#EdJourney

A Roadmap to the Future of Education

Grant Lichtman

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781119422921, 9781118898581
• eBook ISBN: 9781118898871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Your formula for managing innovation and transforming learning

#EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education is a refreshing change from the negativity so common in the world of education today. Over the course of a 3-month solo road trip across the United States, author Grant Lichtman discovered that there is much to be positive about in today's K-12 schools. Lichtman, one of the country's leading experts in educational innovation, interviewed over 600 teachers, administrators, students, parents, and trustees to find out what kind of innovations they're doing right—and how others can leverage their successes.

Innovation in education takes hard work, planning, and cooperation. With examples from around the country and findings from the latest education research, #EdJourney maps out how administrators and teachers can embrace the innovation process that schools and learners need now. Today's 21st century education presents unique challenges and opportunities to students, and this is a trailblazing practical guide to making sure education is ready for the future. #EdJourney focuses on four key questions:

• What new learning strategies are the top schools implementing to prepare our students for their future rather than for our past?
• How do teachers and administrators manage transitions to new types of teaching and learning?
• What are the key obstacles to shifting away from the assembly line model of education?
• How can we all leverage the lessons of success from the most innovative schools?

The concrete examples and advice in this book will help you bring innovation and educational design concepts into your school. #EdJourney goes beyond the theoretical need for change—by now a familiar topic to almost everyone—and takes a real-world approach to achieving transformative education in any school.

Part One
Roadblocks: How Can We Overcome the Biggest Obstacles to School Reform?

Before I left on my trip, Pat Bassett, then president of the National Association of Independent Schools, urged me to keep track of the obstacles to innovation that schools are facing—the things that don’t work as much as the things that do work. It was great advice, and as I interviewed teachers, students, administrators, and parents representing schools of all kinds and grade levels, I kept a log of these obstacles. As you might imagine, I started to hear similarities in the issues as the trip progressed. By the end of the tour I had captured nearly three hundred specific comments about why innovation and change are challenging and often uncomfortable at schools—why, despite years of discussion and agreement that we have to change education in order to prepare our students for a very different world, change is sluggish, stalled, or set aside. I waited until I got home, sat down with my log, and sorted the list into manageable buckets of similar comments.

I found four obstacles repeated most frequently that appear to present a truly existential challenge to a school’s ability to change what it does:

• Use of time
• Developing people and their ability to change
• Leadership
• Organizational structures

The next set of obstacles, cited or reflected at many schools but not with the same level of prominence or not as firmly blocking the critical path to innovation, are these:

• Changing learning modalities
• Inertia
• Inward focus
• Failure to clarify the school’s differentiated value
• Reluctance to systematically work the problem

Before we get into specific stories and examples, I want to offer some context for the subject of change in knowledge-based organizations. I did not start my road trip completely devoid of preconceptions. For the previous two years I had studied, purchased a small library, and loaded my blog reader with ideas and insights from authors, business leaders, and change agents whose expertise draws from both inside and outside the world of education. It is a world of lessons gleaned from the past five hundred years of human history, tracing the success and failure of knowledge-based industries and organizations since at least the Renaissance.

I have already talked about what is perhaps the most commonly cited obstacle to innovation: change is hard. Assuming I got my point across in the introduction, let’s replace hard with uncomfortable. Although this is an important distinction, the reasons for this discomfort are real. If we don’t have to do something uncomfortable, we generally will not. Change is uncomfortable because it is about the future, and most predictions about the future turn out to be wrong. Organizations that have to commit large amounts of resources—make big bets—on what will happen a long way into the future take big risks that their visions of the future are just plain wrong. Think about NASA and plans for going to Mars. What happens to all of that human and financial capital if someone comes along and figures out a better rocket engine? What happens if electric car designers are wrong and hydrogen proves the more efficient renewable energy source? What if we build a magnetic-levitation bullet train and halfway into the project someone invents the 2.0 version that is cheaper, faster, and safer? These are enormous risks.

Schools are fortunate in this regard. The main job of schools is to prepare students for the future, and the amount of capital risk is relatively low. We just have to continually upgrade what we are supposed to be good at: managing the flow of knowledge. So why do we think that innovation and change are hard? Here are a few large-scale reasons gleaned from the long history of organizational change that pertain particularly to schools:

• Successful organizations tend to be inwardly focused on what they have done, instead of what they might do, and that can lead to doubling down on past success. If schools are not imagining a different future, they will amplify their efforts to do what they have always done, only better.
• Through either omission or commission, leaders may fail to clearly articulate that innovation is an organizational imperative that is critical to the future. If the organization does not see its collective interests aligned with the need to promote innovation, there will be no real change. Schools are very busy places, and when things are generally going well or according to plan, innovation takes a back seat.
• Innovation is not just the creation and implementation of new ideas. Successful innovation demands that these new ideas create new value. The failure to link innovation strategies to value will result in the creation of lots of interesting new ideas that may or may not benefit the organization. Educators are creative people, but not all creativity results in value to the organization. Educators are also collegial and often averse to telling their colleagues that a good idea is not necessarily an idea that will make the school better at serving an evolving mission.
• Organizations fail to innovate if they lack either internal or external networks. If an organization fails to seek external insights, it will become convinced that its way is the best or only way. If the organization fails to develop collaborative internal and external networks, it will lose the advantages of idea leverage and cultivation that have proven over time to be the critical factor in successful innovation. Schools have been much slower to recognize the key role that networks play in innovation than other successful knowledge-based organizations.
• Innovation requires matching change vectors, which combine speed and a direction, to the rate of change in the external environment. Technology is the prime reason that organizations are now forced to innovate much more rapidly than even a decade ago. Knowledge-based organizations like schools have to keep pace with those changes, while also dealing with a nearly vertical curve in the rate of change of the sum of human knowledge.
• Educators tend to be conservative when it comes to change. Educators tend to enjoy working in a highly democratic environment of decision making where consensus is a common goal. Teachers don’t like to ruffle each other’s feathers; they prefer to work together as a collective. This tendency has powerful positive effects when it comes to developing collaborative working groups, but it generates overwhelming frictional resistance to change if there is cultural reluctance to ask hard questions of one’s colleagues and oneself.
• Schools have always been a special case with respect to failure. In schools, risks are taken in small, slow increments, and failure is not generally celebrated. There are few, if any, institutional benefits or rewards for those who want to take risks, and there is plenty of downside for both students and employees who try and fail.

These are just a few of the challenges to innovation that translate from other knowledge-based organizations to education. There are many more challenges, but we will now focus on those obstacles most common to schools and see how educators all over the country are overcoming them.

Chapter 1
Time: The Most Common Obstacle to Change in Schools

At the end of a long day of school visits in Denver, I spoke with Alan Smiley, head at St. Anne’s Episcopal School. He talked about the need to balance rapid innovation with maintaining a center of focus for students and adults that does not change. I knew that he had touched on a very important theme, but I also knew I was tired from eight hours of interviews at two schools that day and would not grasp his real meaning without time to reflect. This idea was there, teasing me, just past the range of my understanding, as I wrapped up at St. Anne’s, drove out of Denver in a rainstorm, and settled in for the long drive to Kansas City.

As it turned out, I did not get to Kansas City that night. My car died just across the Colorado-Kansas border; I will save that tale for later in the book. So it was not until the weekend, having left Kansas on my way to St. Louis, that I finally had the chance to think about time and the pace and rate of change. With a full day to make the drive, I turned off of I-70 East, the major six-lane swath of asphalt that boldly pounds across the American heartland, onto Highway 50, a small two-lane byway which winds through the green, rolling hardwoods and rich bottomlands of the Missouri countryside. Speeds are slower, small crossroad towns flicker by, John Deere dealers and red-roofed, back-road burger stands more common than Arby’s and McDonald’s. Sometime in the midafternoon I slowed down, pulled over to a deserted picnic stop, and turned off the ignition. As I looked across the cloudy countryside, I finally got Alan’s point.

The same rapid changes in the world that drive innovation also drive an ever-more-hectic pace of learning. We pile on increasingly competitive college admissions; parents, students, and educators press the pedal to the floor even harder. Yet we all know that we think best, find connections, experience important and sometimes life-changing “aha” moments—not in the rush of the day or when information is swirling at us as we try to grab it, write notes, or complete an assignment—but instead when we take a walk or a long drive, or meditate, or just sit with a cup of tea in the afternoon or at the end of the day. Few schools have time set aside for drinking tea.

Our Most Precious Resource

Ask any randomly selected group of American adults, “What do you wish you had more of?” Some will say “money,” but almost all will say “time”—the time to do many of the things they would like: visiting with family, pursuing an interest outside of their normal work, helping a charity. The traditional industrial age model of education, as much as any manufacturing assembly line, is slave to the concept of time. Students’ lives are segmented into twelve or thirteen yearlong blocks of time according to their age and birthdate. Years are broken down into school time and nonschool time, semesters, trimesters, quarters, summer school, and vacations. Days are strictly bound by the time that schools must start and end within a remarkably narrow set of options. During those days, students and teachers march to the unnatural rhythm of bells and class changes, many still in blocks of 50 or 55 or 49 minutes that suggest that learning is best accomplished in exactly these quanta parsed out according to subject. Some schools have modified the daily routine to allocate two-hour blocks for one subject and not for another, or fewer, longer blocks for all subjects.

Schools that truly challenge their use of time find that it holds the key to liberating innovation. In my research with schools, by far the most frequently cited obstacle to meaningful change is time. The two areas for which teachers, administrators, and students consistently told me they wish they had more time, or more flexibility in time, were the organization of class time in the daily schedule and time for adults to meet, collaborate, and learn. Both public and private schools are finding solutions to the problem of time. Some create new time, not by extending the school day or year, but by shifting where people have to be during the day. Some reprioritize how time is spent and find that the school survives, and thrives, following what were formerly thought of as impossibly difficult changes to the school’s schedule. And we will hear of a ninth-grade student who came up with an elegant solution to one of the most intransigent problems in every school: finding time for teachers to meet and work together on their own learning pathways.

Why Is Time Chopped Up?

During my visit to a highly respected school in the Midwest, I sat in on a third-grade class. Recognizing the benefits of working across subject matter areas, this school had created a two-hour block of time to teach humanities. Sitting in the back of the class, perched on the tippy edge of a chair made for third graders, I noticed that the well-organized teacher had listed the day’s agenda on the whiteboard. She had parsed the day into about a dozen blocks of time. This is absolutely routine at most elementary schools. Student time is chopped up into so many minutes for math, so many minutes for art, so many for reading, and so on.

Not a single educator has ever told me that students learn best in twenty-minute or hour-long blocks of time segmented by subject, yet almost every school structures time that way. Why is school organized this way? I asked this question of many educators I met on my trip, and the answers varied little. The responses fell into two groups: (1) “I need that time in order to teach my students what they need to know,” and (2) “It’s done that way because that is the way we have always done it.” In an overgeneralized way, these two themes characterize the vast majority of responses about why daily schedules are the way they are.

As I discussed in the introduction, there is an enormous disconnect between what educators say are the key learning outcomes they want for their students and the allocation of our precious resources: time, people, money, space, and knowledge. Educators overwhelmingly agree that the essential qualities of their graduates are things like creativity, love of learning, good citizenship, empathy, effective communication, deep understanding of the challenges that face us in the world, and curiosity. Yet the organizing element of both student and teacher lives, day in and day out, week after week, year after year, is that the allocation of time has nothing to do with those essential outcomes.

Daily life at school is organized this way because that is how we always have done it, and changing the allocation of time can be extremely uncomfortable. Teachers have been hired, trained, labeled, organized, and evaluated by how well they control their time, their classroom, and their subject. A change to the daily schedule is a threat to who and what they are as teachers. Can we blame teachers for not welcoming a major change in their daily routine with open arms when this has been the source of their individual and community identity for as long as any of us can remember?

Most educators agree in principle that long periods of time that allow for deep inquiry, accumulation of experience, and iterative practice of critical skills will yield the best long-term results. Ask the same question to teachers and administrators about changing the specific schedule of their school, and it scares the heck out of them. Even asking the question often generates fear, skepticism, and push-back: “You are trying to steal my time.”

What if we were starting a school from scratch, with no preconditions other than creating the best possible learning environment for students? Would we break the day up into 55- or 75-mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Roadblocks
• Part Two: Blazing the Trail
• Part Three: The Road Ahead
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement