Round 2: Introduction
Bob Uhing
As educators, we recognize we need to have the skills that are required to train students for their lives beyond high school. Our society is changing at a very rapid pace and we want to be sensitive to that. We’ve had a lot of inputs and initiatives and from that we see a heavy emphasis on changing the high school experience. We’ve applied the renewal practices and from that changed the perspective for how we go forward to one of being student-centered. I want to thank you all for making this possible. I’d like to make a special thank you to Rhonda and Rich for putting this all together.
Rhonda Jindra
Welcome. We are so glad you’re part of this. You’re probably wondering how we got here. It started with a conversation. Once we started talking we wanted to add some teachers and administrators. From there the commissioner got involved and we thought about who else needed to be involved, which is why you’re sitting here today. We wanted to move this further than just conversations. We decided to have a conference not where you sit and listen to speakers but where we get to leverage your abilities as professionals in this field. We want you to create this. That’s why we’ve put on this conference in this manner. Not just to sit and get, but to roll up your sleeves and make it happen.
We want you to be a part of this change. Our schools are good, but we want them to be great. And that starts with a conversation.
Rich Katt
I started my career at Howells so this feels like old home week. As part of the department of education, we visit schools but we’re not there everyday like you are. When we started talking about a conference, we knew we didn’t want just speakers, so we brought a group to help us with this, InnovationLabs. They’re going to help challenge you through a variety of exercises so we can get to the good stuff.We qualified for some incentive dollars from the federal government to help with this because this is a conversation about all children.
Donlynn Rice
I want to let you know that Dr. Christianson is here in spirit and is in support of what we’re doing. The last couple of years we have been looking at the high school. Our state board passed a policy on high school. We need strong leadership and that’s why you’re here. We also need a relevant and rigorous curriculum. You’ve probably heard about the 1/3s. One third of the students continue to improve every year; one third is maintaining; and one third continues to lose ground. We’re wanting to get all of our students up to doing well. Another key component is relationships. We want students to know that someone cares about them and their education.
We do not want to have a state driven initiative here. We want to have unique opportunities and have the support come from the local level. I want to compliment all of you on your hard work.
Jim Scheer
This is a great meeting for me. I thank all of you for taking the time and being a part of this ongoing experience. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. I see this as another milestone step. I appreciate all your time and effort for making it happen.
Michael Kaufman
What are some of the characteristics of the best meeting you’ve ever been to? - Specific focus
- Feeling like you can make a contribution
- Networking
- Informal discussions
- Good time boundaries
InnovationLabs is a young company but we partners have been working together for about 16 years. We’ve discovered some tools that help people accomplish a lot of practical things in a very short time. We have constructed exercises to help you think differently. You’ll be required to produce a product for each of the exercises and share them with the rest of the groups so that we can socialize the results quickly. We’re able to accomplish a lot because we work in parallel. We find work in small groups much more efficient than having the entire group create something.
One thing we’ve noticed is that our society has the right answer syndrome. We expect that there is one and that the first thing we say needs to be that. Our process works around that through the use of iteration. We don’t have to get things right the first time. We’ll revisit topics from multiple points of view and refine them over time.
In this process, we want to suspend the decision as to what we’re going to do for as long as possible, because once you make a decision, you shut out everything else. We want to stay open to the possibilities that might be available. The process is like a funnel. We start wide and end narrow. We want to be clear about the objectives. We want to know why we want to change. We want to create a series of options and a subset of that is that we want to walk out with a set of experiments. That’s a tricky word because parents don’t want you experimenting with their kids. But how do we learn? Through trial and error. We’ll need to make mistakes. How do educators feel about mistakes? We want to learn so we’ll have to make them. And to try things out, we’ll have to take risks. How do educators feel about risk? Right. So we’re going to have to be challenged. We’ll have to do things that we’ve never done before.
We also need to develop a process for continuing the learning from what we ‘try’, which is a gentler word than experiment. Everybody is going to have fear in doing this, but we need to walk through it. In order to do that what will we need?
- Faith in colleagues
- Trust
- Strength and courage
- Being aware
- Intuition
I was recently at a session with an astronaut who spent almost 6 months on the space station and was completely inspiring in terms of how he approached the “what if”. He realized that his intuition was terrestrially based and not that useful for figuring things out in space. He was like a child in terms of being curious about what might happen if he tried this or that. He fully embodied the learner and I invite all of us to become like that. Let’s be excited about what we’re doing here and take the risks and be curious about what is possible. I’d like to say a couple of things about the process. We don’t build in breaks so please take them as a team as you need them.
We’re capturing your work so you don’t need to take notes. We’ll publish a website with the results a few hours after you’ve finished your work.
This is the longest you’re going to hear from us. As Rhonda said, this is a conversation and a chance to get some work done.
Let’s talk about the timeline. Tell me things you noticed about this. - We live in a world of change
- Cause and effect
- We didn’t see the changes coming
- Happening quickly
- We need to adapt
- Education is not separate
- The more we change, the more we remain the same
- It’s not always for the better
- We’re not in control
- We act out of fear
- We’ve seen trials and errors
- Haven’t learned much
- Everything’s related
- We don’t realize how what we do today impacts what we do tomorrow
In 1982, Buckminster Fuller said that education has the longest lag of any system in the world. At that time it took 35 years for an idea to arise and be implemented in education. Even if we cut this in a quarter, that would be too long. Think about that as you go into this next exercise.
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