Becky Burch, literacy coach at Fairmount Elementary, shares her learning and insights about the power of design. Gordon County Schools, where Fairmount Elementary is located, is a member of the PAGE High School Redesign Initiative which is using the Working on the Work framework as a school transformation initiative in partnership with the Schlechty Center. Through these relationships Becky had the opportunity to attend the Schlechty Center’s Coaching for Design II session at our Louisville, Kentucky, office and to enroll in the PAGE Teacher Academy. The academy has three goals: to facilitate role transformation, to provide a catalyst for change, and to “publish” work. Here Becky has accomplished all three!

Foundations: The Learning Landscape from the G school on Vimeo.

AMY HURLOCK ZOCK, a teacher in the Whitfield County Leadership Program, created this unique “letter” to her superintendent as a summary of her experience because an actual letter didn’t feel dynamic enough.

Amy said, “So many great books, so many experiences, and I they are all very connected. I was having a really difficult time representing that. So I began pulling in all the documents and things I’d done during the year that related to my leadership experience. I felt like doing my letter this way allowed me that novelty and variety and was stronger than any letter I could write.”

Way to go, Amy! We were just so impressed that we had to share this summary with others doing the tough but rewarding work of transforming schools and classrooms.

3-D Leadership Letter by Amy Hurlock Zock

In an article published in Educational Leadership, “The Threat of Accountabalism,” Phillip Schlechty offers that public education in the United States is slowly being overwhelmed by what David Weinberger, a highly regarded author in the field of business, calls accountabalism.

According to Weinberger, “accountabalism is the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to ward of evil.” He goes on to write, “because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to our schools where it is eating our young - as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.”

Daniel Pink, in Drive, cautions, “what science is revealing is that carrots and sticks can promote bad behavior, create addiction, and encourage short-term thinking at the expense of the long view.” At the Schlechy Center we have heard many stories from educators who are caught in a world of contradictions and dilemmas where accountability, while well intended, has become destructive, or just plain silly. We invite educators, parents and/or students to share examples of accountabalism, where short-term thinking and actions have trumped doing what is in the best interest of students over the long term.

Posted by George Thompson

We suspect that you and your staff have been dedicating time and energy to unravel and try to make sense of either the new Common Core Standards or newly revised state standards. At the Schlechty Center we have also been educating ourselves about the most recent standards, thinking hard about your challenges, and anticipating some of your current needs and interests. This article discusses the current issue of standards-both Common Core Standards and revised state standards-from the perspective of the Schlechty Center’s major concepts and frameworks. We know that you have state officials and others telling you what you need to know and how you need to proceed. You’ll find we take a different approach. We recommend questions for probing district discussion that might help strengthen your district’s direction while you and your staff think deeply about important content. 

We are also offering a session (also entitled “Whose Standards Are They?”) at the 2011-2012 Working on the Work Conference in order to provide you and your districts additional support in this area. 

We would love to have feedback on the article and this issue in general. Let us know what’s happening in your district with standards and how you imagine using this article.                                   

Sincerely,

George Thompson

President, Schlechty Center

                As a part of the charter, the chartered school group would be freed from most if not all of the policy restrictions, rules, and directives under which other schools in the district would be operating. In some cases, the group might also be provided some venture capital to support their efforts. In exchange, the chartered group would agree to document their efforts, make their work transparent to others, and, if the innovations proved to be successful, provide technical assistance and support to others who might want to use the innovation as a prototype for their own efforts to solve the same problem. 

                Shanker found the idea appealing, not only because it had the potential to release the creative capacities of teachers, but also because it had the potential to empower teachers to pursue ideas they believed worthy of pursing. It was not long, however, before the idea of the charter school was co-opted by those bent on introducing more choice and more competition into the American system of education-and, ironically, also as a tool to bring teacher unions “under control.” (Of course, those who use charter schools to promote choice and competition argue that these schools can also serve as models for public schools, but it is clear that choice and competition rather than systematic exploration of innovative solutions to persistent problems is the superordinate goal of the charter school movement. Indeed, some of the more popular charter school models operate more as franchises for an established innovation than as tools for exploring alternative models.)

                 As instruments to promote choice and competition, charter schools have become places that promise to do better (which is not to say, do differently) what traditional schools are intended to do. Indeed, some charter schools proudly proclaim that they are traditional schools. Rather than inventing the future, the goal of many charter schools seems to be to affirm the past.

                If one assumes that schools as they have been designed to operate can meet the needs of the twenty-first century and that all that is needed is relief from onerous bureaucratic regulations, then the ideas underlying most present versions of charter schools will provide some relief to a few students in a few schools. The obvious question, of course, is, “If it is the regulations that are impeding performance, why not change policies and program restrictions for all schools and for all students, not just the lucky few who enroll in this or that charter school? Why insist that the formula of strong states and weak school districts is the preferred formula, when state intervention almost invariably leads to more regulation and more bureaucratic controls than would otherwise be found in any but the most highly bureaucratized big city school system?”

                 If one assumes, as I do, that what is needed are schools that encourage continuous innovation and the disciplined exploration of alternative solutions to persistent problems, charter schools such as those now being developed will do little to help us meet the challenges we must meet to ensure that every child will be provided a high-quality education. The charter schools Al Shanker described to me could, however,  be valuable tools in our effort to transform our schools from government-based bureaucracies into the community-based learning organizations they must become if they are to serve twenty-first-century democracy and twenty-first-century economies well. (See my book Leading for Learning for a more extended discussion of this point.)    

                To properly use charter schools as such a tool, policymakers would have to renounce the idea that these schools are primarily a means of providing parents and students choice. More than that, they would need to be prepared to recognize that school improvement is not a stand-alone activity.  In the long run schools only improve on a continuous basis when there is strong sense of community surrounding the school and a sense of ownership and pride attached to the school.

                In the multicultural, multiethnic world in which we now live, democracy’s survival depends upon the building of a sense of community among the diverse populations from which children come. In addition to needing strong communities as a condition of their own improvement,  public schools may be the only organizations positioned to systematically address the need to build community, just as the schools may be the only organizations that might help parents better fulfill their educational functions. The challenge confronting many schools, therefore, is to build a sense of community among diversity rather than to simply design schools that assume a unity of purpose that does not exist.

                The fact is that many of the problems we locate in schools have their origins in the family and community. Rather than lamenting this fact and complaining about the lack of family support and community support, maybe schools should be encouraged to explore innovative solutions to these and other problems. Rather than seeking ways to help schools develop the capacity to do those things families and communities no longer can or will do, it might  be worthwhile to charter a faculty to explore new ways for schools to build community in places where a clear sense of community does not exist and to help parents to better carry out their functions as educators?

                 Maybe a school that operated under a specific charter to build community rather than trying to serve a community that is fractured could also serve as a catalyst to solve many additional problems that are affecting community life in America-for example, the lack of honest communication across racial and ethnic boundaries. Maybe schools could once again serve as vital centers of community life and become the cultural institutions they must be if they are to serve our democracy well. Maybe schools could become places where the young and the old, the rich and the poor join together to ensure the continuation of our democratic way of life as well as to provide each child with a quality educational experience. Failing this I fear schools will continue to devolve into the government-dominated agencies present reform efforts are threatening to cause them to become.

                If the initial concept of charter schools were adhered to and charter schools were seen as tools to explore ideas like transforming schools into community-building agencies, well-conceived charter school initiatives might address issues that have plagued our education system for many years. As things now stand, however, the charter school is as likely to further aggravate the problems that exist in some communities as it is to address those problems. The problem for educators committed to democracy is to create ways to educate children from diverse backgrounds and to do this in a way that embraces diversity rather than accepting Balkanization as a solution. Too many charter schools treat race as a variable to be controlled rather than a resource to be used. Indeed, as a group, charter schools are even more segregated than are public schools.

                What we need are schools that build communities and reinforce a sense of unity among us rather than schools that are designed to support the divisions that exist between and among us. We need schools that are based on the understanding that a strong common bond that fosters pluralism and tolerance and that honors cultural diversity and democratic discourse is the only means we have to ensure that democracy will prevail and the further disintegration of community life will be avoided. Charter schools such as those once described to me by one of the nation’s foremost union leaders could well lead the way to the communities we need to support the schools all of our children deserve. However, charter schools such as those now being encouraged will, I fear, not only fail to solve the problems we have but might well exacerbate them.

            This is the third post I have written that was inspired by the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. According to the Heaths, one element that makes an idea “sticky” is the element of the unexpected. Ideas that are conveyed through the introduction of an unexpected event are more apt to stick and be remembered than is the case when the story line leads to an expected and predictable result. Great stand-up comedians are aware of this fact, and many of the jokes they tell that are later repeated at cocktail parties and in bars stick because the punch line is unexpected. Indeed, when the punch line is too predictable, one begins to hear faint “boos” from the audience. 

            I came of age as a student of education in an academic atmosphere where it was assumed that the primary task of the teacher was to bring students to profound academic understanding by challenging their present beliefs and present understandings. Many of my professors at Ohio State were Dewey disciples, and it was their understanding of Dewey that led them to the notion that an idea is more likely to stick if it is created or appropriated by students in response to some puzzle or problem for which the students’ present knowledge does not suffice. This being the case, one of the primary tools in the arsenal of great teachers is the art of asking confounding questions-questions that reveal disjunctions in the present knowledge and beliefs students have regarding the nature of things and the way things work. Sometimes these disjunctions are revealed in logical contradictions and sometimes they are revealed in competing facts. It is such disjunctions that constitute what the authors of Made to Stick refer to as “the knowledge gap.”

            Here is an example: Sometime back my youngest daughter took her son to the Patton Museum where he (then about 5 years old) saw many military tanks. A year later he and his mother decided it was time for an aquarium, so his Mother took him to the store to buy what his grandfather referred to as a fish tank. Eventually he put these pieces together in a way that led, for him, to a “knowledge gap.” How could those big things at the Patton Museum be tanks and that glass thing Mom bought be a tank as well, he queried. This led to a somewhat systematic inquiry, resulting in my grandson’s learning a great deal about tanks-including the fact that in Texas, farm ponds are called tanks as well-and in the process he learned something of the wonders of a Google search.

            In my work as a speaker and consultant, I use this story to illustrate how important it is to transform schools from push environments to pull environments. One of the ways this can be done is by transforming schools into platforms where students are provided experiences that confront them with disjunctions and with questions that challenge their present views of the world in which they live. Once the challenge is given and accepted it is, of course, necessary to provide students with the learning tools they need to satisfy their curiosity. Unfortunately, as schools are now organized, teachers are more likely to push knowledge down to students rather than encourage students to explore knowledge and make it their own.

In my last blog post I talked about the fact that to make complex ideas “stick” (a term I have borrowed from Chip and Dan Heath), it is essential to distill the ideas down to their core elements. My goal here is to illustrate what I mean by this assertion by discussing a problem I have confronted for a long time.

            Three sets of ideas have driven me since my earliest days as a teacher. First, as a student at The Ohio State University, I came into contact with many professors in the School of Education who helped me to understand that learning is an active process and that students learn best when they are confronted with compelling problems and issues that call upon them to reflect and create solutions. I never got over these ideas, and I am still struggling to understand all that I think I know about them.

            Second, as a result of experience and study, I have come to the conclusion that the bureaucratization of schools, the removal of schools from the control of communities, and the embedding of control of schools in governmental agencies is a major impediment to quality education—especially if creativity, problem solving, inquiry, and knowledge work, as well as mastery of traditional subjects, is included in the definition of quality. 

            Finally, I have concluded that the primary job of the teacher is to create conditions in which students became emotionally and intellectually engaged in the pursuit of solutions to problems and in the exploration of possibilities, and that these conditions should be orchestrated in a way that encourages students to learn what they need to learn to participate fully and meaningfully in the society and culture where they will live out their lives. 

            Now, that is a lot to unbundle, and in spite of over 40 years of disciplined work and having written nine books, I still feel that I am on the “cutting edge of ignorance” with regard to these issues. In the past couple of years, however, I have come up with some simplifying statements that seem to me to come to the core of what I think I have learned.

            First, while I say that I am concerned with transforming schools from bureaucracies to learning organizations (and I am), stripped to its essential core, what I am really up to is transforming schools from teaching platforms to learning platforms.

The terms teaching platform and learning platform seem to be ideas that stick. They invite further discussion and exploration, whereas the terms bureaucracy and learning organization are not especially inviting terms and sometimes shut discussion down. Indeed, unless one has a relatively sophisticated understanding of the literature on complex social organizations, the words bureaucracy and learning organization are apt to be viewed as nothing more or less than buzzwords and jargon. I have found, however, that when I say that what we must be about is transforming schools from teaching platforms to learning platforms, the ideas seem to resonate more and stick longer.  

This is a beginning. But if the conversation stops there, all we have is a slogan. If, however, we use the idea of platform as a beachhead from which to launch a larger assault on conventional ways of framing the problems of schooling, we may be on our way to thinking about schools in more productive ways. 

            Second, in recent months I have taken to suggesting that a part of this transformation is moving schools from being a push environment to being a pull environment. Sometimes I use a picture of a person with a megaphone to illustrate what I mean by a push environment and an image of student doing a computer search to illustrate what I mean by a pull environment. Sometimes I illustrate these points by showing pictures of bored students listening to what must be a poorly constructed lecture and then contrasting the photos with a video of students actively engaged in querying an expert about a subject of interest to them.

            I have found the ideas of push and pull to be “sticky ideas” that lead to discussions about notions such as “learning is an active process” and why working on the work, rather than working on the students, is a preferred strategy for improving the performance of students and of schools. The push/pull idea also opens up discussions of why discovery, inquiry, and problem solving are so important and invites teachers and school leaders to consider the ways bureaucracy serves as a barrier to pulling information from the environment and how bureaucracy works best to support pushing information down from the top. 

The following are some additional sticky notions I have found especially useful in unbundling my thoughts:

Transformation requires more than change—it requires metamorphosis. Imagine something like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a tadpole becoming a frog. Transformation goes across forms; reform stays within the limits of the existing system. 

One goal is a goal, two goals is half a goal, and three goals is no goal at all. I often use this sticky phrase to invite people to consider the importance of having a clear conception of the core business of their organization and the superordinate goal toward which this business is oriented.  I also use it to invite people to consider the possibility of exploring the linkages among goals and selecting for action that goal which if pursued will lead to progress toward other goals as well. 

The cutting edge of ignorance is a phrase I use to suggest that transformation requires one to go beyond the research and the safety of the known and be prepared to explore unknown territory and travel more by assistance from a compass (which keeps direction clear) rather than a road map—which can specify destinations (goals).

Work on the work rather than on the students. This is a dangerous sticky idea and too often becomes a slogan. What I mean to convey is that teachers can either design schoolwork in a way that encourages students to perform or they can induce students (through rewards and punishments) to do whatever work they design for them to do. Many teachers, however, hold on to the view that it is their performance rather than the performance of students that determines what students learn; these teachers are therefore not in a position to hear what is being said about the motive power of the work students are assigned or encouraged to undertake.                    

Teachers are leaders and those they most often lead are students. This is an old idea and one that has appeal to teachers once they accept the fact that it is the performance of their putative followers that is of most importance in school. The performance of leaders can make a difference in the performance of followers, but it is the performance of followers that determines the effectiveness of the performance of leaders. Teachers are more dependent on students than students are dependent on teachers. Teachers cannot teach without students being present, but students can learn without teachers and increasingly they can learn anytime and in any place. Schools are no longer as essential as they once were and they will be increasingly less essential if they are not transformed into learning platforms. Teaching is increasingly available to those who are motivated to learn, and schools are not the only places where teaching and teachers exist.

Later in the year I will return to these ideas and share some of the stories I tell to help further clarify what I mean by these phrases that I hope will stick with my audience.

By Phil Schlechty

Some time back I read a book by Chip and Dan Heath entitled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Clearly this book stuck with me, since I am still pondering some of the ideas the authors present. From time to time I will use this blog to present the results of these “ponderings.” Here we go!

The Curse of Knowledge

            One of the ideas the authors present is something they call “the curse of knowledge.” In my early days I spent a great deal of time reading sociological theory, especially theory intended to explain life in complex social organizations, and I clearly became cursed by the knowledge I acquired. In 1976 I produced a book entitled Teaching and Social Behavior: Toward an Organizational Theory of Instruction. The title alone should have warned the reader that I had been “cursed by knowledge.” I had learned a lot about organizational theory and I cared a lot about schools. My goal was to take what I had learned and apply it to something I cared about.

            What I failed to appreciate is that to understand and embrace what I was trying to say about schools one needed to know at least as much as I had recently learned about organizational theory. Unfortunately, most who knew what I knew about organizational theory didn’t really care much about schools-they were more interested in studying life in corporations, hospitals, and the military. Even more unfortunate was the fact that most of those who cared about schools really didn’t know much about organizational theory. (I even wrote a chapter about what I called the “psychological bias of American educators” in which I lamented the fact that too few educators seemed interested in the study of schools as social organizations.) The result was that the book was a flop. A few university professors liked it, some graduate students read it, and my mother was very proud. The fact is, however, that what I wrote had little impact on the direction of schools and school reform.

            I sincerely believe that if I had known how to present my ideas in a “sticky” way I might have made a much greater contribution than I did to the school reform agenda that was beginning to emerge in the late 1970s. For example, in Teaching and Social Behavior I describe 36 different types of schools and try to show that the way schools are organized affects the performance of both teachers and students in schools and in classrooms. Among other things, I show how and why demographic shifts in student populations so often lead to increased reliance on bureaucratic structures and coercive means of student control. This does not happen by intent and it does not happen rapidly-rather it is a form of social drift that operates more like the classic frog in the pot of water being brought to a boil. Leaders can stop this in its early stages, but often they fail to act until it is too late and crises arise. If what I wrote in 1976 had been understood as I intended it to be understood, policymakers might have been discouraged from some of the ill-informed actions some of them have taken in the name of school improvement. Unfortunately, I failed to present my ideas in a sticky way. I hope I have learned something about this business since 1976.

            Here is a story that might make what I am trying to communicate more “sticky.” (Stories are a powerful way to make ideas stick.)

One of the wisest men I have ever known is Jay Robinson. Jay, who passed away several years ago, was, when I first met him, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina. (He later became vice president of the University of North Carolina.) I met him about the time the book mentioned above was published. Jay read it and here is what I recall him saying to me: “Phil, you are going to have to make up your mind whether you want to write books for people like me (by which he meant practicing school administrators and teachers) or for professors and graduate students. I read this book because I like you, but believe me I wouldn’t have gone beyond the preface if I had not known you. There is good stuff in that book, but I had to work too hard to find it.” (By the way, Jay is the person who introduced me to the work of Peter Drucker.)

            I started working with Jay in 1977 and I worked hard to meet his standards. I knew I was getting someplace when, in the early 1980s, I was invited to testify before the education committee of the Tennessee legislature. After I testified, one of the committee members gave me a ride back to the airport. On the way back I recall him saying, “Son, you sure can get the hay down to the ponies.” Obviously, he was pretty good at getting the hay down to the ponies himself. In one brief and pithy statement he both summarized the problem presented by the curse of knowledge I referred to earlier and suggested a solution as well. Those who have knowledge must seek the core of what they know and what they want to communicate and they must state what they know in terms that are familiar to their audience. (By the time we took our ride, the legislator was aware that I was born and raised in the country and knew something about horses, ponies, and haylofts.) 

            Stating a complex notion in simple ways is, according to the Heaths, one of the first steps in making ideas stick. To do this, one must get to the core of the idea and strip away everything but that core. In doing this, however, one must be careful not to strip so much away that the essence of the idea is lost. Moreover, the core idea should be stated in a way that invites others to later explore the subtleties, nuances, and additional insights that have been stripped away to make the idea more sticky.

            Here I am reminded of the maxim that anyone who wants to present a complex notion to an audience that is not already familiar with the contours of the notion should have a 30-second message that states in clear and simple terms the core of the message he or she is trying to convey,  a 3-minute statement for those who find, as a result of the 30-second message, that they want to know more, and a 30-minute statement that expands and develops the core idea to a more sophisticated level-thus the simple idea of the 30-3-30 rule for conveying new ideas.