The Tempered Radical

Are YOU Intentionally Creating a TED in Your Head?

One of the key points that I've picked up from The Innovator's DNA -- a book that I've been talking about for months (see here, here and here) -- is that the most innovative thinkers are those who can think across domains.

When we work systematically to explore thinking that occurs OUTSIDE of our field, we can often find ways to transform the work that we are doing INSIDE of our own organizations.

So how exactly does one come into contact with thinking beyond their own worlds? 

For many cutting edge business professionals, regular interactions with innovators outside of their own fields happen at conferences like TED, which was intentionally established as a forum where thought leaders in technology, entertainment and design could have sustained intellectual collisions with talented peers in adjacent professions. 

Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen explain the power of Ted like this:

"TED's underlying beauty springs from the intentional diversity of participants and presentations.  This diversity forms the foundation for innovators to potentially connect the unconnected.

Innovators in our research not only frequented places like TED, but literally constructed a TED in their heads through an intentional depth and diversity of life experience, creating a personal Medici effect."

(p. 47)

"Constructing a TED in their heads" is a cool phrase, isn't it? 

It is an approachable reminder that when we are building our own learning networks using social tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, we need to intentionally reach beyond the thinking of leading educators. 

The question that people constantly ask, however, is:

"So who should/could/would we follow if we wanted to introduce meaningful intellectual diversity into our own learning networks, Bill? 

It's not that we're opposed to the idea of adding new thinkers to our information streams.  We just don't know where to find them!"

While that's a tough question to answer -- the kinds of thinkers who will challenge individual educators is largely dependent on the specific fields that teachers are interested in and/or responsible for -- here are three non-educators that I learn a ton from.

More on Using Twitter with High School Students

One of the things that I love about making my thinking transparent here on the Radical is the push back that I inevitably get from readers.  There's real value in having your ideas challenged by passionate people with different perspectives. 

Recently, Peter Wilson stopped by to leave me a bit of push back on the role that Twitter can play in high school classrooms (see here and here).  Peter's central contention is that Twitter is not conducive to encouraging the kinds of deep interactions and reflection that characterizes top thinkers. 

He writes:

Twitter in the classroom is not a great idea. Its 140 character minimum encourages superficial, simplistic communication when students need practice with deep thinking and interpersonal dialogue with each other and with adults.

He also writes:

If we teach students to think in bursts of 140 characters, then to what extent is their capacity to sustain attention on deep, complex matters handicapped?

My first reaction to Peter's push back is that while it is true that Twitter messages are intentionally short -- 140 characters is the length of one well written sentence -- those who use Twitter as a learning tool would hardly describe it as a place characterized by superficial, simplistic communication.

Using Twitter in High School Classrooms

One of the best professional experiences I've had in a long time happened at my Teaching the iGeneration workshop in Cincinnati this week.

You see, I had the distinct pleasure of working with a super motivated team of teachers from Westfield High School in Westfield, Indiana.  They were remarkable---both as professionals and as people---reminding me of just how much powerful teaching can be when educators enjoy their work AND their peers.

Over the course of our time together, we got to talking about the different ways that Twitter can be used in schools.

Having been a Twitter fan for several years---and recognizing that there is still a lot of skepticism around social media spaces as a tool for schools in the #edusphere---I wanted to pull together some thinking around the role that Twitter can play in classrooms.

Here are three specific ideas shared by high school teachers in my PLN yesterday.

Innovation Interview Questions

I've said it before and I'm sure that I'll say it again: The Innovator's DNA by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen has really had an impact on my recent thinking. 

The book's central premise is that organizations can figure out how to become more innovative by studying the key actions of the most innovative companies---Amazon, Apple, eBay, PayPal, Virgin---and one of those actions is systematically hiring innovative people.

Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen put it this way:

Clearly, if companies want innovative ideas from employees, they should screen for innovation potential in the hiring process.  Most companies rarely do it, but highly innovative ones do.

They explicitly screen candidates for creativity and innovation skills as part of the new-hire process.

(p. 194)

Interesting, isn't it? 

I don't know about you, but I'm not sure that I've ever been a part of an interview team that was thinking specifically about the innovation potential of the teachers that we were considering for positions in our building.

So I decided to whip up a few interview questions that might just help schools do a better job spotting the most innovative minds in their applicant pools. 

They are designed to spotlight the five skills that Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen believe are characteristic of innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

Here they are.

Tell me about a lesson that you have tinkered with over the years.

What did that lesson originally look like? What changes have you made to it over time?

How did those changes impact your students? Your peers? Which changes were the most successful? Which changes failed miserably?

What did you learn—about teaching, about learning, about students, about yourself—from those instructional successes or failures?

How do YOU learn?

Are you constantly reading? Constantly writing? Constantly practicing?

More importantly, who are the most interesting people that you currently learn with? How did you meet them? How do you connect with them?

What have they taught you? What have you taught them?

What well-established professional practice are you skeptical about?

What is it about this practice that leaves you doubting? Can you give tangible examples of places where this practice has let you—or your students—down?

Tell me about the most interesting idea that you’ve learned outside of education.

What is it about that idea that captures your imagination? Can you find any connections between that idea and your work in schools?

Can that idea change the work that you are doing with students, colleagues and/or peers?

Tell me about a profession that you are curious about.

What is it about that profession that captures your imagination? Why would working in that field leave you energized? How does that profession compare—positively or negatively—to education?

 

You can download a PDF version of these questions here:

Download Handout_InnovationInterviewQuestions

Hope they are helpful---and more importantly, I hope that if you use them in your interview process that you'll leave me some feedback and tell me how they've worked!

 

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Related Radical Reads:

Innovation in Social Spaces

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions

Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

More on Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

 

The Mitchell 20 Didn't Wait for Superman

I've read a ton of reviews lately of The Mitchell 20 -- a remarkable education documentary film driven by my good friend Kathy Wiebke that details the efforts of a group of 20 teachers in a high-poverty Phoenix elementary school to change the lives of their students by changing their own practice.

I guess I'm struggling to find the right words to explain how powerful the film is.

That's why I was so jazzed to find a comment from a teacher named Jill Saia on Nancy Flanagan's review of The Mitchell 20. 

Jill wrote:

My faculty and I can't wait to see The Mitchell 20; for some reason we feel that we are living the same story right now.

Like Mitchell, we are NOT waiting for superman; we are digging in, collborating, and working very long hours to improve our students and ourselves.

In the end, that's the BEST summary for The Mitchell 20:  It is the story of a group of teachers who collectively recognize that waiting for superman is a strategy that is failing our poorest students.

 It is the story of a group of teachers who recognize that super powers really do rest somewhere deep within every teacher who takes up the challenge of working in our highest needs communities.

It is the story of what one group of colleagues can do when they decide to fight back by studying their practice collectively with one another---even when their backs are against the wall and they're working in forgotten communities.

I won't lie: The Mitchell 20 made me wet in the eyes more than once simply because it is the story of passion and service and professionalism and need and hope all wrapped into one.

And I needed that. 

Surrounded by failed policies, destructive policymakers, and constant attacks, I've started to doubt that our public schools -- and more importantly, children in our poorest communities -- REALLY have a chance.

What The Mitchell 20 reminded me is that as long as there are teachers with a heart for children and a determination to study their craft together -- and as long as we are politically willing to get out of their way -- there is ALWAYS a chance for EVERY child in EVERY community.

That's a message we ALL need to hear.

Here's the trailer:

 

 

 

When are YOU going to see the whole film?

More importantly, when are YOU going to forward the trailer to YOUR local school board members, state representives, or federal legislators?

This isn't a film that they can afford to miss if we really care about EVERY child.

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Related Radical Reads:

Are YOUR Kids Living a Silent War?

Are High-Poverty Schools Just Another Debate?

Does ANYONE Love Public Schools?

Lessons Learned from the LeBronathon

 

 

 

 

Learning Teams Develop at Different Rates [New Slide]

One of the key points that my Building a Professional Learning Community at Work co-author Parry Graham and I often make is that the learning teams in any given building develop at different rates.

As a result, they need different support and are ready to tackle different tasks at different times. 

Just like we are pushing for differentiation and a customized approach to the individual learners in our classrooms, school leaders must take the same approach when working with professional learning teams.

Download Slide_TeamsDevelopDifferentRates

 

What does that mean for leaders of a PLC?  Perhaps most importanty, it means you need to be regularly monitoring just where your learning teams are.

What kinds of tasks are they ready to tackle?  What kinds of tasks rest too far outside of their current developmental abilities to introduce? 

These two handouts can help you to gather the kind of information necessary to make nuanced choices about the support that you provide to the individual learning teams in your buildings:

Stages of Team Development:  This document details the six main stages of team development that Parry and I see in learning communities.  More importantly, it provides a list of suggestions for supporting teams in each stage of development. 

Professional Development for Learning Teams: This checklist covers the kinds of team-based collaboration and instructional reflection skills that define highly functioning learning teams.  Consider giving it to each team in your school to gather first-hand information about what each team is struggling with. 

I hope these handouts help.  More importantly, I hope that you'll stop by and leave me some feedback about the handouts if you actually use them in your work. 

Parry and I are constantly polishing our own thinking about PLCs, and feedback from others helps us to do just that.

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Original Image Credit: Night Run by Phil Roeder

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/5663010874/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on October 10, 2011

 

Just How Much DOES the Composition of a Professional Learning Team Matter?

Ross Smith—the director of Window’s Core Security at Microsoft spotlighted in The Innovator’s DNA (2011)—knows a thing or two about structuring collaborative groups.

Responsible for managing almost 70 teams focused on Window’s security issues, Smith noticed that one group—the Defect Prevention team—had been the most innovative for five straight years.

Specifically, this six-person team had developed a series of productivity games designed entertain users while simultaneously gathering feedback on the functionality of Windows products.

As Smith explains, this novel approach to gathering feedback from end users was incredibly successful:

“We saved millions of dollars and improved quality to a level that we’ve never seen before”

(Ross Smith as cited in Dyer, Gregersen & Christensen, 2011, p. 181).

What WAS it that made the Defect Prevention team uniquely innovative in an organization known for innovation?

What CAN Principals of PLCs Learn from Love Labs?

University of Washington psychologist John Gottman—introduced in Malcom Gladwell’s Blink (2005)—has a seemingly amazing ability: Given 15 minutes with any married couple, he can tell you with near certainty—90% accuracy, in fact—whether or not they will stay married or end up divorced.

How does Gottman do it?

By carefully monitoring—second-by-second in laboratory experiments—the emotions attached to the interactions that occur between spouses.

Over time, Gottman and his associates have developed a sophisticated emotional coding system, using nuanced observations and digital sensors to identify the seemingly fleeting moments of deception, defensiveness, contempt, neutrality, sadness, and support that occur during conversations.

Gottman convincingly argues that these fleeting moments of emotion—even when observed for a short period of time—are evidence of the larger pattern of interactions that “arises naturally and automatically” and that inevitably defines any human relationship.

Innovation and Intellectual Collisions [Slide]

I've spent the past few weeks working my way through The Innovator's DNA, a fantastic book on the traits of truly creative people by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen.

One of the key points that resonates with me is that innovators are constantly seeking out opportunities for intellectual collisions--interactions with a diverse range of individuals and ideas that can challenge assumptions and help to highlight new perspectives on old issues.

Download Slide_CollisionofIdeas

 

Think about that for a minute, would you? 

Intellectual collisions ARE important to new thinking, aren't they? I know that in my own professional career, the most innovative ideas that I've ever had were the result of interactions with others who saw things just a little bit differently than I did. 

Heck, that's the best part of working on a professional learning team.

But if exposure to a diverse range of ideas and individuals is essential for generating new thinking, shouldn't we be doing more to teach our students specific strategies for generating their OWN intellectual collisions? 

Shouldn't kids be learning to:

• develop a deep awarness of their own understandings?
• analyze the diversity of the groups that they are a part of?  
• efficiently design systems for introducing more diversity to their own studies?

Better question: Do schools and teachers--who often spend their entire careers teaching the same classes in the same buildings with the same peers---have the expertise to teach students the skills necessary to be innovative and to generate their own intellectual collisions?

Best questions: If we REALLY cared about developing innovative thinkers, how would our classrooms need to change?  How would our systems of student assessment and school accountability need to change?  Who is responsible for leading these changes?

We constantly hear that the one advantage that Americans still have over international peers is our ability to innovate. 

Can we maintain that advantage if we aren't systematically showing our kids the specific behaviors of innovators?

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Related Radical Reads:

Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

More on Teaching Innovation with the Curiosity Box

Environments that Build Walls

 

 

 

Teaching the iGeneration Workshop

As many of you know, I've written a book on responsible technology integration titled Teaching the iGeneration for Solution Tree. 

It's a book I'm remarkably proud of because it takes a skills-first approach to 21st Century teaching and learning. 

Instead of introducing readers to interesting web-tools, I introduce readers to specific strategies for teaching students to communicate, collaborate, problem solve and manage information. 

Sure, readers learn about specific web tools that can make communicating, collaborating, problem solving and managing information easier---but the focus of the text is squarely on skills. 

It's an extensioon of my argument that our job is to build a bridge between what our students know about technology and what we know about learning efficiently.

If you happen to live in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area--or are just looking for a good excuse to hit the road for a bit of professional learning---I'll be presenting a two-day Teaching the iGeneration workshop on October 18th and 19th. 

You can check out the the slides for the workshop here:

 

Teaching the iGeneration Slides

You can also check out the course wiki here and learn more about registering for the workshop here.

Hope you'll think about joining us for what promises to be an exciting two days of learning about the role that technology should play in good instruction!