FUSE14 and Designing for Engagement

Sometime last fall I stumbled onto design thinking (DT) and was immediately drawn to its grounding in working with and for people. DT, to put it simply, is a process (or, if you prefer, the DT "mindset") that can be summed up as "people-centered problem solving with a bias toward action." Since learning about it, I've been working with it as often as I could, including participating in the #dtk12chat to meet others interested in DT in education. So when I learned about FUSE14, a two-day design thinking workshop hosted at the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation in Atlanta, I jumped on the opportunity, given that it was scheduled immediately before ISTE2014 this summer (on which cf. my reflections). At FUSE14, I was very eager to work on some problems we've been uncovering at our school with the hopes of designing prototype solutions for them.

At the event, +Melissa Strong, the chair of our MS World Languages Dept., and I represented our school in the 201 track, to which we brought our problem of "time" to put through the DT process. Using MVIFI's DEEPdt process (standing for Discover Empathize Experiment Produce; digital editions of the fantastic DEEPdt playbooks can be purchased here), we had hoped to gain a better understanding of how we manage time, with the goal of bringing back to suggestions to our community. And that's exactly what we accomplished, though not in the original way we had intended.

@mosspike and @DeLibrosCorazon doing some #empathy interviews at #fuse14 pic.twitter.com/toCYVNI4IM
— Amanda Kruysman (@coachhkay) June 25, 2014

Discover

Our Middle School campus has 9 periods each day, with 40min in each period. It's an exceptionally short amount of sit-time to have with students each day, and more faculty of late have begun to identify problems with our schedule and have suggested that we again explore block schedules, among other ideas, making it the perfect "wicked problem."

Before jumping into the deep end of the 201 track, we were asked to organize interviews with our "users" to be held during our first day. Time affects all users (e.g., students, faculty, staff, parents, etc.) in our community, but because we were biased toward our schedule, we decided to focus mainly on our students. After 75min of great Q&A with two students and two faculty members (thank you, Regan and Ian!), we realized that we needed to take a few steps back: our problem isn't as much about time as we initially thought.

Empathize

Our interviews exceeded all expectation and gave us some very useful data to work with. In particular, they bore out a few interesting observations:

• Kids are more engaged when introduced to new material, and they're more engaged when they're reviewing material in preparation for a test. They don't find the middle stages in a particular unit as engaging as the beginning or end.
• When asked to "think about something" at home, kids rarely do so. Unless there's some tangible activity to be done, kids don't do work outside of the classroom, and even then, they report less engagement than when doing work in class.
• When rushing through material, kids don't often feel that they should ask questions, and they sometimes feel that tangential questions, when not answered, must be irrelevant to the topic at hand.
• Double periods (only in English and science) are more engaging than single periods, on account of the types of activities done in class.
• 50min periods aren't necessarily more productive than our current 40min periods, since small talk often gets in the way.
• Regular breaks in the middle of the day are more welcome than random breaks throughout the day. 

Based on our subsequent empathy mapping of the interviews, we concluded that time and our current schedule aren't our primary problems. Rather, time was more of a symptom of other problems, namely the problem of overall engagement and "flow" (cf. Csikszentmihalyi's TED Talk). It's not that we don't have enough time, as much as it's about how we're using the time that we do have together. In other words, a different schedule, with longer class periods, wouldn't by itself fix any of the issues that our users identified. That's not to say that I wouldn't warmly welcome more time and longer class periods, but the interview results suggest that we need to work on engagement to give our community clear reasons for using time differently, before we can tackle more concrete schedule issues. With that, Melissa and I began to dig deeper into the assumptions and obstacles standing in the way of the kinds of engagement that we believe are possible.

Experiment and Produce

Now that our discovery work has uncovered engagement as the deeper issue, we, with the help of the outstanding FUSE14 coaching staff, next needed to uncover the long-held assumptions governing how we use our time (cf. Kahneman's idea of "theory-induced blindness"). We now believe that, by challenging these assumptions to produce "How might we?" (HMW) questions that have the potential to engage our community in productive discussions around these ideas without seeming confrontational, we can start working toward new kinds of environments for not only our students, but our faculty and staff too. Our users, then, have become faculty.

1. Assumption: Students learn best through regular content-based testing.
➔ HMW transform our feedback system to reward process over product?

We broadly use the word "feedback" to include not only rote testing but everything we do that informs students of their own progress through our courses. It's the way we answer (or don't answer) questions, it's the work we do with them in class, it's our body language, and more. With this in mind, we need to think through our feedback systems in much greater detail, starting with the fact that a test isn't the only form of feedback.

2. Assumption: Rigor usually excludes creativity.
➔ HMW: Use curiosity to drive our curricula and content?

That kids are most engaged when introduced to new material underscores the power of creativity and wonder in the learning process, I think. There seems to be a widespread assumption that rigor and creativity are mutually exclusive, but this isn't the case at all, as cognitive science is proving. We need to think hard about how we can continue to challenge our students, while also encouraging them to be creative, along with building on other non-cognitive skills. This goes for us too: if we're not feeling creative in teaching, I can't imagine that we're feeling truly fulfilled.

3. Assumption: Our purpose is driven by our obligations to the school.
➔ HMW: Separate true purpose from duty or obligation in what we do as educators?

Students and faculty have a frightening small amount of free time, thanks to the regular ancillary duties and obligations (i.e., external motivators) that are asked of us within our communities. Many seem to equate such obligations with purpose, thereby using such obligations to drive purpose; but Melissa and I would like to challenge this assumption and have larger conversations about purpose (i.e., intrinsic motivators), under the belief that our purpose as educators far exceeds these obligations.

4. Assumption: Kids need daily homework and class meetings to learn.
➔ HMW: Get rid of homework?

This assumption speaks for itself. A growing body of literature (e.g., a recent Stanford study), however, including our own school's Workload Study, makes a strong case for the relative lack of value that homework offers, especially within the traditional framework. That said, this HMW question may be the most controversial, with homework being so culturally ingrained in education.

In sum, if we can challenge these assumptions and work toward engaging both our faculty and our students in different ways than we currently do, we may be able to treat the symptom of time that we've been discussing in our community. No one would say that our classes lack engagement, but after talking with students and faculty and thinking through our wicked problem, we see the big picture differently and believe that there is still opportunity for improvement. A 40min class, while still short, can still be productive, if we have more of an active understanding of how engagement works. This is only the beginning of this process, and we're hopeful that we can unpack more assumptions in conversations with our community and conduct even more interviews, when we return in the fall.

#dtk12chat at MODA

FUSE14 included a trip to MODA, the Museum of Design Atlanta, where we had the opportunity to view the Design for Social Impact exhibition and watch a live broadcast of the #dtk12chat show, hosted by +Trey Boden and +Dan Ryder. The exhibition is amazing and included a number of remarkable works by designers driven by change.

In @modatl with a great group of educators. It's a great way to nourish our creativity and start our summer. #fuse14 pic.twitter.com/7VDgjMKXSn
— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) June 26, 2014

DT Resources

If new to DT and interested in learning more about it, I recommend any of the resources below. More than anything else, DT is inherently social, and so it's best to talk about it with others. Regardless of experience, I highly recommend stopping by #dtk12chat on Twitter on Wed. at 6pm PST.

• Creative Confidence (Tom and David Kelley)
• Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators
• Frog Collective Action Toolkit
• IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit
• Stanford d.school Crash Course in Design Thinking

—

Throughout our workshop, our coaches were insistent that we do all the work, while they only gave us guidance and some of the tools to do it. For that reason, FUSE14 was one of the most intense and rewarding PD experiences I've ever had, and I can't recommend it enough to other educators seeking to rethink how we work with people. We came to Atlanta with a problem and left with a few questions that can offer opportunity for innovation within our department and at our school. Leaving Atlanta, I have more of a designer mindset than ever, and I'm eager to get to work. Thanks to everyone who made the experience so valuable for us, including +Bo Adams for his fantastic work as MC and host, Trey Boden for designing the experience, and the entire 201 team of coaches, led by +Greg Bamford and +Jennifer Chan.

ISTE2014 and Collaboration

After a week in Atlanta for FUSE14 (cf. my reflections) and ISTE2014, my head is spinning. It was an extraordinary experience, and I learned so much that it's going to take months to sort it all out. Most of all, it was a invigorating and inspiring to spend quality time in person with so many amazing people (thanks +Dominique Dynes for the picture below!).

Having fun at #iste2014 with friends! @DeLibrosCorazon @mosspike @Ms_Cerda @coachk #brewcue pic.twitter.com/3ra21bCTMG

— Dominique Dynes (@DominiqueDynes) June 27, 2014

Last year in San Antonio, I spent a fair amount of time reading the ISTE Tweet stream, which helped me to learn what others were doing at the conference. This year, however, I spent the majority of my time presenting and talking with people in person, including meeting a number of Twitter friends for the first time. While I regret not being able to follow ISTE on Twitter as closely as I'd have liked, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations I had, since this is what ISTE is all about.

Come learn about Google Maps at #googleedu booth! #iste2014 #googlect @mosspike pic.twitter.com/I3jqNTsywq

— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) July 1, 2014

So much happened in Atlanta, but I'll share some brief highlights:

• Our #brewcue was very successful, and the Google events were awesome, where we were able to reunite some of our GTACHI colleagues. It's amazing to see what we've all been doing in the past year, and I'm beyond honored to be part of such an illustrious group. The Instructure party was also quite heavily attended, and I enjoyed meeting other independent school folks at our #isteisen dinner, where I got to catch up with an old friend and colleague +Jennifer Carey. The #isteball baseball game was a lot of fun, too. All in all, there was plenty of great socializing in Atlanta.
• HackEd was again fantastic. I had the opportunity to lead a session on design thinking, following up on FUSE, and we had some good conversation about bringing DT into the classroom.
• At the GlobalEd Day "min-conference," +Melissa Strong and I led a discussion on world language study and globalization. We learned what others are doing at their schools to make their language programs more global, which gave us some ideas of our own to try out.
• I've been experimenting with gamification in our Latin program, and so I was geeked to chat with +Michael Matera about some of my ideas. He gave me some extremely helpful feedback that I'm very excited to test next fall, and I look forward to continued collaboration with him.
• +Zee Poerio invited me to join her poster session on using technology in Latin classrooms, focusing on the project-based learning approaches we've been taking. We had fun sharing some of the projects we've been working on with our students and hopefully offered an attractive plug for the study of Latin.
• +Isis Stephanie Cerda and I gave a session on using Google's Fusion Tables in the design thinking process at the Google Playground. This session was particularly interesting, in that it generated a number of questions about how we collaborate that I think are worth exploring in more detail.

The State of Collaboration

Given that ISTE is all about bringing people together, Stephanie and I decided to send out a brief survey on collaboration to collect data that we'd use in our Fusion Tables session. In particular, we collected standard demographics like gender, role, experience, etc., followed by research questions on collaboration. Using a 4-point scale to prevent selection of an unhelpful "no opinion" middle response, we asked respondents to rate their agreement with the following statements, with 1 representing "strongly disagree" up to 4 "strongly agree":

• I collaborate with others in my organization.
• I collaborate with others outside of my organization.
• I participate in regular PD activities.
• I organize regular PD activities.

With the collected data, we demonstrated how Fusion Tables can be used for quick analyses in our session (cf. the overall Collaboration by Experience results below). All told, 90 people submitted a survey (we thank them all!), and the data are summarized in this Fusion Table (feel free to copy).

A few caveats: We pushed out the survey on Twitter at a ISTE and must acknowledge that the sample size is both small and certainly skewed toward the more collaboration-friendly; but our numbers are nonetheless interesting. And we must remember that correlation does not imply causation, so any apparent relationships in the data will need to be investigated further, before conclusions can be drawn. With that in mind, here's a summary of our findings:

• It is certainly significant that 60 of the 90 respondents were female. Any comparisons between males and females must thus be taken with caution.
• Not one male response had more that 20 years of experience in the current role!
• Participation in PD is relatively stable across experience levels (i.e., no one experience group participates with greater frequency).
• Overall, there seems to be an apparent correlation with experience and organizing PD: the more experience one has, the less PD she organizes. Those with 0-5 years of experience report an average response of 3.77, while 21+ stands at 2.67. That's a huge drop.
• Female administrators (3.92) and tech specialists (3.78) organize significantly more PD than respective male counterparts (3.4 and 3.5, respectively), but male teachers (3.15) organize more PD than female teachers (2.71). Female teachers with 21+ years of experience only report a 2 for organizing PD.
• The less and most experienced administrators and tech specialists organize PD more often than those in the 6-10 year range.
• Less experienced educators collaborate more inside of their organization, and more experienced educators collaborate more outside. This phenomenon is more pronounced with males (a statistical by-product?). 

Even in an informal survey of this sort, we can ask some potentially powerful questions about the data we collected and dig deeper into problems that we may not have known existed. Among a number of interesting questions, we can ask why the more experienced teachers are not leading as many PD opportunities as others. I've witnessed veteran teachers who believe they have less "value" than their younger colleagues who are more tech savvy, but this simply isn't true. Now knowing this, how might we encourage educators with more experience to share their experience inside and outside their communities? How might we learn to better appreciate the diverse value that everyone brings into our communities? To gain a better understanding of the problem and begin to work toward solutions, we should next talk with more experienced teachers about their thoughts on PD.

It could be quite interesting to repeat this process in a Twitter chat sometime. If we pushed out a survey, ideally asking students questions, and gave our communities a week to respond, we could spend the discussion time analyzing the results and generating more questions for investigation. Any takers?

—

So much for ISTE2014. Atlanta was a fabulous host, full of friendly people and great food. I enjoyed talking with you all, and I can't wait to do it again. And in the meantime, I'll be looking forward to kicking around these ideas.

My "Go Bag"

Following +Trey Boden's share of his "Go Bag," or what gear he carries around with him, I'll share my own gear that I have with me in my DT manpurse, with an eye on FUSE14 and ISTE2014. These are the things I find useful while traveling and/or conferencing:

My Go Bag

• Rickshaw Zero Messenger Bag (medium, custom) — Really love these bags. The medium size forces me to compromise on what I really need to have with me.
• Rickshaw Deluxe Drop Pocket — Pockets can be swapped out of all bags.
• Rickshaw Classic Folio — Great for carrying pens, cards, small notebooks, etc.
• 13in MacBook Pro
• MotoX
• Sennheiser CX215 earphones — Great sound for the price.
• Anker 5600mAh portable battery — Absolutely indispensable. Can get 3 charges from it.
• Extra large Moleskine soft cover journal (squared, gray) — For detailed sketchnotes.
• Pocket Moleskine hard cover notebook (squared, red) — My "commonplace book" for random notes and ideas.
• Field Notes notebook (dot-grid, pitch black) — For notes from FUSE and ISTE.
• Small Post-It notes
• Lexar 32gb flash drive
• Business cards and a Y&G business card holder
• uni-ball 0.7mm roller pens (assorted)
• MUJI 0.5mm gel ink pens (black) — Trying these out on a recommendation, but I'm more of a 0.7mm kind of guy.
• Sharpie retractable markers (assorted) — An addiction.
• USB dual-port adaptor and 6' micro USB cable
• HDMI and VGA dongles
• Microfiber cloth — Handy for cleaning screens, glasses, etc.
• Reading (Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and David Mitchell's Black Swan Green)

Add a pack of Starbucks Via, and I'm good to go. What's in your go bag?

Summer Reading and Discussion

Cognitive Surpluss

Now that summer is fast approaching (and since I'm long overdue for a blog post), I've been thinking about what sorts of professional development I'l be doing over the next few months. Last summer, I spent a lot of time at conferences, and while it was a fantastically productive period of time, this summer I'm looking forward to doing more reading and reflection on the past year of experimentation.

Making Thinking Visible

In particular, I'm interested in exploring ideas on innovation and cognitive science, and to that end, I've compiled a list of books that have caught my attention in the past year (cf. some notes here on a few I've already read). I'm hoping that others in the PLN will be interested in reading and discussing some of these ideas. At the moment, I've got my eye on Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and Ritchhart, Church, and Morrison's Making Thinking Visible, but I'm interested in all of them. If any of the books or ideas look interesting, upvote any of them in the comments section at the bottom of the book list document.

There are also a few books I've recently read that I'd love to discuss in some way, including Hurst's The Purpose Economy (cf. his blog) and Pentland's Social Physics (cf. his blog). I'm open to suggestions on others of value, and I welcome comments on them. And if anyone interested in book discussions will be at ISTE this summer, perhaps we can put together a time and place for conversation in person. Feel free to circulate the list among faculty, and cheers to a productive summer!

ISTE 2013 Reflections

I had an amazing experience at the 2013 ISTE conference in San Antonio this past week (June 22-26) and will be reflecting on it for quite some time, I'm sure. It was a different experience than I expected, but one that nonetheless exceeded all my expectations. My #iste13 notes are public, and I welcome comments and questions to help me further reflect.

The conference was big in every way. In fact, its size made for some difficulties, like full sessions and wifi issues. But overall, the size only added to the social aspects of ISTE, which were easily the highlight of the event. Having a chance to catch up with some old friends and meet and have face-to-face conversations with people I've interacted with on Twitter was worth the travel alone. The feeling of collegiality and acceptance at ISTE was almost overwhelming, since it seemed that I was rarely not caught in an engaging conversation with someone, whether sitting in the Bloggers' Cafe or just walking through the halls of the convention center. The Twitter activity was nothing less than amazing too, with over 50,000 Tweets logged during the event. It'll be interesting to read through them over the rest of the summer.

We had some great #coffeecue meetings, where we talked about gamification, PD, and social media tools like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., and we had a great #brewcue at a local San Antonio favorite, The Friendly Spot. I learned a lot at ISTE, and I'll briefly highlight some of my more-specific takeaways from the conference.

1:1 Program Administration and PD

Saturday's HackedEd "unconference" was fascinating. In fact, I barely said a word, while I instead listened to the compelling insights that others had, based on their experience. In particular, I was very interested to hear what advice educations were willing to offer on professional development and working with 1:1 programs. Specifically:

• Several people advocate the importance of getting teachers comfortable with the devices that their students will be using, if different from their own. Our teachers have PCs, but most students will have Macs.

• The importance of visiting other 1:1 classrooms was underscored, and I think that we need to put more emphasis in doing this next year, when we begin our program.

• An organized LMS is key, which will be another priority of ours in developing courses with Instructure's Canvas.

• Interestingly, devices amplify what you do well and what you don't do well. We'll need to keep a close eye on this next year.

• With that, teachers must be willing to not be the expert with the tools in the classroom anymore.

• It's important to give only 1 or 2 tools for teachers to learn in the first year of a program. Next year, we're starting with 7th grade only and will be focusing our attention on Canvas and Google Apps.

• Finally, some educators suggested that a good PLN is more valuable than a TIS or other person whose job it is to facilitate technology integration. We need to think about ways to build a stronger PLN at our school.

Gamification

After reading Jane McGonigal's inspiring book Reality is Broken (on our #caedchat summer book list!), attending the Epic Leadership workshop, and talking to others about games, I have a new appreciation for gamification and the value of play in the classroom, namely, that the intrinsic principles of game mechanics (i.e. what makes a good game) can often be more valuable than the game itself. I've also come to learn that games don't just imply video games but can include almost any activity structured around solid gamification principles. Games can be played by students, but they can also be used with faculty for professional development and even to simply boost morale. I have some ideas for next year that I'll write up elsewhere.

Keynotes

I thought all three keynotes were epic wins. Sunday night, McGonigal highlighted the importance of gamers as "super-powered hopeful individuals" who are motivated by creativity above all other emotions (despite creativity not being an emotion).  She stressed that, when we're designing games for classroom, we should be thinking about positive emotions that gamers crave, in addition to points and achievements. And most of all, she stresses that we must "empower students to make contributions to the world now, not when they're adults."

Steven Johnson's Keynote on Tuesday morning was based on the premise that "not all great ideas are eureka moments." In other words, good ideas don't just happen but are the product of long-term thinking. In Johnson's words, an idea "is not a single thing; an idea is a network." I'd never thought of ideas in this way, where diversity becomes paramount. "When we surround ourselves with people who are different, we become smarter," Johnson stressed. With this in mind, I now believe that it's even more important to visit other regularly schools for professional development, given that "chance favors the connected mind." I'm going to make it a point to read his book Where Good Ideas Come From this summer.

Wednesday afternoon's closing keynote by Adam Bellow, adorned with his Google Glass, was both impassioned and emotional. He underscored the importance of creativity in the classroom, especially the role we educators play − we who "are the artisans, craftsmen, and chefs that make technology matter." As Socrates said and Bellow reiterated, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” I understand this to mean that we shouldn't spend our time and energy looking to the past or arguing about what clearly doesn't work. Instead, we need to build new "superstructures" together (cf. Reality is Broken p. 318) that pave the way for more creativity in education today.

I appreciated the fact that the three keynotes echoed similar ideas but that each of them approached these ideas through their own unique lenses. That different insights reveal the same things about the current state of education has got to say something about the importance of these ideas, I think.

—

In the end, it's about the ideas, not the tools. We want to be social. We want to collaborate and help each other. As McGonigal, Johnson, Bellow and others have emphasized, we want to play hard and do meaningful work, and we want valuable feedback on our efforts so we can do even better in subsequent attempts. We want these things because, as the field of positive psychology is demonstrating, our brains have evolved to depend on them. With this in mind, my overall top takeaway from the whole conference, perhaps, is my own modified understanding the relationship we have to the technology we use. It seems to me that this relationship is Darwinian, in that the most successful tools we use have been selected for, based on their ability to give us these very things that our minds crave, like playful connection and meaning. If a particular tool doesn't allow us to do these things, it won't be very successful in the long run because no one will use it.

So, our task in going to conferences like ISTE isn't to learn how to force technology into our classrooms, but rather to move our classrooms to be more collaborative, meaningful, and give better feedback. And we do so by being connected. Technologies like GAFE and Twitter that easily help us to do so are the ones that we will always come back to. From now on, I plan to focus on the ideas and let the technology fall into place naturally. Next up, #gtachi!

HW "Three For All" PD Program

I've casually mentioned our "Three For All" program for professional development to a few colleagues from other schools, and based on the questions asked about it, I thought it may be worth sharing to a wider audience.

We'll be starting our 1:1 laptop program next year in 7th grade, before rolling it out to 7-9 and 7-12 in the next two years, and to better prepare our faculty and staff to use the devices effectively, we contemplated all varieties of PD plans. Our school structure makes it difficult to offer blocked time for join PD, leaving it instead for faculty to do on their own. With that in mind, we contemplated plans that used words like "require" and "mandate" to make the importance of PD work clear, but because that approach didn't really capture our school's philosophy toward PD, for which we believe in autonomy and choice, nothing seemed right.

Our MS Head of School finally decided on one he called "Three For All", which asks all faculty (not just 7th-grade teachers) to complete 3 PD projects by the start of the next academic year on Aug. 27. In March, he revealed the program to the rest of the faculty using a video we put on YouTube, rather than through an email (which was very well received!). A single PD project could include almost anything, including reading a book and writing a review, watching a webinar or taking an online course, participating in a Tweetchat, attending a workshop or #coffeecue meeting, visiting a school, or even going to a conference. And if the conference offers multiple workshops, it could well count for three PD credits itself. We've created a document of suggested activities to encourage collaborative participation, but there were very few restrictions on the types of activities.

Because we want faculty doing the kind of work that they're interested and invested it, we also gave the option of requesting specific 1:1 tutorials or departmental workshops. If a teacher gave a workshop for others, that would count as a credit, since we want to encourage the formation of a support network within the school. But we also welcome departments to arrange for workshops led by experts they choose from outside the school in order to ensure that their PD time and work is valuable and most of all, to make it clear to our community that we support them in their "Three For All" activities.

PD work is recorded within a spreadsheet, and faculty are encouraged to share their work with the rest of the community on our faculty portal, where others can see what they've done and whether they found the project useful, while asking any questions about it.

Thus far, we all are quite happy with the results. In fact, in addition to the variety of work recorded, we've been pleasantly surprised at how many credits some faculty have already earned. By giving our community autonomy to select their own projects and trusting them to do the work responsibly, our level of participation is high. Moreover, more faculty are exchanging ideas with each other not only for "Three For All" opportunities but also for ideas to use in their classrooms next year. I'm still thinking through ways to facilitate face-to-face sharing (e.g. a "demo slam" or weekly coffee chats) and welcome any suggestions.

When we return to campus in the fall, our TIS team will lead an edcamp-like PD workshop, where we hope others will be willing to share what they learned over the summer. Most importantly, we hope that these sorts of discussions that the "Three For All" program has already sparked will continue to happen throughout next year and that we will continue to build a strong network of experts from within our faculty.

I welcome any questions or comments on the program, and I'm also curious to learn of other approaches to PD that other schools have found successful.

Pink's Drive and Motivation

Thanks to a bit of extra free time over spring break, I finally had some time to read Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, since I've been lately thinking about the sometimes tenuous relationship that faculty have with professional development (PD.  The first half of the book focuses on the problems of motivation mainly from the perspective of the the business world, but it has clear applications to other fields, especially teaching (Pink offers suggestions for parents and educators later in the book).  The book is fantastic, and Pink is able to articulate much of what most people know from intuition but don't put to practice.  I'll briefly underscore only a few of Pink's points that I found salient to me:

Pink argues compellingly that now is the time for "motivation 3.0", which is based on intrinsic nature in humans "to learn, to create, and to better the world" (225), to supplant reward vs. punishment-based motivation 2.0.  His arguments are all based on scientific studies, which he cites fully in his rather convincing attempt to prove that motivation 3.0 is a real phenomenon that the world just hasn't yet adjusted to.

Pink criticizes the "carrot and stick" model for motivating people to complete tasks in that it simply doesn't work.  While it may have some positive effect for more "algorithmic" tasks, it does nothing for "heuristic" work that requires creative and independent thought (27ff.).  Unfortunately, much of what we do in education is driven by algorithm (e.g. excessive lecturing, needless homework, standardized testing, etc.).

To break from this model, Pink underscores the role that autonomy plays in creating the intrinsic motivation that drives people both to be productive in a given task and to feel fulfilled in their work (83ff.).  He then offers several examples of the "results-only work environment" (ROWE), in which companies have given employees "FedEx" Days (e.g. Atlassian; cf. p. 91) and "20% time" (e.g. Google; cf. p. 94) to use for whatever creative projects they wish to work on, and the results have spoken volumes.

Ch. 6 discusses purpose and the "most underused word in the modern workplace: Why" (137).  I wholeheartedly agree that we don't often enough discuss the "whys" of what we do.  Failing to do so, I fear, can prevent the formation of a strong community, when the goals of a given project aren't immediately clear to those asked to support it.

While considering these ideas, I've been trying to think of ways to implement more 3.0 strategies in education.  My focus right now isn't in the classroom, however, but with faculty ourselves, given that it's very difficult for me to believe we can continue to be strong teachers if we're not doing regular PD.  We're too often busied with administrative tasks (albeit many of which are self-imposed) that we don't have a chance to explore, create, and stay "fresh".  Consequently, even potentially exciting PD work can seem like drudgery for some, rather than creating a sense of "flow" (a somewhat opaque "Zen" concept discussed on pp. 114ff.).

Based on these points, I've listed some ideas I've been churning:

• I'm interested in giving a "flow test" (153-4) or doing an "autonomy audit" (166-7) for both faculty and students.  I will be heading the Student Workload Committee at our school next year and will certainly incorporate some of these ideas.

• I'm thinking about ways to give faculty a periodic "FedEx" day to use as they please.  How would this look?  Is it even practical?  It's important, to my mind, to give faculty as much autonomy and freedom as we would like to give to our students.

• How could faculty then use "FedEx" days inside the classroom while simultaneously supporting their curriculum?  Cf. Mike Jackson's blog post on his own thoughts for giving students more autonomy.

• How can we restructure our current "team" models to give faculty more autonomy in what they do in their classes?

• Finally, we need to have more "why" conversations to foster community. They need to happen frequently and in small groups, where people can ask questions and feel open in voicing their opinions, even if dissenting.  The lack of teacher collaboration is well known (cf. this article from the Atlantic) and needs to be addressed.

I have more questions than answers right now, but I'm also optimistic that we have the opportunity on the horizon to do some interesting things.  I'd love to hear other reactions from those who have read Drive.  Alternatively, I welcome suggestions for other books.  Find me at @mosspike on Twitter to start a conversation.