Design Thinking for School Leaders

Five Roles and Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change

Alyssa Gallagher, Kami Thordarson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781416625971
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

"Design is the rendering of intent." What if education leaders approached their work with the perspective of a designer? This new perspective of seeing the world differently is desperately needed in schools and begins with school leadership.

Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson, widely recognized experts on Design Thinking, educational leadership, and innovative strategies, call this new perspective design-inspired leadership—one of the most powerful ways to ignite positive change and address education challenges using the same design and innovation principles that have been so successful in private industry.
Design Thinking for School Leaders explores the changing landscape of leadership and offers practical ways to reframe the role of school leader using Design Thinking, one step at a time. Leaders can shift from "accidental designers" to "design-inspired leaders, " acting with greater intention and achieving greater impact. You'll learn how viewing the world through a more empathetic lens—a critical first step on the path to becoming a design-inspired leader—can raise your awareness of the uniqueness of your teachers and students and prompt you to question the ways in which they experience your school.
Gallagher and Thordarson detail five specific roles to help you identify opportunities for positively impacting students, teachers, districts, parents, and the community:

• Opportunity Seeker. Shifts from problem solving to problem finding.
• Experience Architect. Designs and curates learning experiences.
• Rule Breaker. Challenges the way things are "always" done.
• Producer. Gets things done and creates rapid learning cycles for teams.
• Storyteller. Captures the hearts and minds of a community.

Full of examples of Design Thinking in action in schools across the country, Design Thinking for School Leaders can help you guide your school to the forefront of the new design + education movement, one that will move traditional education into the modern world and drive the future of learning.

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Chapter 1

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Design-Inspired Leadership

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A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be.

—Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady

A Call to Action

It's no secret: schools need to change. Everywhere you go, educators are talking about change. Whether at educational conferences, school district meetings, or in school hallways, there are many discussions about the need for education to be different. Sometimes it feels as if we are living in an echo chamber, with everyone talking about and even agreeing that change needs to happen, but most are unsure where to start. In many places, a "culture of powerlessness" has been accepted as the status quo. Teachers and site leaders feel bound by habits, traditions, and test scores, mostly because our current school system is designed around two primary design principles, both of which are outdated:

1. Students come to school as empty vessels or blank slates ready to have their heads filled with knowledge.
2. This is best accomplished in an assembly-line format in which students are batched and grouped to proceed through a fixed amount of knowledge to prepare them for their futures.

These two design principles served us well for many years, but are no longer sufficient. In a VUCA—Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Ambiguous—world, what does it mean to prepare our kids for their futures? Are we learning as fast as our world is changing? If not, why not? Now, more than ever, school leaders, both in classrooms and administrative offices, are needed to move us beyond the conversation about change and start making changes.

So how do we move beyond the talk?

Portrait of a School Leader

School leaders have historically been portrayed fairly negatively in the media. From Ferris Bueller's Day Off to the HBO series Vice Principals, school leaders are almost always inane characters or ineffective managers at best who care more about the rules and procedures than the actual well-being or education of students at their schools. While those portrayals may not be accurate, they do highlight the traditional view of "principal as manager," a role that no longer captures the complexity of school leadership. And while it is easy to laugh at the ways in which principals are portrayed, sadly, the role of the principal hasn't evolved as much as the world around it. This failure to morph the principal into a more modern leadership role may be one of the reasons for such a high turnover rate. Annually, there is a 20 percent turnover rate among public school principals. Year after year, approximately 12 percent of all school principals leave the profession, either to retirement or other careers, and 8 percent move on to other roles within education. This number is only slightly lower in private schools (Goldring & Taie, 2014). And sadly, turnover is much worse in troubled schools, where every year, nearly 30 percent of principals quit and, by year three, more than half of all principals leave their jobs. We can't help but wonder if all this transition is partly due to dissatisfaction with the role of school principal.

Unfortunately, the high turnover rate is not only limited to school principal roles; it applies to teachers as well. In the past, it was common to celebrate teachers' retirements representing 25 to 35 years of teaching. Nowadays, it is a much different picture. In the last 15 years, the turnover rate has increased, with teachers leaving the classroom for alternative careers in educational technology or leaving the field of education altogether. Studies from the U.S. Department of Education show that 17 percent of teachers who entered the field in 2007–2008 left the profession within the first five years. Teacher leaders are an important key to creating the change that is needed, not only because changes are needed in the classroom, but also because we need a qualified leadership pipeline for the future. What if there were more or different opportunities for teacher leaders? Could we create a new profile of the school leader that is more effective and therefore more appealing?

Disruption

The world is changing rapidly. Our learners have changed, and everything in the world of education must change, as well. We are in the middle of major disruptions in almost every industry (see Figure 1.1), including learning, yet our roles and infrastructures haven't kept up. Learning has been disrupted by technology, which has altered how we learn. For the first time in history, people of all ages can learn anything they want at any time of day with little more than a device and an Internet connection.

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Figure 1.1. Disruption

A few indicators of global change:

• The world's biggest taxi company does not own any taxis (Uber).
• One of the largest accommodation providers owns no real estate (Airbnb).
• What has become one of the most popular media sites creates no content (Facebook).
• The world's largest movie provider owns no cinemas (Netflix).
• Two of the largest software vendors don't write their apps (Apple and Google).

Source: From "The Battle Is for the Customer Interface," by T. Goodwin, 2015, TechCrunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/.

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For example, making the news in Ohio, an 8-year-old decided he was hungry, but both parents were fast asleep in the house. He had seen his parents drive their car and decided the best way to quickly learn was to watch videos on YouTube. After viewing what he felt was enough instruction, he and his younger sister ventured out to McDonald's … in their parents' car! While it was a short distance to travel, he apparently followed every rule of the road and handled the vehicle without incident. Imagine the surprise of the McDonald's worker when an 8-year-old expertly pulled up to the drive-thru window. Learning has changed.

The World Economic Forum, a nonprofit organization established in 1971, engages political, business, and societal leaders in discussions around the many issues facing our world. One of their primary concerns is education, because they don't see education broadly making the changes necessary to keep up with how fast the rest of the world is evolving.

"We are today at the beginning of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in previously disjointed fields, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another. Smart systems—homes, factories, farms, grids, or entire cities—will help tackle problems ranging from supply-chain management to climate change" (World Economic Forum, 2016b, p. 1).

With the world changing so quickly, how can we get to a place where schools are experimenting and able to adapt at the rate needed to keep up? We are in the middle of major disruptions that are requiring new abilities and roles in our future workplaces. Innovation is pushing us to fine-tune our skills in data collection and interpretation and demanding that we master lifelong learning. With the rate of change increasing exponentially, leadership will also need to draw on new strategies and practices to work with and support new talent, the younger population of educators who are more adaptable and accustomed to a change-oriented environment. The skills to manage, shape, and lead the changes underway will be in short supply unless we take action today to develop them. "For a talent revolution to take place, governments and businesses will need to profoundly change their approach to education, skills, and employment, and their approach to working with each other" (World Economic Forum, 2016b, p. 7).

The role of school leaders—whether the principal or the head of school—needs a major disruption, too. What if leaders were able to approach their work more like designers? Designers actually see the world differently and therefore bring a new perspective to their work. This new perspective is desperately needed in schools and really does begin with the school leader. We call this new perspective design-inspired leadership and believe it is one of the most powerful ways to spark positive change and address education challenges using the same design and innovation principles that have been so successful in private industry.

Design-Inspired Leadership

The word "design" can be elusive to define; however, we know it when we see it. We certainly know when we experience poor design, because it usually means that something isn't working. In a blog post on experience mapping by Jared Spool (n.d.) we came across this definition of design:

"Design is the rendering of intent (para. 7)."

A designer works to make their intentions real in the world. Regardless of our background and experience, educators are all actually designers with the common goal of making education better. Design might happen unintentionally, but it happens. From the principal planning next week's staff meeting, to the creation of school goals, implementation of new programs, and the meeting of new mandates, we are constantly designing. Without taking the time to understand design principles, many leaders are operating as "accidental designers," occasionally stumbling upon innovative ideas or solutions. With more background on design, we believe we can help leaders shift from "accidental designers" to "design-inspired leaders," acting with greater intention and achieving greater impact.

Design-inspired leadership deals with more than just process; it is rooted in mindsets that you adopt in your work. Approaching Design Thinking as just a process can reduce it to a series of meetings and checklists. Design-driven leadership offers opportunities for moments of impact, often unscripted and unplanned but still intentional, and the mindsets are what help you identify these opportunities. These mindsets correspond to the five roles of leaders embedded within design-inspired leadership (see Figure 1.2), which will help you move from an accidental designer to an intentional designer—one who embraces an explorer's mindset, ready to discover something new rather than return to something familiar. Intentional designers in education will need tools for creating real, lasting, and replicable change in their schools and districts.

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Figure 1.2. Roles Embedded Within Design-Inspired Leadership

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Design-inspired leadership is a shift from the traditional view or role; it is a dramatic move away from Leader as Manager and a move toward Leader as Designer. Figure 1.3 outlines traits of both traditional leadership and design-inspired leadership. Which column inspires you more? What type of leader do you want to work for? What type of leader do you want to be?

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Figure 1.3. Traditional Leadership Versus Design-Inspired Leadership

Traditional Leadership

• Leader (teacher) centered
• Heavily influenced by organizational hierarchy and time in the role
• Afraid to venture beyond what has been strictly deemed "best practices"
• Yes, but, or no
• Begins with constraints
• Slow to act
• Starts with answers
• Fearful of unknown
• Prefers things to fit in their boxes
• Takes the safe path
• Values being right and risks avoidance
• Fixed mindset

Design-Inspired Leadership

• User (student) centered
• Recognizes the intelligence in the room regardless of "status" within the organization
• Not afraid to go beyond "best practices" to experiment with new solutions
• Begins with possibilities. Leads with "What if … ?"
• Bias toward action
• Starts with questions
• Embraces ambiguity
• Comfortable with the messiness of learning
• Values great questions and experimentation
• Growth mindset

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This book is for school leaders who understand the need to lead differently, but could use some practical help in imagining a new role, both what it looks like and how to get there. Written with a clear goal in mind, this book will put you in the driver's seat and enable you to make choices about both the pace of change and the distance you wish to travel. Even if you only engage with a few of the strategies partway, we believe they will result in positive changes for your school. We will reframe the role of a school leader by sharing five new roles and tools to develop the skills necessary to make these changes. Each of these five roles includes a set of stances and mindsets. Some roles may feel very familiar in your work, while others may be new. While the outcomes of de...