always learning

One of the quotes from the panel session at the Hong Kong Summit has really stuck with me:

We look at technology as a tool, but our students look at it as an environment.
(Btw, if anyone can remember who said it, I would love to know!).

I often say that technology is just a tool to use when it meets our needs (like a pencil), but hearing this sentence made me re-evaluate my own perceptions. After all, what is a tool?

• something I use when it suits me
• something I control
• something I don’t need or want around me at all times – only when it’s necessary
• something small, manipulated by it’s user

Maybe we use this phrasing because it’s less intimidating, because teachers can see the direct comparison or evolution between a pencil and technology, because it helps us feel like we already know what to do with it (the technology, that is).

OK, so then what’s an environment?

• something that’s all around us, in use all time
• something we can not directly manipulate or control
• something necessary to live, and ubiquitous, like air
• something we are immersed in, even if we’re not specifically thinking about it or intentionally “using” it

That’s a big difference. What does this say about the different ways that students and adults might be perceiving the world around them? What does this mean for education?

Maybe it would help to think about other things that probably started off as strange new tools, but now are inescapable parts of our daily environment, for example: the alphabet, books, electricity, running tap water, etc. These tools are behind everything that we do, they are part of the fabric of our lives.

Although these tools started as something new and different, we can not simply choose to use them in one situation, but not in another. A math teacher wouldn’t say we don’t need to use the alphabet in this class because it’s math. An English teacher wouldn’t say we don’t need to know how to switch on the lights, because this is English, not science. So why do so many of us still think of technology that way?

As Greg Whitby pointed out during the same panel session: “You never send a changed individual back to an unchanged environment.” I think Greg was referring to teachers, but now I’m wondering: what if our students are the one’s who’ve changed? And what if our schools are the unchanged environment?

What do you think?

Tom Kelley got me thinking at the Hong Kong Summit: Where’s the innovation in our schools? Where’s the risk taking? Where’s the abundance of ideas? Who’s seeing things with fresh eyes? How are we taking the best ideas from other industries and applying them to education?

Generally speaking, schools are excruciatingly slow to change. Even when schools are making a concerned effort to be innovative and re-think traditional modes of learning, it often ends up being a variation of what’s already in place. I’ve been on countless curriculum review committees where one pre-packaged program was chosen over another in an effort to “modernize” the learning experience, but in the end all we ever seem to get is a new coat of paint on what we’re already doing. Sure, we’re moving forward, but it’s at a snail’s pace.

So how fast should schools be adapting and changing? What should the pace of innovation be?

Unfortunately, as Tom eloquently described, if we have any hope of staying ahead of the curve, we need to be moving even faster than the other innovators in our field. It’s not enough simply to be an innovator,  you need to stay ahead of everyone else who’s innovating – even if they appear to be outside your field.

Tom refers to this as the “Red Queen Effect” after a scene in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, where Alice is shocked to be standing in the same place after running quite fast for an extended period of time and the Red Queen explains, “if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

This isn’t a question of schools choosing to stand still or not innovating at all, because I do believe we’re all trying to move forward in one way or another. This is about the dangers of slowing your pace of innovation just enough for others to out-pace you – not necessarily other schools, but rather other modes of learning. Interestingly, Tom also mentioned that resting on your laurels is usually the time when others outpace you innovatively (something I think many good schools are very much in danger of doing all too often).

Another Hong Kong presenter, Stephen Heppell, was also careful to emphasize that the biggest challenge today is the pace of change: exponential. With this rapid pace of change there is no time for the “staircase mentality” (pilot, review etc). He reminded us that we didn’t value tech in the 80s – what are we mistakenly not valuing now?

Why does this happen?

Tom explained that innovation falls squarely in quadrant 2 of Steven Covey’s matrix: it’s “Important”, but “Not Urgent”. For example, we absolutely have to have a new math/science/reading/social studies program. The teachers can’t teach without one, so picking a new one is going to fall in quadrant 1, and ultimately, innovation gets put off until tomorrow. However, innovation has an urgency all its own and those that don’t place innovation as a priority will find themselves displaced.

As innovators, Stephen mentioned that we need to be critical about what’s convenient for us versus what’s good for learning, for example, our assumption that ringing a lunch bell means that a thousand students will suddenly be hungry at the same time, or that students are at the same stage in their learning (in same grade) because they happened to born between two Septembers, etc.

Another problem is that radical change is often thought of as expensive. On the contrary, as Stephen, observed: “It’s more expensive to make or maintain schools and add bits of exciting 21st century around than to just skip to a much cheaper 21st century model model of community learning.” This is a good example of the difficulty people face in conceptually realizing the advantages of bold innovation: we naturally assume that slow steady progress will be best (as we are taught from an early age, when the tortoise wins the race).

How do we make innovation a priority in our educational institutions?

Tom discussed the 10 Faces of Innovation from his recent book of the same name, explaining that we need 10 different types of people to bring all the facets of innovation to the forefront of our organization:

• The Hurdler: this is the person who says, “of course there will be obstacles – that’s my job, overcoming obstacles.”
• The Storyteller: data is not that powerful. Stories carry messages farther.
• The Anthropologist: this is the person who focuses on seeing with fresh eyes (or “vuja de”). People get immersed in their own environment and simply stop seeing it for what it is, it becomes “just the way things are,” for example the turnstiles at CDG airport, which are impossible to carry luggage through, despite the fact that they’re between the airport and the subway. Yet airport employees see them day in and day out and they haven’t been changed. We need to observe objects in use in their natural environment so that we can design with empathy
• The Experimenter: this person gives permission for failure, knowing that innovation involves risk. To innovate, we must to be able to fail in a safe environment by creating an idea-friendly organization where we have the ability to “squint” and see the “shape” of an idea.
• The Cross Pollinator: the ability to share ideas, to take inspiration from other cultures and enhance, thereby gaining in translation. Examine other ideas cross continents, cross countries, cross industry, cross age (”reverse mentors”) to be able to build upon other ideas and transform and improve them.
• The Experience Architect : The Experience Economy – book (commodity, product, service, experience)
• The Collaborator: brings people together to get things done.
• The Director: enabler of great creativity around them
• The Set Designer: approaches from people standpoint then looks at business & technology elements to create effective designs. Building engaging, seductive, delightful learning is also a design task.
• The Care Giver: have empathy and work to extend the relationship.

How do you structure for innovation?

Tom shared several criteria for successful innovation:

• A flat leadership model to enable anyone to have their idea heard by the “boss” no matter where you are in the organization. He also pointed out, however, that after many years of experimentation at IDEO, the company found that 100 people is the limit for a flat leadership model, and any larger organization will unfortunately need to have a “boss’s boss” and so on.
• Must have an abundance mentality, the goal is to share as many ideas as possible, knowing that only a very small percentage will work. He cites an example of a game-design company which had 1000 ideas but only 6 patents in one year.
• The need for good humor, an environment where it is OK to make fun of the boss.
• Workspace design must focus on building collaboration, for example, the stereotypical office design of cubicles actually look a lot like voting booths, which are specifically designed to prevent collaboration. What about our set-up of each teacher in their own classroom? I’m not sure you could design anything so physically non-collaborative if you tried!

What does this mean for education?

The time for innovation is now, as Stephen described (and Marco Torres’ slide below emphasizes), “learning is at a crossroads:” we’re looking at a choice between productivity and new approaches, those new approaches being:

• student portfolios;
• making huge leaps in our model of education, not tiny steps forward;
• working to produce ingenious, engaged, inspired, surprising, collegiate students;
• and developing learning experiences that are open-ended, project-focused, multidisciplinary.

By innovation, I don’t mean just adding more technology to the classroom, I mean thinking differently about learning in its entirety. For example, I still find it hard to believe that many schools have not fully implemented a project-based learning approach. This was all the rage when I was in teacher’s college 10 – 12 years ago, but even now it’s still marketed as something “new” (maybe that’s why I like the MYP so much). How is it possible that, 12 years after learning about a model of education being the best thing since sliced bread, only a few schools really excel at this approach?

It’s not technology alone that makes us innovative, it’s looking at learning with fresh eyes. It’s asking ourselves: if we could start from scratch, what would our schools look like today? I can’t remember who said this first but, “technology is just an amplifier” – technology doesn’t change the quality of teaching or learning, it will only amplify it, either in a positive or negative way. What we need to be looking at is changing our approaches to learning, not modifying our curriculum to a “newer” version of what we’ve already had for the past 20 years.

We could start by taking a step back and looking at the whole experience of teaching and learning, as if we  were aliens from another planet or anthropologists studying a remote tribe, as Tom described the role of the Anthropologist in his 10 Faces of Innovation. It’s only through observing learning in its natural environment today, wherever it’s taking place, that we can understand how to build schools that meet the needs of today’s learners. As Tom quipped, “I don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish!”

What do you think? Is your school innovative? What are you doing to encourage innovation? What can schools do to focus on innovation despite the daily urgencies of our profession?

If you were an alien who knew nothing about our education system and you arrived on our planet today, how would you design a learning community for today’s students?

Miguel Guhlin quote from Clarence Fisher, Literacy as Battleground, image source
Chris Lehmann quote image source: Flickr user Ali K.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending, and presenting at, the Apple Global Leadership Summit in Hong Kong. I knew it was going to be great after presenting at the Think Ahead Roadshow here in Bangkok in February, but I don’t think I realized just how great it was going to be. Of course, there are some things I would have changed (more on that in my next post), but thinking back to all of the educational events I have attended this year (and I’ve been to quite a few), I think this one was the best! And I think I’ve figured out why.

Last month I attended the EARCOS Teacher’s Conference (ETC) and left feeling a little disappointed. It was great for networking (and relaxing, given the stunning location), but it wasn’t really what I was looking for in a conference, content-wise.

To be honest, I was starting to feel a little disillusioned with conferences in general this year. The effort it takes to get to the conference location, the costs involved, the exhaustion coming back to work after a full weekend of conferencing. It was starting to seem a little too much for me, considering how much I can learn relaxing on my couch, at home, in my PJs, thanks to my PLN.

But, last weekend changed my mind. While reflecting on my two very different conference experiences over the last month, I realized there are a few things conferences need to have in order to make the expense and the effort worth the trip:

Focused Content

Maybe this is just an international school thing, but I find so many conferences try to be everything to everyone (and so do schools, for that matter). They want to have sessions specifically for every discipline area, every educational trend, leadership, third culture kids, global issues, etc, etc.

In doing so, it can be hard for one person to fill up each day with directly relevant sessions – there are only so many presenters on in each given session, chances are there won’t be one directly related to my area of interest in every session. By stretching the topics so thin, in order to meet everyone’s needs, the conference often ends up meeting no-one’s needs. Sure, one presentation a day, maybe, but is that really worth the trip?

The Apple Leadership Summit was so clearly focused on the way that learning has changed, and the ways we need to prepare for the future, that I was engaged from the first moment until the last. All keynote speakers had specific experience that directly related to the changes we need to make in education – even though they all approached the topic from different perspectives, it was immediately clear how all of their expertise was directly related to the future of education. None of the sessions during the entire 3-day event strayed from the topic.

Stephen Heppell’s keynote during the (sumptuous) banquet set the tone for the weekend by sharing specific examples (and so many pictures) of schools that are changing with the times and embracing non-traditional school infrastructure (physical structure and well as curriculum design).

His emphasis on adaptability, flexibility, openness, and learning communities (instead of “schools”) brought the challenges of education in the 21st century to the forefront, along with visual, practical ideas for moving towards solutions.

His vision and passion for learning, in all forms and contexts, was an inspiring way to begin the conference. Having seen Learning to Change, Changing to Learn dozens of times, it was such a privilege to hear him speak directly about his experiences and to see the full range of his work and to begin to get a picture of what kinds of changes are next for education.

The following day, Tom Kelley brought his extensive experience with innovation to the field of education. His focus on risk-taking, seeing with new eyes (”vuja de,” in his words), prioritizing innovation, and recognizing the rate of change gave solid, real-world examples, which directly illuminated and enriched Stephen’s more philosophical presentation the day before.

Being able to see with such clarity the way innovation and different modes of thinking (from his new book The 10 Faces of Innovation) can impact pretty much every field (from advertising, to hospital care, to product design, to kids toothbrushes!) helped create more concrete understandings of how critical risk taking is for education. He made it so clear that we can spend forever improving what we’ve already got, but what we really need to do is look at the whole experience of learning with fresh eyes.

After a presentation on developing a global mindset from Vivien Stewart (much of which is already happening in many international schools), we had a choice of 3 breakout sessions with each of the keynote speakers – a great way to go more in depth with the content presented in their first sessions.

Next, was a panel discussion from all keynote speakers plus a few special guests including Greg Whitby, John Couch, Daniel McCormak, Richard Swart, and John Wray (thanks to @mrdinhk for that final name!). This was a good time to ask those burning questions that came up during the keynotes and breakout sessions earlier that day. It was very interesting to get several perspectives on the same topic, especially because each panel speaker was coming from such different backgrounds. For me the highlight was hearing Richard Swart, principal of Nanjing International School, speak so passionately about the need international schools to move forward with the ideas presented at the Summit without delay, to stop wasting time worrying about the way we’ve always done it, but to envision the future and create it, now.

Finally, at the end of a long day of plenary sessions (by the way, most of my ideas for improvement spring from being seated the entire day in pretty much the same room, more to come in my next post), John Couch shared Apple’s vision for education in the 21st Century.

I had seen some of his slides before, but it amazed me, yet again, how ironic it is to be hearing from a vendor the most relevant, forward-thinking, pedagogically sound ideas for education. It hit home for me (again) that if these are the people making the computers, these are the computers we should be using in our schools. This vision for education, which I so passionately believe in, is so clearly wrapped up in the package that is Apple.

On the last day, we had one final keynote from Macro Torres, after all of the fantastic ADE-led break-out sessions. His extensive experience in the classroom, combined with his fresh perspective and boundless creative energy definitely ended the weekend on a high note.

Marco so clearly understands how important it is that our students become innovative, creative, creators of content, and how critcal it is to change the classroom environment from our traditional factory model to that of an engaging and empowering studio experience.

Conference Size

I guess because it is so difficult to actually run (and finance) a conference, the organizers prefer to have as many attendees as possible. Unfortunately, this only ends up watering down the event – trying to appeal to all interests, abilities, needs, and levels of understanding.

Having a limited number of participants (in the case of the HK Summit, it was 500 people), helped create a much more personal and intimate feel. With a few small changes in the agenda, I probably would have been able to meet and speak to pretty much every single person at the Summit. How often can you say that about a conference?

For example, Alex (my husband) and I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Kelley at the banquet dinner, and he was amazed at how close our community of learners is, given that we are spread out throughout the region. Personally, I was on a little bit of a geeked-out high because I knew someone (or a few someones) at almost every table. It was like a geeky international school teacher reunion for me!

Shared Vision

Limiting the number of participants, and sending out direct invitations, also helped create an environment where most (if not all) of the attendees shared the same vision for education. Therefore, the purpose of our coming together was not so much to learn what has changed, or decide what we think, but more what we can do about it.

We came approaching these ideas presented from the same perspective and the Summit was about how we can continue to move forward, not just about taking the first step. Talk about an important opportunity to network! These are clearly the people that will lead the charge in international schools to change our educational system.

Stimulating Content

Having focused content, with a smaller group of people who shared a similar vision for education, directly influenced the level of information shared. No need to focus on introducing the changes the 21st century has brought to society, time wasn’t wasted convincing the participants that technology is crucial to learning, no one needed to be convinced that education needs to change to meet the demands of today’s learner and today’s society. Not that I don’t enjoy hearing all those things explained, helping reinforce my own ideas and clarify my thinking. But, I much prefer to have my thinking pushed to a new level, to hear new ideas that build on my current understandings, and to interact with others who are at a similar place in their learning.

Location, Location, Location

One of the most subtle, yet powerful, ways that the Summit was successful was the choice of location: Canadian International School of Hong Kong. This school exemplifies everything that the Summit was about. From the staff training room, to the 1:1 Apple laptop program, to the prominent signage, to their Year of Information Literacy focus, CDNIS clearly demonstrated a school that shares and practices a 21st century vision for education.

Every time I turned a corner (or hiked up another flight of stairs), I saw evidence of inquiry-based learning, the IB PYP, MYP and DP in action, 1:1 learning, and most importantly: a clear, visible, tangible, achievable vision for the school being implemented every day. A vision that represents the most important aspects of the Hong Kong summit in action. This is what we need to see from a conference: what the ideas look like in practice.

Final Thoughts

So, once again, Apple hits a home run. (Oh, did I mention the conference itself was free?) I hope it becomes an annual event!

In your opinion, what are the factors that make a conference worth the effort, time and expense?