Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Round 6: Managing Change, Challenging Orthodoxies & Mining Ideas (Assignments)

Guidelines for Managing Change
Teams 1 and 2

So far today we’ve explored our assumptions about managing change and worked with some articles containing different ideas for managing change. Now it’s your turn to take that work and synthesize it into a first set of guidelines and simple rules that you propose be used to support the change process going forward.

As this project for rethinking high schools moves forward, how should it be supported and driven? How should the multitude of ideas for change that will come up be handled? How should other people be engaged in the process—both inside the school system and in the greater community (business, government, parents and so on)? How will everyone stay in touch and what kinds of information will they share? How will you know if the changes are working? How can a process of continuous innovation be built into the fabric of the education system?

You have some decisions to make. Will your system for managing change be centralized or network-based or both? Will it admit only incremental changes that fit within accepted guidelines, or will it sometimes challenge authority with deep innovations, or some of both? How much local authority will there be? Does it matter whether different programs are being tried at different schools so that the schools have less in common with one another over time?

Create a set of guidelines to serve as rules of thumb for managing a continuous process of change and innovation that doesn’t allow the education system to stand still but doesn’t cause the system to tear itself apart either. Your list should tell someone who wasn’t here this week how to get started, get connected, make changes, implement changes, and make a difference. It’s a set of simple rules that allows the whole effort to come together without much centralized control.

You may wish to consider some of the following questions as you do your work, but don’t treat the list as a set of essay questions that you’re required to answer. Just let them provoke thought.
  • How do you engage more people inside the system to rethink the high school experience?
  • How do you engage more people and organizations outside the system to rethink the high school experience?
  • How do ideas become experiments, pilots or initiatives without being bogged down in bureaucracy?
  • Once people join the movement, how are they encouraged to come up with ideas and implement them?
  • How do people in the movement communicate, share ideas, support one another?
  • How does everyone find, document, recognize, support, copy, and improve upon the good ideas of others (inside the system and outside)?
  • How do we know that ideas are working—whether they’re successful or not?
  • How do we find and distribute resources to support the effort?

Challenging Orthodoxies (The Dominant Design) and Assumptions
Teams 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Systems have difficulty making radical change because they have been built up over years or decades into what they are. Every component of the system seems to be an absolute necessity, even though at one point in its evolution the component did not exist and was not required. Unless some of these major assumptions and ways that we do things can be successfully challenged, innovators are left to nibble at the edges with incrementalism. Challenging the dominant design is a technique for breaking out of incremental design.
Focus on the following areas:
  • Team 3: The staff (or learning team including students) and its professional development
  • Team 4: The learning experience
  • Team 5: Facilities: virtual, physical & media
  • Team 6: Administration
  • Team 7: Players outside the system (e.g., business, government, parents, community…)
Record the most compelling ideas onto poster boards—one idea per poster board. List the title of the idea, describe it with a few lines of text, and draw a diagram that describes the idea. Create 4-6 poster boards. Put at least one of your names on each board as a point of contact someone could turn to for more information about that idea.

Step 1
For your focus area, make a list of the major orthodoxies, assumptions or components of the dominant design for the high school experience—better yet, for learning experiences that take place between the ages of 14 and 18. Assumptions, orthodoxies and dominant design are just three ways to think of the same thing. An orthodoxy describes how everyone else does high school education—the status quo. It’s “how it’s always been done,” or more devastatingly, “how it MUST be done.” A standard curriculum, a typical number of years to “graduate”, graduation itself, grades, and typical features of a campus might be examples. Assumptions have to do with what we believe about the system: how people learn, what motivates them, whether they can be trusted, and so on. The dominant design tells us how a system is forced to be designed by restrictions, rules and regulations placed on the system by the system outside of it (government, society, other institutions and so on).
Step 2
Choose one or several of the items from your list and do a “take away” to help you uncover ideas for rethinking the high school experience. For example, when we work with other public education clients, they often tell us that they “have to have a school building.” That’s an orthodoxy/assumption/dominant design. So we tell them to design a system of education that works but doesn’t include a school building. If they suspend their disbelief long enough to get into the exercise they usually come back with two results: (1) a design for a system that doesn’t include a school building (rarely) and, (2) other insights they got while doing the exercise (more frequently). The second result is usually more important than the first. In other words, the purpose of the exercise is to force the mind to think laterally in a new way by embracing the “impossible”, not necessarily to make you design a school without buildings.

Do at least three different take away challenges in this round of work and see what ideas you come up with for rethinking the high school experience.

Mining Ideas from the Expeditions
Teams 8, 9, 10

In your team area you’ll find the documentation from all of the Learning Expeditions that the participants did before the session. Using this documentation, accomplish the following:

  • Go through the reports and pull out ideas for change in high school that you find interesting or compelling. List them on your marker board. These ideas may be major initiatives, suggested pilot programs, or small experiments. They might be as radical as, “shift from giving grades to using portfolios instead,” or they can be incremental. Note that the idea should indicate the perceived problem and the shift to the solution.
  • As you explore the reports and discuss them, record any new ideas that may come to mind as a result of the discussion, but which were not in the reports.
  • Record the most compelling ideas onto poster boards—one idea per poster board. List the title of the idea, describe it with a few lines of text, and draw a diagram that describes the idea. Create 4-6 poster boards. Put at least one of your names on each board as a point of contact someone could turn to for more information.

Team 8: Look for ideas that represent key improvements that can be made in the high school experience (these ideas may apply to the learning team in a classroom, to an entire school, or to the entire system).

Team 9: Look for ideas that represent radical innovations that can be made in the high school experience (these ideas may apply to the learning team in a classroom or to an entire school).

Team 10: Look for ideas that require involvement with the broader community around the school: business, government, community organizations, parents, and so on.

Treat this assignment as an inquiry instead of a critique. There are certainly very good ideas contained in the learning expedition results. What might be more valuable are the insights that you may get while looking at the results. Try to avoid thinking about why or how various ideas won’t work. Leave the subject of implementation for later. Let your mind spend time forming and looking for patterns in the data and your conversations about the data. From those patterns, powerful ideas may emerge. Look for ideas that delight you on first impression, shape those ideas up, and run with them.

Rolling Up
Gather together into groups as follows:

  • Teams 1, 2 and 3 join together (Manifesto for Change)
  • Teams 4, 5, and 6 join together (Options for Things We Could/Should Change)
  • Teams 7, 8, and 9 join together (Process for Change)
  • Teams 10, 11, and 12 join together (Vision of the Ideal High School Experience in 2020)
Rearrange chairs and marker boards as necessary. Once you’re in your groups, allow each of the three teams in your group about 5 minutes apiece to share their work.

After you’re done sharing, spend the remaining 30 minutes consolidating your work into a single presentation. Extract the best ideas from each team. Look for common ideas or themes that emerged. Work fast and don’t think too hard about or argue over what you’re doing—just let it flow.

Express your presentation on one of the marker boards and be prepared to share it with everyone else when we all reconvene as a large group.

posted by Peter Durand at 5:30 PM

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