Round 7: Synthesis Conversation
Q: Any reflections on yesterday and the work we did?Bill Thenhaile: They’re taking us through the same steps we need to take our kids through. They’re teaching us the process. We will take this back and teach it to our own staff. We have to work together. I cannot solve these problems by myself. We have to trust each other to solve these problems. We have to be okay with not having the answers too.
We need to know that men and women solve problems differently. We need to understand this. Men go inside themselves and figure it out. Women like to talk about it. We just need to listen and say, “Uh huh”.
Instead of just allowing staff members to do things, we need to encourage them to come up with new ideas.
The Pareto principle says that we spend the majority of our time on things that don’t matter. The 80% of our lives in school are those things and they will take care of themselves.We need to make sure that we are not afraid to ruffle the feathers. We need to do that in our communities.
For the governor, I want to ask him what his idea of education should look like in Nebraska? In the visits with other governors what do they say about the No Child Left Behind program and have other states done what we’ve done. If no other state is doing it, then we are the tip of the sword and let’s put that out there. I also want to charge him to share this experience with other governors.
Diversity of Stakeholders
MK: Do we have any school board members here?
We don’t. There wasn’t a facility big enough to hold all of the people we want to include. That will be the next phase.
If we’re the tip of the sword, then our sword needs to be double-edged. And we need a handle with some way to wield this sword.
It would be nice to see some follow-up.
Our goal is to find a way to sustain this.
We need to talk to our people. Time and money come up over and over again. But there are ways to solve that. They are not a good enough reason not to do stuff.
MK: In terms of taking you behind the scenes, what do you think we were doing while you were in break-out groups? We had time. This is not a control-based model. We often ask ourselves “what do we do next?”One of the things I understood when I got to the superintendents office because once you control the purse strings, you have power. We have to collaborate otherwise we’re headed for disaster.
This I got from church council meeting which mapped out the stages of a life cycle of an organization. You start with courtship, infancy, go-go, adolescence, prime, stability, aristocracy, recrimination, bureaucracy, and end with death. At some point policy replaces common sense. That is my nightmare with education.
My thoughts are about conversations. That’s what we need to do and until staff feel comfortable having honest conversations, we will not be able to solve our problems. They need to be able to share their hopes and dreams.
Everything that needs to be done has already been done before by others. Maybe we can leverage their efforts.
Someone referred to this as a grassroots effort. If it really is to be one, it has to start in our classrooms.
The current obstacles that need to be overcome must be overcome and we need a guiding coalition that will take us forward. We don’t need to have the entire community behind us. We need to have a plan to overcome our obstacles.To have education as a successful business, we need to send out feelers into the world to find out what’s happening. Some of those ideas are beyond our own boundaries
In the student interviews I was struck by how seriously they took the questions. They were so honored to be asked their opinion. That came up yesterday. If we give them some ownership, the problems we have with them will disappear. They wanted to be heard and they were excited by the idea that we wanted their input.
It’s important that you engage all the stakeholders in your community and leadership is a key feature of that. We need to begin the conversations and take the risks.
MK: There are 100 leaders right here.
My concern is that it’s easy to talk about this here but harder to take it back and not fall into the rut. There are plenty of barriers: other staff, the system itself. I hope we can get some help in moving forward with the process.
Yes, the system itself is an inhibitor. here is so much more bureaucracy in the last 10 years than ever before.
People have passion here for the subject, for the kids. How can you develop passion in other people? We need to get started and we need to help continue it.
Introduce the idea in a staff meeting and let it settle for a month and then revisit it and add to it. You’ll build the passion. This is not something that we can develop overnight. It might take a year or two. Introduce it slowly and people will come on board.
We are also dealing with state report cards. You have to change the public, the newspaper and the governor. We’ve got strings going in two directions right now.
There are people who don’t have the passion but they know things need to change. You don’t want to have too much passion against it but the conversation that happens between opposing points of view can sometimes be helpful.
The Right Stuff
The people in the room are forward-thinking but not all of our colleagues are. Just like kids are all different so are we. To say that we can get everyone to be as passionate as we are is like saying that all children can think the same way. It won’t happen.
We have people who have been doing the same thing for so long and it works for them; it will be hard for them to change. And there is grief in change. If we tell them that they have to change or move on, then they go to different stages: anger or denial. Maybe they will move on eventually, but maybe we can help them get through it. Maybe we can help them do it differently. Maybe then we could help them assuage the fears of backlash.
Let’s help them see the initial parts of success. Maybe then they’ll come on board. Let’s start with the small successes and maybe bigger changes will be possible.
What if we were to refer to our obstacles as opportunities? Maybe the reframe would help us see that as something to solve as opposed to an obstacle to go through.
I’m not sure that we have enough passion to do this. I think people are at different places with that. I’m curious how people got through the question you asked last night about where we are personally with our passion.
I’d like to see what others have done in this.
There was a program that did change and used a questionnaire to figure out with their staff where they’re at.
R&D in the "Real World"
MK: You can begin to bring this back to your organizations and create a culture that allows us to try things. I hope you can create in your own sphere of influence some changes.
Where do businesses initiate this change?
Bryan Coffman: It happens in all different places. Business is no better at innovation than anyone in education. Though Cisco is a positive example. They created 14000 R&D units and just let them run with their own ideas. At some point there were enough successes that the change rippled throughout the organization. The innovation didn’t happen at the top. You can use this as a model for yourselves. You have so many different units, you’re able to generate massive change across the entire organization. If you generate enough change locally, then it will ripple out to the top. It will roll out and nothing can stop it. You can still work at the top but you don’t need to start there.
In business R&D they’re trying to make a better widget or increase their bottom line. But what is our widget? We’re trying to get to an end result but we don’t know what it is. That’s what makes this such a messy process.
That’s why we need to know why we need to change.
Does anybody in this room think that anything is wrong?
Yes! We are not meeting our kids. We’re not providing them with what they need once they leave our doors.
Video games challenge kids. Our classes may not.
MK: The sponsor group had a conversation that soon all the learning will not happen in the classroom. The kids may still go to school but the learning will happen outside of it.
Right. And the people who are building the video games don’t know anything about education. We need to take control of our own destinies. We’re cheating ourselves and our students. We need to stop breaking stuff and start making it.
People will still come to school because they need to learn how to talk to people. Society is changing. We have people who think we just take care of their kids for the 8 hours we have them. We can no longer ignore the kids who don’t fit like we used to because of the changes of society. We’re not frustrated with the box kids. For the others, it may not be biology and geometry for kids; it may be hygiene classes. Out of the box for us is so vastly outside.
I believe it was Mark Twain who said that “I never let schooling interfere with my education.” I think our kids know how to do that. Bill Gates was a person like that too.
Identifying Our Personal Passion
MK: What are some common themes that came up yesterday?
- Technology
- Control
- Ownership
- Relationships
- Learning communities
- Communication
- Relevance
Another thing we didn’t hear is accountability. Who is accountable for these changes and knowing when it’s successful or not? We’re letting outside forces determine accountability for us. They control who takes the test. How do they know what’s working or not?
In the idea of personalization, maybe we can create connectedness so that we eliminate the drop out rate. That’s a reason to change right there.
There is a need between the arts and sciences and we need to partner with the colleges.
A real grassroots effort might start at the teaching college because that where we started. We need young kids coming up with these ideas. So that they start running the schools that way.
BC: If we came up with 5 things as planks for your vision, what would they be?
We need to define our purpose as an ongoing thing.
MK: Personalized learning could be one.
We need to look at assessment and innovate it.
We need to have these conversations in our schools.
We need to build our relationships with students, with business community, with the local community.
BC: I split it into two: relationships with students and broadening the responsibility base.We need to have integration of subject materials. A lot of people need to learn English but it could be done in places other than English classes, such as interdisciplinary subjects. Life is integrated why not our classrooms.
I want the teachers to change from control to more nurturing guides. Maybe we could call them facilitators, guides or coaches.
I look at the list and I see strategies. We look to the government to tell us what to do because we don’t know what we want. We haven’t identified what we want it to look like. How do we know what strategies and relationship to build until we know where we’re going?
Part of it will unfold. We need to trust the process.
But that’s why the state has standards. We work with their framework because we have no strategy of our own.
We need to add the idea that life long learners are our teachers too.
What’s missing is that we need a learning community. It could be anybody that fosters the ideas.
Why does there have to be one set thing for it to look like? We’ve all had chocolate cake but how many different types? It doesn’t all have to be the same.
What is a productive worker in the year 2020?
Someone who enjoys what he does.
We’re not going to be able to define it. But we know that they will need to include technology.
Okay, well let’s get to work. Sign up for these areas and sit back down.
MK: We’re going to get to some details in these areas. Come up with what you’re going to accomplish and lots of ideas of how.
We’re going to spend about 45 minutes figuring this part out and then we’ll shift into district groups to talk about what you’re going to do in these 9 areas.
At some point the governor will show up and we’ll incorporate him into our process.
BC: I have been doing this work for 20 years. Do not underestimate what you’re doing. What you’re doing is very cool. Let’s get to work.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home