Dangerously Irrelevant

I love the ending of this 60–second video! Are we?

Hat tip: Jeff Ronneberg

A new video from New Brunswick, in the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) style. Well worth a watch! 

Here are some things I will probably never understand:

• Interpretive dance.
• Xenophobia.
• Why rhythmic gymnastics, curling, and men’s field hockey are Olympic sports but baseball is not.
• The continuing appeal of I Can Has Cheezburger.
• This.
• School administrators who continue to merely tweak the status quo and somehow think that they and their school organizations are doing just fine.

It’s not like by now principals and superintendents don’t know that the world has changed. There can’t be more than a handful of school leaders that somehow have missed every single conference where a featured speaker was a Will Richardson / David Warlick / Alan November / Ian Jukes type, right? Even those non-technology, mainstream leadership conferences like AASA, NASSP, NAESP, and ASCD are beginning to invite us techie folks to speak.

Okay, so maybe we’re not persuasive enough. That’s fine. But it’s one thing to ignore the presenter on the stage. It’s another to ignore the evidence before their own eyes. All administrators have to do is LOOK AROUND and they can see the changes in their students. In society at large. In the many institutions that are dying in the face of these transformative technologies.

There’s a concept in the law known as willful blindness. The idea is that one deliberately takes steps to avoid seeing what’s right in one’s face. To how many of our school principals and superintendents does this concept apply? What can we do to help (make) them SEE?

“Hi. I know the world has changed. There is compelling evidence staring me in the face as an administrator that business as usual just isn’t going to suffice in this new digital, global society. Not if we are to prepare students for the next half century rather than the last. But you know what? No thanks. I choose to do nothing.”

Nope. I’ll probably never understand that one…

Image credit: see no evil

[This is a guest post from Carl Anderson. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, drop me a note. Happy reading!]

By now it is an old story but still a pressing contemporary issue. Industries that have traditionally relied on a top-down hierarchy of power distribution are folding. We see it today most readily in the newspaper industry but it is painfully obvious that other industries, especially those who deal in information currency, are under siege as well. It is clear that the schools are a part of this list.

Traditionally, or for as long as anyone alive today can remember, most school systems have operated under a very clear top-down hierarchy. The Department of Education passes down edicts to states. State Departments of Education (headed by a commissioner) then pass funding & accreditation requirements and curriculum standards down to school districts. School districts are headed by superintendents operating with an authority given to them by school boards delegating responsibilities to principals and other building administrators. These administrators then delegate responsibilities to teachers and other school employees who then deliver the state mandated standards-driven curriculum to students. I realize this is a very simplistic picture of our school systems and there are great differences in the nuances between schools but for the most part this is the type of system most of us operate under.

This system was very efficient for many years and was necessary for a long time. However, when we hear criticisms of schools operating under an industrial model of education looking more like factories it is not just what goes on in the classroom that causes this comparison but also how they are structured. This structure looks like almost any corporate business hierarchy with the CEO and shareholders at the top and the workers and consumers at the bottom. Just as the corporate structure is designed to make as much profit for those at the top this system best ensures that the needs of those near the top of the pyramid are met. Today, in education, this hierarchy is most concerned with administering RTTT and NCLB measures like curriculum standards. Hence, the overly high concern with high stakes testing and "teach to the test" messages many of our teachers end up hearing. Who does this system serve? With whom lies agency in learning?

There is a new structure of learning emerging that is gaining momentum, one which appears to have no regard for edicts issued via a top-down hierarchy. Web 2.0 & social media technologies have given teachers and students agency in their own learning through the creation of what has been collectively referred to as "personal learning networks" (PLNs). Through PLNs learners choose their own learning agendas and self-select who they listen to and what curriculum (if any) they follow. Through the use of popular technologies like Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, and Facebook informal learning is quickly becoming a viable option. Teachers no longer have to look to their school system for support, they can find it through the networks they have created. This same kind of network structure and powerful informal learning is also what has made this latest phenomenon of unschooling actually seem like a viable option for some. The more our networks grow the more they challenge the authority of the traditional top-down hierarchy.

While unschooling is a little bit extreme and probably not right for most kids the fuel giving this movement momentum is something we need to address in education or our formal institutions of education will suffer the same fate as the newspaper industry. I am reminded of this slide from a TED Talk by Devdutt Pattanaik called, East vs west -- the myths that mystify..

In this talk Dr. Pattanaik discusses how the fundamental belief structures between east and west cultures clash. He illustrates this with a simple story about Alexander the Great meeting a gymnosophist, "When they met, the gymnosophist asked what Alexander the Great was doing. To which he replied, 'I am conquering the world. What are you doing?' 'I am experiencing nothingness,' replied the gymnosophist." Neither could see the point in the others endeavor because the denominator for Alexander's life was One and the denominator for the gymnosophist's life was Many. This fundamental element of belief informed everything about how both individuals interpreted these actions. The traditional hierarchy that has dominated our school systems has a denominator of one while PLNs, student-centered learning environments, and movements like unschooling operate with a denominator of many. If our industry is going to survive we need to find a way for both equations to find a common denominator. We have to look for ways to invert this hierarchy.

One potential method that our schools could use to help address this issue of one verses many is teacher professional partnerships (TPPs). TPPs are similar to law firms where the practitioners own their own practice. In TPP schools there is no administration but instead the teachers in the TPP work together to share the responsibilities normally delegated to building an district administrators.

This solves a few problems that teachers and schools face. First, it brings more decision making responsibility closer to those who are directly effected by those decisions. It places agency closer to those served by schooling and in so doing elevates the teaching profession. With agency comes responsibility and built-in accountability. If a teacher is held responsible for their own performance via a personal stake in ensuring that they offer a quality learning environment that students will want to participate in there will be no need for complex systems of teacher performance pay or other measures like those in RTTT. With a TPP a teacher's performance is shown in their enrollment and whether a school thrives or fails depends entirely on how well they manage their own practice. What's more, TPPs eliminate the need for teacher unions since the partnership is in itself a union of sorts.

Currently there are just ten TPP public schools in operation in the United States and so far they all appear to be doing well. This model of school organization holds a lot of potential addressing the problems and issues facing schools and education including the inevitable irrelevance of our traditional school hierarchy. Ted Kolderie from Education|Evolving will be Steve Hargadon's guest on his Future of Education series this Thursday, July 8, 2010 to discuss Teacher Professional Partnerships. For more information on TPPs I urge you to attend this free online discussion in Elluminate or at least listen to the recording afterwords.

Carl Anderson is an art and technology teacher, technology integration specialist, and adjunct instructor for Hamline University's School of Education. He writes the Techno Constructivist blog and is @anderscj on Twitter.

I head to Denver tomorrow, eager and excited for the ISTE conference. I’ve got a plan this year; there are some things I want to learn and some conversations I want to have…

Things for which I’m scheduled

• Saturday, June 26 – Are your policies getting in the way of your progress? (at the TIE+ISTE Leadership Bootcamp)
• Sunday, June 27 – ISTE Leadership Symposium
• Monday, June 28 – 1–2–3, CASTLE PD! (at ISTE Unplugged)
• Monday, June 28 – CoSN CTO Leadership Forum

Things I hope will happen (if you can help with any of these, please come say hi!)

• Have my usual rockin’ awesome time at Edubloggercon. Some of my best conversations and learning each year are here.
• Faciliate our proposed discussion at Edubloggercon. Sylvia Martinez and I are proposing a conversation about the challenges of being an outside speaker/consultant. I don’t know if we’ll make the final agenda but I hope so!
• Learn more about Google Voice. I need someone to help me get the most out of my new phone service.
• Learn more about Google Apps for Education. I’m interested in talking with educators who are using this well with students in their school organization.
• Learn more about the School of One. I’d love to talk with someone who’s seen it in action!
• Learn more about robust learning software that does a good job of working with students at higher cognitive levels. These may be more like simulations or video games than traditional computer-based learning programs? Can I find software that’s doing performance assessment, not just fact assessment?
• Learn more about essay grading software. I’d like to see how this software class has changed since last time I looked at it.
• Maybe find funding for some CASTLE projects? This may be what draws me into the vendor area. I need to talk to some larger companies about some potential project sponsorship opportunities.
• Learn new things that aren’t even on my radar. This usually happens a great deal for me, so I’m not too worried. Maybe I’ll pick up some tricks/tips for my new iPad!

Other thoughts

I’m deliberately leaving much of the conference open. I want to reserve space for spur-of-the-moment conversations and serendipitous interactions. If you want to chat - even if we’ve never met before - please come introduce yourself!

Trying to reach me at the conference? Try @mcleod on Twitter or call/text me at 707–722–7853. I’ll also be hanging out a lot in the Bloggers’ Café.

What’s your plan for the ISTE conference? Hope to see you there!

On the Internet, we write ourselves into existence.

That’s a wonderful thing. It allows us to reach audiences that we otherwise wouldn’t reach. It allows us to try on personas - and perhaps to reinvent ourselves - in ways that may be difficult in our everyday, face-to-face interactions.

But it also can be misleading.

Several recent incidents have caused me to revise some of my pre-existing beliefs about a few fairly prominent education bloggers. I now think and feel differently about them than I did just a few months ago, simply because I now have more information and thus a more complete picture of who they are.

I’ve been thinking about this as I get ready to head to the ISTE conference later this week. I won’t necessarily be wary as I interact with my edublogger peers, but I may be just a little less willing to accept things as they appear on their face. Not much, just a tiny bit. Most of the time people are as they appear - face-to-face or online - and I’d rather be a naive, trusting optimist than a negative, surly skeptic. But we have to recognize that we all also have secrets, ones that may remain uncovered because of geographic and/or interactional distance.

That edublogger who’s active in Twitter every evening and has a bunch of followers? He seems cool but maybe he beats his kids.

That edublogger with 20,000 subscribers and a heart of gold online? She seems great but maybe she’s cheating on her spouse. Or a cutter.

That charming, effervescently cheery and witty edublogger that everyone loves to hang out with at the conference? He seems wonderful but maybe he’s embezzling funds. Or a kleptomaniac. Or a drunk driver.

As you head to the ISTE conference later this week, or simply interact with folks online, I leave you with the thought:

Can you ever really know that edublogger beside you?

Update: I'm not as pessimistic as this may read. I'm just thinking out loud here...

Image credit: In order to exist online we must write ourselves into being

Jeff Utecht is offering a free copy of his new book, Reach, until Friday, June 18. After then you can purchase a PDF or paper copy at a very affordable price (which is what I did because I want to encourage him to do more of this!).

You also should check out Jeff’s free e-books: Blogs as Web-Based Portfolios and Planning for 21st Century Technologies in Schools.

Jeff’s new book campaign illustrates that the Web makes it easy for us to share resources and gain visibility for our efforts. This is a wonderful (and previously unimaginable) thing. As Seth Godin notes:

Ideas that spread, win.

[and e-books are a great way to do this]

Is your school organization teaching its students to be EMPOWERED (not just safe, responsible, and appropriate) users of our new information landscape? Or is it still pretending that being findable on the Web - as an individual / company / agency / charity / NGO / etc. - is less important than, say, mastering those soon-to-be-forgotten fact nuggets?

My goal for June: 30 days, 30 book reviews. This post is a review of The Future of Management by Gary Hamel (and Bill Breen). My short recommendation? This book was easily the best leadership book I read in 2009 and should be required reading for all practicing and preservice school administrators.

What I liked about the book

Hamel is one of the leading leadership and business scholars of our time; he has won numerous awards for his writing. As you read through this review, whenever you see the word company or business, substitute school organization. The essential premise of this book is stated early on:

What ultimately constrains the performance of [an] organization is not its operating model, nor its business model, but its management model (p. x). [Unfortunately,] the equipment of [current] management is now groaning under the strain of a load it was never meant to carry. Whiplash change, fleeting advantages, technological disruptions, seditious competitors, fractured markets, omnipotent customers, rebellious shareholders – these 21st-century challenges are testing the design limits of organizations around the world and are exposing the limitations of a management model that has failed to keep pace with the times (p. x).

In other words, as Charles Leadbeater says, “old groaning corporations are the wrong shape” for the fast-paced, ever-changing, innovation-driven, global economy in which we now live.

Hamel notes a number of new environmental factors that now exist for organizations, including reduced barriers to entry across a wide range of industries; a shift in bargaining power to consumers rather than producers; a world of near-perfect information; and the rise of more nimble, global competitors “eager to exploit legacy costs of the old guard” (pp. 9–10). He then goes on to describe why management, rather than other factors, is the key to resolving many of these dilemmas. He also outlines three formidable challenges that now confront organizations:

• Dramatically accelerating the pace of strategic renewal in organizations large and small;
• Making innovation everyone’s job, every day; and
• Creating a highly engaging work environment that inspires employees to give the very best of themselves. (p. 41)

These ring true for school systems as well as corporations.

Hamel states that “if we were to measure the relative contribution that each of these human capabilities makes to value creation, . . . the scale would look something like this“

• Passion 35%
• Creativity 25%
• Initiative 20%
• Intellect 15%
• Diligence 5%
• Obedience 0% (p. 59)

Guess which ones school systems reward, both for their students and their employees?

I liked Hamel’s emphasis on organizational learning. For example, he notes that “there is no surer way to undermine a new business venture than to measure it by the profits generated, rather than by the learning accumulated” (p. 225). Unfortunately, this happens all too often in the public schooling context when it comes to standardized testing results.

One section of the book profiles different companies that are management outliers and identifies some key management lessons to be learned from them. For example, a key idea from Whole Foods Market is that “the biggest obstacle to management innovation may be what you already believe about management” (p. 79). One of the key lessons from W.L. Gore is that “management innovation often redistributes power (so don’t expect everyone to be enthusiastic)” (p. 96). A key lesson from Google is that “experienced managers may not make the best management innovators” (p. 119).

The middle of the book had a statement that really resonated with me:

The people who have a stake in the old technology are never the ones to embrace the new technology. It’s always someone a bit on the periphery, who hasn’t got anything to gain by the status quo, who is interested in changing it” (pp. 127–128).

There are a small handful of us in educational leadership academe for whom this directly applies. We are trying to figure out how to publish or perish and become recognized as national experts in this new information landscape rather than the traditional one of peer-reviewed academic journals. We have little interest in burying our writing in places that educators in the field never read. We have little interest in writing that is disconnected from conversation and collaborative knowledge-building. We’re all in the first decade (or less) of our scholarly careers, however; we don’t have the legacy disability of having built our reputations in the world of ink on paper. Time will tell if we’re successful at challenging the old system or if we get beaten down and/or driven out by our collective peers.

Hamel notes that current management was built around some core principles: standardization, specialization, hierarchy, alignment, planning and control, and the use of extrinsic rewards to shape human behavior (p. 151). All of these are under assault in our new technology-suffused, hyperconnected, globally-interconnected society. Some of the new management principles that now are ascendant include variety, flexibility, activism, meaning, and organization for serendipity (p. 179).

Near the end of the book, Hamel postulates some key questions (and gives some potential answers):

• How do you build a democracy of ideas?,
• How do you amplify human imagination?,
• How do you dynamically reallocate resources?,
• How do you aggregate collective wisdom?,
• How do you minimize the drag of old mental models?, and
• How do you give everyone the chance to opt in? (pp. 189–190)

Those are great issues around which to invent the future of management.

Key quotes

The most critical question for every 21st-century company is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? (p. 42)

AND

Regulatory barriers, patent protection, distribution monopolies, disempowered customers, proprietary standards, scale advantages, import protection, and capital hurdles were bulwarks that protected industry incumbents from the margin-crushing impact of Darwinian competition. Today, many of these fortifications are collapsing. (p. 48)

Does this sound like public schools to you? It does to me.

AND

No one has a blueprint for building an innovators’ paradise. It isn’t just your company - every big organization is inhospitable to innovation. If you want to build an innovation-friendly management system, you’re going to have to invent it. (p. 84)

AND

Some of your colleagues are likely to protest that while “it might work there, it will never work here.” When you’re up against a belief that seems set in concrete, it may be helpful to ask, whose interests does this belief serve? . . . It’s hardly surprising that most managers believe you can’t manage without managers. (p. 138)

AND

Vociferous, honest dissent is not a hallmark of hierarchical organizations. . . . Adaptability requires alternatives. Alternatives require dissenters. (pp. 167–168) Does anyone suppose that pathbreaking innovation will come out of intellectually homogenous companies? (p. 175)

Questions I have after reading the book

• How many public school systems have a hope of ever pulling off even a fraction of this?
• What will it take for school leaders to recognize the organizational dangers that accompany
• How long will it be before policymakers and parents recognize the limitations of current management strategies and begin advocating for something different?
• Are ANY educational leadership preparation programs talking about this stuff?

Rating

In the first section of the book, Hamel notes that

When it comes to innovation, a company’s legacy beliefs are a much bigger liability than its legacy costs. . . . Few companies have a systematic process for challenging deeply held strategic assumptions. Few have taken bold steps to open up their strategy process to contrarian points of view. Few explicitly encourage disruptive innovation. (p. 54)

The challenge for all school leaders - and the university programs that prepare them - is how to initiate and sustain these kinds of changes. This is what I’m wrestling with as an educational leadership professor.

This is an excellent book. I have no hesitation giving it 5 highlighters (out of 5).

[See my other reviews and recommended reading]

The newest video by Common Craft is about augmented reality. Lately I’ve been showing some augmented reality examples to school administrators, just to give them a taste of what’s to come…

Happy viewing!

This is a must-watch video by Hans Mundahl, Director of Experiental Learning and Technology Coordinator at the New Hampton School in New Hampshire. Not only does Hans have a cool title (how awesome would it be if every school had a ‘director of experiential learning?’), he makes a mean video.

Check out Hans’ 3–minute clip below, where he tries to explain the value of social media to his school leadership team. Then check out the wiki page that resulted from his efforts. Nice work, Hans!

[hat tip to Jesse Moyer at The Future of Education blog for leading me to this]