gallery Director
Greenwich Academy, CT
Jon Freer
Director of Technology and Innovative Teaching
Solebury School, PA
Rhonda Hewer
Learning Services Consultant
Waterloo Region District School Board, Ontario, Canada
Louise Lindsay
Innovation Coach
Knoxville Jewish Day School, TN
Sonja McKay
Teacher
Exploris School, NC
Stephanie Mendrala
Director of Professional Development
STEM School Highlands Ranch, CO
Ingrid Moore
Director of Lower School
The Steward School, VA
Brian Mull
Innovation and Learning Design Coordinator
Trinity Episcopal School, NOLA
Hannah Nelson
Science Teacher and Academic Dean
Watershed School, CO
Gwenyth Nicholson
8th Grade Humanities Teacher
Saco Middle School, ME
Bobby Pollicino
Upper School Principal
Bullis School, MD
Sara Slogesky
K-12 Social Studies Curriculum Specialist
Capital Region Education Council Magnet Schools, CT
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Carla Silver, Head L+Doer
Leadership+Design
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Happy October, Friends!
We are continuing with our "Mad Lib" themed newsletter series, and this month we are exploring analogies. Designers often use analogy or metaphor as a tool to frame tensions and challenges as well as an ideal future state. When we work with schools on strategic planning or on articulating mission and values, we often ask them to share a metaphor for school culture - one that goes beyond the platitude of "garden" or "family" and exposes some of the gems, idiosyncrasies, and challenges within the culture. This month, we've asked our writers to share analogies for school - what if school was more like ______________ and less like _____________.
I've been thinking a lot about this article this month and the specific metaphor or analogy I thought I would want to share for the future of school. I knew immediately what I
wanted
to write - but I was worried about being misinterpreted or offending someone with my examples. But then I had to get real with myself and have more faith in the L+D Recharge readership. I had to believe that readers would understand that I am not passing judgment about value of either of the two activities below - I think they are both worthwhile endeavors - but that you will see that my choice for using the two analogies is to describe the
qualities
that I hope for the future of teaching and learning and also those qualities I feel we might need to creatively destroy in school. So I'm taking a bit of a risk and hoping you will assume best intentions.
What if school felt more like:
and less like:
A little context: This summer I had the joy of participating in Seth Godin's AltMBA program. It was a one-month intensive online course that allowed me to connect with some of the most interesting people in all different industries from around the world. One of those interesting people was a woman named Piper. She wrote a post on our discourse/collaboration platform about her relationship to exercise and physical health that had evolved over her adult life. She harkened back to her high school days, painting a John Hughes-style picture of the social dynamics she experienced, where people were labeled and placed in boxes - "
the brain, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal." Piper found herself in the "drama crowd" and self-identified as "NOT the athlete"and she participated in very few physical activities - in large part because there were no other options beyond organized sports at her school. As she grew into adulthood, she realized that she had almost no connection to her own body. A lifestyle of inactivity was leaving her both unhealthy and without a mind/body connection. She wanted a way to stay fit, be social, and combine personal expression and movement with her interest in performance as well. So she created WerkOut Palace - which is a blend of dance party, comedy, aerobics, and pilates. It brings people together to be silly, creative, and authentic and to work out - hard.
When I watched her video (and I promise to share the link at the end), I felt such a sense of joy. It wasn't that I identified with the participants - I'm not sure I am brave enough to attend a Werk Out Palace Class (not to mention, what would I wear?!) - but there was such a palpable sense of
engagement, ownership, fun, creativity, authenticity, individuality, collaboration, and choice.
And while everyone was experiencing all of these these qualities, they were doing something really good for themselves. They were getting healthy and strong with a high likelihood that they would continue to do it again and build lifelong healthy habits.
I want school to feel like WerkOut Palace.
Instead, I think school too often feels like a Cotillion Program. Don't get me wrong. Cotillion programs offer something valuable and they too can be enjoyable ways for young adults to learn social skills and life skills. But they also, by design, are rigid, formulaic, with sense of proper etiquette and the right way of doing things. From my experience with Cotillion, there is not much room for experimentation or new ways of doing things. In fact, by design, everyone is learning the exact same thing, at the same time, in the same way with an emphasis on compliance and obedience. For many students, school still places a premium on getting the
right
answer, or solving problems in a one way, and also on behaving. While there is a simplicity and safety to homogeneous and uniform experiences, they don't tend to surface much passion. Joy, silliness, fun, chaos, and engagement often get pushed to the side and replaced by seriousness, order, mind-numbing rigor, and boredom.
In a global innovation economy, the most desirable jobs will require humans of immense empathy, flexibility, creativity and passion. We will need optimists who can see many possible solutions to any given challenge, who can manage high levels of ambiguity and complexity and who are insatiably curious, directing their own learning and work throughout their lives. Robots will be doing the compliant, obedient jobs of yesterday. More than anything, we need joyful people who can take hard and sometimes even dark situations, and find the light within them. As Seth Godin wrote in a recent blog, "Doom is inevitable. Gloom is a choice."
Even if WerkOut Palace seems a little scary or unsettling to you - something you might never try, I hope you will try to see what I see in it - a vibrant, joyful, fulfilling, engaging and healthy experience for the people involved. And isn't that what we want for the experience our students have at school everyday?
If this analogy doesn't work for you, maybe some of the articles below will be more to your liking! Thanks to
Colleen Schilly (Hillbrook School),
Michael Molina (Gilman School) and
Gwyneth Nicholson (Saco Middle School), for their contributions this month. All three have offered very different analogies for school. Do you have one you would like to contribute? Email me at
carla@leadershipanddesign.org
.
As always, we have some excellent programs coming your way - with a few spaces still left in our Human Centered Design for Admissions Professionals in Baltimore, October 29 and 30. We are super excited to partner with AISAP on this one. While the Santa Fe Seminar is full, if you are hitting a wall this fall and want to come refresh, renew and reconnect with your work, we can probably find space for you.
Warmly,
Carla Silver
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| What If Schools Were More Like Wayfinding and Less Like GPS Navigation? |
| Colleen Schilly, Head of Lower School, Hillbrook School |
I'm sitting outside on our 14 acre campus at Hillbrook School. I see a pair of Kindergarten girls walking to the office together. I say hello. They wave and smile and one of them says "I'm going to get my jacket I forgot in the music room, but first my teacher asked me to deliver this note to the front desk." They go on their way. As they walk the next stretch of their journey they amble along. One of the girls takes a little skip and speeds up her step. The other matches it...and within moments they are sprinting towards the music room. On their journey back to their classroom they take a different route. A group of 8th graders (giants!) crosses their path and they freeze, staring. They get a couple high fives and hellos, and then they resume their journey.
Two 2nd grade students are walking down a small hill with a tote bag full of books. They share the load, each carrying one handle, and struggle with it a bit. Sometimes one of them moves faster than the other. Sometimes one of them loses their grip. They make it to the library, deliver the books, and start to walk back towards their classroom. They take a wrong turn towards a fenced off construction area. They realize, turn around, and get back on track.
A group of 6th grade students sit at a picnic table working together. Every now and again there is some screechy laughter, or one of them rolls off the bench and flops on the ground, but they are flipping through books and making progress on their work. They are keeping an eye on the clock, and pack up their things and move to the next class at the appropriate time.
None of these children are accompanied by adults. And that independence is a gift.
I've been mentally tending to a theory for some time now. My theory, in brief, is as follows: Children are showing up to school differently than they have in decades past. Most notably, they are showing up with underdeveloped self-regulation skills. The experience of childhood is changing, and that is having some concrete effects on child development.
I have some hypotheses on why this is happening, none of which are yet backed by any data beyond anecdotal, qualitative observation. I think there are likely many contributing factors, and each child and family's story is always a nuanced and individual one. That said, I am seeing a trend, which is a complex interplay between the increasingly fast paced nature of our world and the way we as adults interact with screens and  devices. As adults we are FAST and we are DISTRACTED. We are leading largely unexamined lives around how the speed of living, and the inattention we give it as it passes us by, is profoundly impacting the way we interact with children and alters the types of experiences we provide for and share with them. We are trying to raise children, as parents and as schools, in the same way we navigate from place to place: by typing a destination in to our phone and waiting for that phone to tell us when and where to turn and how long it will take to get there.
We are thoughtlessly
overscheduling and overprotecting
little human beings through childhood, because it's how we are living our own lives....and as a result the journey we (and by extension they) are on is less fruitful, more frenetic, and highly reactive.
Which brings me to the question at hand:
What if schools were more like wayfinding and less like GPS navigation?
Wikipedia offers an interesting look at the term "
wayfinding
". In addition, I like to describe it as the experience of moving about the world with open eyes, a present mind, and a willingness to embrace serendipity. What if school, what if
childhood
, were more like that?
True moments of wayfinding require time. They require parents, teachers, and leaders to prioritize possibility, ambiguity, and some uncertainty over what is predictable and scheduled. Wayfinding requires a firmly held belief that there is power in the emergent, and that when learning and living are supple in response to what shows up they can be that much more transformative and lasting. Opening up the world to children through a wayfinder's mindset requires that we (as adults) be comfortable with reasonable risk and relinquish some of our much treasured illusion of control.
"Risky play primarily takes place outdoors, often as challenging and adventurous physical activities, children attempting something they have never done before, skirting the borderline of the feeling of being out of control (often because of height or speed) and overcoming fear...Most of the time risky play occurs in children's free play as opposed to play organized by adults. In modern western society there is a growing focus on the safety of children in all areas, including situations involving playing. An exaggerated safety focus of children's play is problematic because while on the one hand children should avoid injuries, on the other hand they might need challenges and varied stimulation to develop normally, both physically and mentally."
One of the types of risky play that the authors identify is "Exploring on one's own". In other words: wayfinding.
Children NEED it.
And we are increasingly seeing larger numbers of children who are either unusually fearful or unusually unable to manage themselves when afforded age-appropriate freedom...because they haven't had any practice.
You might have started reading this article because you were hoping I would give you "7 Strategies to Make Schools More Like Wayfinding and Less Like GPS Navigation"...but I'm going to disappoint you. Not only do I not know what those strategies are...but making a list like that would be doing the thing that I'm suggesting we resist: prescribing concrete strategies and sequences of steps towards the mythology of an elusive outcome.
The only suggestion I have right now is, while we are looking at what adults (whether they are parents, leaders, or teachers) can do to change, adjust, innovate, or adapt the landscape of schools and parenting...we ought to take some time to turn the microscope on ourselves. How can you be more of a wayfinder? How can you disconnect (literally or figuratively) from the GPS systems in your life? What might emerge when you do?
Children will follow our lead.
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Crows Know: It Takes a Village
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Michael Otieno Molina, English & History Teacher, Gilman School
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A flock of crows is called a "murder". The snarky poet who thought of this moniker must have heard a flock of crows cawing - with that awful scream that curdles into a gurgle - and thought of the discord and distress that accompanies a murder. This poet must also have been an educator.
If you have ever attempted to shepherd humans engaged in education, whether students from grades to graduation, teachers from tradition to innovation, or administrators from bottom-lines to highest standards, you know that school leadership can feel like a murder of crows. Heaped atop the many challenges indigenous to education are the challenges of social discord that can make this work exponentially more difficult. Having taught and led in educational environments as diverse as Yale University, San Francisco public schools, Atlanta-area charter schools, and now a Baltimore all-boys independent school, I can attest that social discord knows not race, class, religion, or gender. While privilege is not evenly distributed, discord most certainly is. How might we overcome social discord to get to the work of nourishing hearts and minds? The design approach of biomimicry can help us imagine how to create functional, healthy, sustainably interdependent social environments.
According to the
Biomimicry Institute
, biomimicry or biomimetics is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies.
While universities like Stanford use this approach at their
Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab
to design robots of the future,
organizations such as the non-profit
Bioneers
promote the use of biomimicry to design
restorative food systems
.
If this approach can be useful for such massive opportunities and challenges as these, can
we also use biomimicry to design ways to mitigate the social discord typical in educational institutions?
One answer can be found in Fast Company magazine's 2010
Biomimcry Challenge
which inspired IDEO to team with the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) to redesign the type of hierarchical organizational structure that
Lindred Greer of Standford Graduate School of Business
asserts "makes people turn on each other when they face an outside threat." Together IDEO and USGBC studied the relationships between fungi and tree roots, the reproductive strategies of octopi, and the way flamingos signal their health and diet among other biological phenomena. Ultimately, IDEO helped the USGBC design "an interlaced system of shared information across an entire network." This innovation is typical of IDEO, but we should wonder if there are design solutions closer to home. Are there solutions to social discord that we can mine from the way communities have responded to immense challenges, such as recovering from the natural disaster of a hurricane or educating in the midst of the human disaster of injustice? Spoiler alert: there are.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, 400,000 people were displaced to new cities around the U.S. They had to start new lives, new jobs, and new schools in new cities. As a New Orleans native lawyer and teacher, I was called do something to help during the  tough years of rebuilding lives and communities. After securing a
New Voices fellowship
to work through a non-profit called the Young People's Project (YPP) between Atlanta and New Orleans, I was introduced to the quiet brilliance and socio-educational design mastery of Bob Moses.
A legend of Civil Rights who helped to organize share croppers to demand the right to vote in 1960s Mississippi, Bob Moses returned to Mississippi in the 1980s. Back to combat a new form of inequity, the "
digital divide
", Bob Moses applied his advanced degree in mathematics and his experience teaching illiterate adults to read in order to pass voting poll tests. Moses designed and patented a gamified method of teaching algebra, an essential building block to tech literacy. Called
Flagway
, Moses' algebra game engaged high school students in teach-playing with junior high school students who could then teach-play with elementary students, helping cement the principles of algebra in the minds of all three groups. What Bob Moses knew, and what the graduates of his program who went on to found YPP knew, is that education is a community-wide endeavor that was strongest when rooted in something people could enjoy together, like physical play. It takes more than a village. It takes a village having a good time.
To meet the challenge of the dislocation and dearth of information following hurricane Katrina, we took a similar design approach in developing a series of community events to deliver access to everything from FEMA guidelines to secure rebuilding funds, to charter school admissions policies, to connections to employment, legal, and health service providers. We called these events, Blowout Consciousness, to reflect New Orleans cross-generational cultural tradition of brass band blowouts or street jazz band competitions. In addition to having a wide-range of service-providers and community organizations present to distribute important information, we invited community elders and leaders to speak between band sets about New Orleans' history of recovery from disaster, what it took in the past and what it would take this time. We learned that this cross-generational approach is a boon to community despite the many challenges that physical displacement might create.
Though these examples don't necessarily fit the standard definition of phenomena that might be instructive from a biomimicry standpoint, opening our minds to place human resiliency and invention squarely in alignment with the genius of nature can open new wellsprings of insight. Yet even a more technical application of biomimicry can lead us to similar insights. Re-enter the crow.
The labeling of a flock of crows as a "murder" couldn't be more inaccurate and undeserved. Scientists know now that crows are among the most intelligent animals on the planet. A recent research paper by psychologists out of the University of Iowa and biologists from the State University of Moscow aptly titled "
Crows Spontaneously Exhibit Analogical Reasoning
" reports that crows exhibit advanced "higher order" reasoning, including the ability to analogize relationships between colors and shapes in order to obtain food, abilities once thought only possible for humans and some great apes. Additionally, other studies have shown that crows seem to recognize and
spread the news about specific researchers who have captured them
and seem to have warned flocks of up to 600,000 birds to shift long-held migration paths to avoid specific places where crows have been shot. Video taped experiments show crows using
tools for multi-step processes of acquiring food
. Other studies have proven that they
can quickly solve problems that require collaboration
. How are crows so smart?
A study of how crows relate, proposes answers, one of which suggests a scalable solution for human endeavors in education. Among a gathering of adult crows, "nonfamily juveniles were tolerated" in feeding areas because of complex social networks and established social norms. As a result, young crows expand their pool of adults to model beyond their parents, and thus learn more from more diverse sources for longer periods of time. If we interpret this information through the lens of biomimicry,
how might we imagine and design learning institutions that reflect this approach?
What we can learn from a crow society is that a flock doesn't become a flock by the mere act of moving together. A flock becomes a flock by the complex set of interconnected commitments across the spectrum of a community that allow the group to take the complex and coordinated action of mass movement. Key, also, is the ability to learn from those the people typically charged with teaching: parents and educators. So how might we restructure our school communities to engender the type of resiliency, resourcefulness, and cooperation across a spectrum of people inside and outside of the school environment? How might we transform our school communities from the "murders" that they have been into flocks that they could be?
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| Gwyneth Jones Nicholson, 8th Grade Humanities Teacher, Saco Middle School |
Have you ever had the pleasure of visiting a small family farm or homestead? The great state of Maine is full of them. I'm lucky to
live in Portland, Maine, where we have one of the
best farmer's markets
around. When I can afford to spend a little extra on meat, vegetables, and fruits, I shop there instead of at the supermarket. Everything tastes better, and it feels good to know I'm supporting a local family instead of a factory farm.
Sadly, too many of our schools act in a way comparable to industrial agriculture. I believe that school should be more like homesteading and less like factory farming.
Respect for nature vs. forcing things along
Factory farmers have to inject all sorts of disgusting stuff into their chickens to create those giant breasts we buy in the frozen food section. Often, the chickens are so deformed by this practice they aren't able to stand up. A homesteader, on the other hand, allows chickens to run about, eating tasty insects along with grains and grasses. When they're butchered, these chickens provide normal, chicken-sized breasts instead of the giant ones, but the meat is healthier and more delicious to eat.
Schools should honor what's natural for our students. Young children are supposed to learn through play, not through computerized programs and numeracy drills. Older kids can learn through play too - experimentation, exploration, and creation all feel like play when the work is meaningful. When we allow students to follow their passion, we are showing respect for their individuality. When we make space for the deep, slow thinkers - the ones who don't quite reach proficiency when the calendar says they should - we are valuing their nature, the way their brains work, the way they are built to grow. Forcing kids to learn according to a set schedule limits some, stresses others, and values the needs of the system instead of the students.
A willingness to let things be mixed up and messy
Factory farms are efficient. There's a lot of stainless steel machinery and row after row of corn or soybeans as far as the eye can see. Factory-farmed animals are physically forced into compliance and docility. Stall after stall of milk cows, row after row of chickens. But a homesteading farm isn't about efficiency or compliance. Cows, horses, lambs, and goats graze in the same field (and are totally smelly and adorable) and the manure they create becomes part of the land. The garden contains a mixture of vegetables, fruits, and herbs, grown for variety and rotated to make best use of the soil. The eggs that get collected aren't uniform; instead, they vary in shape, size, and color. Occasionally, a goat takes off down the road to see the sights or try out another farmer's field.
Schools should be mixed up and messy because true learning is mixed up and messy. Our desire to keep things neat and linear, along with our need to keep kids of like-age groups in the same spaces, keeps us locked out of some great options when it comes to the way we create our schedules and determine our courses. Our focus on compliance leads directly to our students' docility. What if we made a commitment to prioritize the individual over the need for an organized, efficient system? What if we opened our minds to the possibilities of how to "do school" and accept that change is a messy but ultimately meaningful affair?
Labor vs. a labor of love
Farming is HARD WORK, no matter what kind you do. Though I've never worked at a factory farm, I can't imagine it is a very pleasant or heartwarming experience. It's something people do to make money and provide for their families, and there is certainly honor in that. But a homestead farmer isn't in it for the money alone. They love the land, their livestock, and their way of life.
Students should be stoked to come to school every day, and their teachers should be, too. When we allow for authenticity, creativity, collaboration, and passion, when we make space for trial and error, when we see students as co-creators instead of beings to control and standardize, we make better, more joyful schools for everyone.
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