Project Zero, $100K Fund for Teachers, Coming to Memphis

One of the reasons I agreed to work closely with The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence in the future is that they really know how to swing a bat. And here is a great example.

The Martin and Presbyterian Day School have agreed to bring the widely-acclaimed Project Zero of Harvard, in conjunction with the Center for the Advancement and Study of International Education (CASIE), to Memphis, to make it more accessible to teachers and administrators who just do not have the time and budget to get on a plane and spend half a week in the north-east.  Now, in addition to bringing Project Zero for a three-day conference next February, The Martin has created a $100,000 fund to help pay for attendance by public school teachers and leaders from the Memphis region. That is swinging the bat.

Educators who have participated in Project Zero in the past report that it has fundamentally changed their outlook on how and what they teach.  It has given them the confidence to drill down on their traditional teaching style and rebuild it in line with outcomes that are more relevant to their students’ futures.

Memphis is not an easy place to transform schools, which is precisely why it is the right place to bring resources like Project Zero.  Like The Martin Institute, I am not interested in tackling the easy problems!

Stack O’ Books!

Am I a little excited/stoked by this photo?  Yes!  Faculty at Trinity School in Atlanta were given five book titles to choose from for their summer reading.  Theme: the Art of Questioning.  Not gonna disclose the other titles, but you can see a couple of them. My book, The Falconer, was selected by more than the other books!

Is this because Jill Gough, Director of Learning and Teaching at Trinity has been one of my most steadfast believers for several years? Probably.  Is it because there is actually a chapter in my book called “The Art of Questioning”? Maybe.  Who cares!

Two things I know: I started writing that book a LONG time before others who are talking about the critical role of things like questioning and problem finding; 1990 to be precise.  And I think mine is the only one that has sections that are guaranteed to be understandable to third graders who, after all, are the ones who need to be learning these skills.

Thanks, Trinity!

Into My Future

As many of you know, I formally resigned my position at Francis Parker School this spring after almost a decade and a half in a variety of leadership positions.  I hope to continue my association with Parker, which my great aunt and uncle founded 100 years ago, in informal ways.  For now, and following on my rather unique sabbatical research trip last fall, the future is both busy and exciting.

I have had a hectic spring speaking to, and working with, hundreds of educational leaders around the country as we define what the future of learning looks like and how we get there.  I am also deep into the writing of my next book that will synthesize the key messages of my journey last fall, and the input and knowledge of the educational leaders with whom I have the privilege of working.

I am honored to announce that I have been named a Senior Fellow of The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence in Memphis.  I will remain in San Diego, but a great deal of my time will be spent expanding the national, and indeed international, reach and program of this marvelous public-private educational partnership.  We envision a bold and unique array of ways for educators to connect, share, learn, and develop transformational learning practices that will better equip our students for the rapidly changing world of their futures.

I am also pleased to announce that I have been asked to work with a partnership between the National Business Officers Association (NBOA) and the Online School for Girls in developing cutting edge collaborative blended learning programs aimed at re-imagining the financial and operating sustainability of independent schools.  More on this will be announced by the fall.

My primary release points for news, links, contact information, and resources continues to be here on my blog site and on Twitter at @GrantLichtman

I hope you will let me know how I can help you, your school, or your organization as I pursue my decades-long passion of developing a truly post-industrial age system of K-12 education.

In 40 years…

A couple of days ago friends at Parish Episcopal School in Dallas reached out with an interesting request.  For a publication this summer they were looking for short expressions of what their school, and somewhat by definition, schools in general, will look like in 40 years.  This is what I jotted down for them.

In 40 years I picture (Your School Name Here) as a set of coordinates in space and time, a dynamic node acting within a four-dimensional neural network of knowledge flow; a physical place where adults and young people meet from time to time as they co-learn, co-create, and co-manage the global ecosystem of knowledge; a generator of confidence that every young person has the potential to lead a fulfilling life and to improve stewardship of our planet.

Does it apply to you as well?  40 years is a LONG time.  Think about how K12 and colleges have changed in the last five years and then press on your mental accelerator.  My crystal ball that far in the future is increasingly influenced by mega-thinkers like Adrian Bejan at Duke University, Shoshona Zuboff of Harvard, and Jim Maxmin of MIT, amongst others.  What do they have in common?  They are not constrained by the framework of school-think. They operate in the context of history and what is, or is not, inevitable. I toss in my own sense of hope.

What do you see in 40 years, in less than 100 words?

Offense is Going to Win

Unlike NFL championships, defense does not win in innovative environments.  It just does not. Over time, offense wins.  Education is undergoing dramatic evolution via innovation, possibly even mutation, in the words of Shoshona Zuboff and Jim Maxmin, where mutation is an evolution well outside the conventional frame.  Defense is not a strategy against mutation.Defensive strategies may work long enough for the leader to move to another job or retire, but they will not succeed for the organization in the long run.

Leaders who primarily ask what their organization is doing and how it can improve on that are largely playing defense. Leaders who are asking what their organization could be doing, and push their community into that discussion are playing offense.  Over time, offense is going to win.

Reminder of Bloom Inverted

Today I had two comments from deep in my archive (all of a year ago) on my post about Flipping or Doubling Bloom’s Taxonomy, including this from Bree Berman, an instructional coach at Flint Hill School:

Your focus on the “why” as primary made me think about how teachers view their students’ motivations. Frequently I hear, “Kids only care about grades! We need to help them focus on the learning” which I believe is true, but hard to do when the content to be covered is not of particular interest to a student. I don’t know any teachers who don’t put every effort into making their material interesting, but still, students are (on the whole) being asked to learn certain ideas at certain times, regardless of their natural curiosities.

I loved re-imagining Bloom as I did in The Falconer by flipping the pyramid to start with questions, not content and work forward from there.  So here is the link to that post and the flipped triangle, and thanks again to Shelley Wright for starting my thinking last year.

• Who do I want to be?  If we don’t have a personal stake in the outcome, a model to follow, how do we get engaged in the process?  We have to help students derive their own model for why they should care about what they need to learn in school.
• How to ask questions.  Students need to develop their own questions.  None of us will put in a huge effort to pursue an end that does provide a challenge to our interests.
• Who am I?  What is my worldview and what is my relationship to the world around me? If we don’t know that, it is hard to place systems thinking in a manageable context.
• Systems thinking.  Learning to understand and analyze complex relationships. Without these skills, finding and solving problems is just guesswork.
• Problem finding.  Students need to find problems that they really want to solve.  It is up to teachers to create environments of dissonance in which students will be eager to find problems.
• Problem solving.  Synthesizing multiple inputs to solve those problems that we really want to solve. Without all that precedes this step, none of us have a personal stake in problem solving.
• Dealing with failure because problem solving is hard and inexact, and we learn more from failure than we do from success.
• Creational thinking.  Discovering those nuggets of elegant new knowledge once you have put in the hard work that makes it all worthwhile.

The Zero-Base of Schools

Two days ago I wrote a post about how zero-based strategic thinking will replace our outdated model of long-range strategic planning. As promised I will offer my view of what forms that zero base for any school. A zero-based approach tests every assumption against the absolute core of the mission. This approach is critical at a time when the traditional concept of a school is under severe and increasing stress from rapidly evolving alternatives by which consumers can acquire the core services that schools have traditionally supplied.  As made so clear in my recent discussions with Shoshona Zuboff from the Harvard Business School and Jim Maxim from MIT, history is rife with examples of powerful institutions which are dramatically mutated or completely subsumed by alternative mechanisms which provide desired goods or services at significant cost discounts or in ways that are preferred by end users.

In my recent workshops I have asked participants to list their schools’ fixed costs and traditional structures, and then to decide which of these could or could not be shifted to, or wholly subsumed by, a third party collaborator, partner, or competitor at a significantly lower cost. As you might imagine, the list on the “could be shifted” side of the ledger was MUCH longer than the list on the “cannot be shifted” side. The later represents a place to start with zero-based strategic thinking, a place to start building a real value proposition.

Here is an example, thanks to deep thinking and comments from Mike Thayer, a math teacher from New Jersey.  After reading my post and my challenge, Mike offered his zero-based starting point:

A school’s mission should be:

1) Providing sufficient opportunities for all youth to learn (and “own” for themselves) the best ideas from our cultural and scientific heritage. (“looking backward”)
2) Providing sufficient opportunities for all youth to explore/create/discover what lies beyond themselves and the culture they live in. (“looking forward”).
3) Providing a safe and caring environment in which these can occur for all youth.

My response:

I’m going to be a provocateur: boil it down!

1)Learn

2)Learn

3)Safety and caring.

I know that cuts out important stuff, but that is what zero-basing does. Not to say those things do not belong in the vision statement and implementation.

Mike:

Ah, now it all makes sense! So here’s my list. In order for schools to be successful, they must have as their mission:

1) Learning at their heart
2) Caring for their students in their soul

And that’s that!

Mike quickly found the power of zero-based strategic thinking.  He believes that his school provides emotional, perhaps even spiritual connections to learning and caring that cannot be replaced or shifted.  Is he right?  I don’t know; but it is a great place to start the discussion.

I have thought about this in the last few weeks, about the absolute core of the institution of education, and here is what I have come up with:

Education is about learning.  The only two elements that are absolutely required for learning to take place are students and time.  Mike added caring, and I think if we want great learning, he is right. (Please comment and question this result!) Learning can take place without teachers, campuses, technology, books, desks, administrators, electricity, fund raising, paper, or anything else that we pay for.  We may not be comfortable with that, but the fact is that learning has always taken place in the absence of many of these. This is not to say that learning can take place with NONE of these, but none are absolutely critical to the process.

So that is where I would start: great learning needs students, time, and caring.  I would build from there, adding only where the addition provides value to the end user that will withstand radical competition from innovative, changing, lower-priced, more convenient competition.  Will the result be a stripped down version of your current school? Maybe or maybe not.  But either way, your organization will know WHY they are what they are, not by default, not because of the inertia of the past or fear of the future, but grounded in intentional, questioned, tested, dynamic, strategic thinking.