What if we ask more questions?: 2014 Reflections

Over the course of the last year, I've changed the approach with which I participate in conferences, thanks in part to a number of amazing conference experiences (e.g., FUSE14) and a formative conversation I had with +Karl Lindgren-Streicher and +Kristen Swanson at #cue14 last spring (Karl has also written on the conversation). In brief, we talked at length about how we want to make our conference experiences more conversational, given the amazing number of educational minds that they always collect, and wondered how we could create and/or participate in more discussion-based opportunities that give us the chance to think deeply about education.

There is power in "we"... what can we do to make things better? #WhatIfVegas the world needs more change agents pic.twitter.com/o3klqp4FnX
— Devin C. Hughes (@DevinCHughes) December 20, 2014

The What If...? conference model is one such opportunity, and so I was excited to learn a few months ago that one of these events, What If...? Las Vegas, would be coming to Las Vegas over the holiday break, when I would be home visiting my family. What If...? conferences work by inviting a number of "Questioneers" to give 8-minute presentations around a central question that's typically radical and challenging with the goal of inspiring change agents. After every 3 questions, conference participants break out in to small group sessions, where we discuss the questions in more detail and work on "action plan" steps based on them.

#sketchnotes for our action plan on using stories to build community. #WhatIfVegas #dtk12chat #empathy pic.twitter.com/3iEOmL3sba
— Moss Pike (@mosspike) December 19, 2014

With a welcome diversity of questions and participants, What If...? Las Vegas provided the perfect forum to think through some of the ideas I've been churning in my head this year. I'll outline just a few of the excellent questions below:

• For me, 2014 has been the year of innovation, in which I've been eager to put action behind the ideas I've been thinking on. Ebele Mogo asked the question "What if the only limits were the limits of our imagination?", focusing on disruptive criticism, which she argued we should be doing "by creation but first by confronting." I love the way she framed criticism not as something negative and to be avoided, but rather as a natural part of the innovation process that critically relies on the power of imagination and creation. By engaging with all prior creation in this way, we can all be artists, regardless of the particular subject that we study. This is the essential component of the "Yes, and..." culture that I'm so invested in creating within our community.

“Don’t be afraid to confront like an artist. Criticize by creating…but first by confronting.” @ebyral #WhatIfVegas #dtk12chat
— Moss Pike (@mosspike) December 19, 2014



• Over the summer, I read Steven Johnson's excellent Future Perfect on the rise of the distributed network, which has been one of the more transformative ideas I've learned in quite some time. Without going into too much detail here, I'm in agreement with Johnson, Aaron Dignan (cf. his fantastic 99u talk on thinking like a startup), and others that the "flat" org model that many startups are using belong in education. 

Melanie Sanchez wondered "What if the middle man should not be eliminated?", based on her experience translating between specialists and non-specialists. She provided a compelling argument for the need of facilitators or "middlemen", and so I'm still thinking about what role such facilitators can play within a distributed network. In this type of network, it seems to me that, unlike the centralized networks with facilitators only at network nodes, everyone in a distributed network should view themselves in this middleman role. And in education, I think this means that all teachers should see themselves as facilitators, bridging the gap between content and skills on the one hand and students on the other.

Without consent you can't have co-creativity. Maybe teachers should be facilitators, not the people in charge of the goals. #WhatIfVegas
— Ann Diab (@AnnDiab) December 19, 2014 



• In the last quarter of the year, I've found myself deeply interest in urban design and the "New Urbanism" movement, which argues for more pedestrian-friendly urban and social architecture and against the suburb or "exurb" model that grew after World War II in the United States (cf. Happy City and The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City for some excellent reading on the ideas). Like the distributed network, I think there are parallels to be found between New Urbanism and school design, but the idea is still just taking shape in my head.

Rachel Aliana Jaffe asked "What if we could design the future experience of the city using place-specific digital applications?" and explored what the future of the internet could look like as a tool for collaboration and socializing. As I continue to think about the ways that New Urbanist architecture applies to schools, I am reminded to consider the futurist perspectives that Rachel mentioned as a necessary part of this architecture, in that digital technologies should have a central role in adding a social purpose to what we do.

It's the mandated #whatifvegas selfie! @mosspike @rachelajaffe pic.twitter.com/fG5eUbZSsF
— Melissa Marie Strong (@DeLibrosCorazon) December 20, 2014

• Overall, my biggest takeaway from the calendar year is the power of questions to spark storytelling. But there's often an awkward contradiction between using stories to define us and being able to change or let them go altogether so that we're not bound to them. This is exactly what mindfulness can bring to education, and it's something I've been thinking about for quite some time now.

There were a number of questions anchored on storytelling, and I found Mark Laisure's question "What if you could spend your days really truly being you?" to be especially provocative. He made me think carefully about what I tell myself about myself and what I really believe about myself, namely what it means to be authentically "me." This question is perhaps one of the more important questions worth reflecting on, as we continue to work on our professional growth, and I'm certain that I'll spend quite some time thinking through it.

—

With its focus on people and their stories and its setting in a revitalized part of Downtown Las Vegas, the What If...? conference experience was a huge success (especially while spending time with +Sara Boucher and +Melissa Strong). I now see that we don't ask open-ended questions, either to ourselves or to our students, and it's more clear to me than ever that sustainable learning is about the questions we learn to ask, rather than the answers. Questions are precisely what allows us to be designers of our own experiences, and I am looking forward to thinking through the questions above in greater details with a designer's mindset. There will be at least three more What If...? conferences coming to California next year, with one coming to the San Diego, Los Angeles, and Bay Areas, respectively, and I can't wait to go through this process again. Thanks to +Matt Murrie and Felicia Mae Rateliff for organizing and running the conference, and thanks to all the wonderful and inspiring participants!

What are your top 3 takeaway questions that you've learned this year? I'm very eager to know what others have to share so we can start taking actions toward answering our questions the right way and make some waves together.

Actions are little ripples. Creating many ripples over time makes waves. #changemakers #tribeofdoers #WhatIfVegas #BAM @tamcdonald
— Felicia Mae Rateliff (@feliciamaybe) December 20, 2014

Grading Participation?

Today, I had an unexpected and quite interesting conversation about grades, including how we evaluate participation, and so I wanted to record some ideas here for further discussion. In the past, while teaching both as a TA and in my first few years at the secondary level, I've always built a participation component into my overall schema. But, after reflecting on what participation means over the past year, I no longer include it. It's a big shift from how I used to approach grading, but I think it's for the best.

The current conception of grading is severely flawed, as more and more educators are realizing; but I just want to focus here on participation, in that it may help us to see this bigger and fuzzier picture more clearly. I'm particularly interested in this question, since it has a lot to do with developing EQ and non-cognitive skills in students, which is one of my major projects this year. With that, grading participation, as I see it, is flawed for developing emotional and social intelligence for a number of reasons:

• Grades are founded on the "carrot and stick" model that Pink has criticized so well in his discussion on motivation (cf. Drive pp. 32-57). I've come to believe that we should never force kids to participate in class, but rather create the sorts of environments that encourage and welcome their participation in their own individual ways. It's thus our responsibility as educators to facilitate classroom participation, not our kids'. As such, they shouldn't be penalized for our own failures.
• Based on our different levels of "social comfort" within classrooms, participation cannot be evaluated evenly and fairly within a given group. How do we evaluate the more talkative students beside those who aren't as comfortable or confident voicing their opinions? How can we take into account different levels of brain development and self control? Too often, I fear, we attribute participation grades to personalities more than anything else.
• As far as I know, participation can't be easily defined and therefore measured. Is there such a thing as a "rubric" for participation, especially within "one size fits all" model? How do we give effective feedback for participation that accurately reflects an understanding of the brain?
• Most critically of all, perhaps, participation is often used as a tool to "fudge" grades, arbitrarily moving some kids up or down a grade level. Is it fair that one student with an 89.7% should get an "A-", while another a "B+" based solely on participation? Shouldn't an 89.7% that's fairly earned equal another 89.7% (whatever that even means!)? Opacity in grades just isn't fair.

Ultimately, this is a discussion about ego. It's not that egos are inherently bad, per se, but when we let them control us, as in this particular case, we build an expectation for participation, which we use grades to enforce. Within the traditional framework, then, assigning a grade to participation is more about us than about our students. But if we can let go of these expectations and let the kids be themselves, while we work to design engaging environments for them, we can develop EQ without the need for a carrot or a stick. In other words, it's about controlling our ego and expectation by building empathy, or an understanding of our classroom experience from our students' individual perspectives. It's not easy, but I think it's the right thing to do.

I'll admit that I'm heavily biased, so I welcome comments or other ideas below or on Twitter. What do you think about participation? Why or why not do you believe in using it to evaluate students? Can we make it work, or is it inherently flawed? What have I missed?

Cultivating a Gratitude Practice

Latin IA Gratitude Notes

Following the CUE Manhattan Beach Rock Star camp, friend and colleague +Karl Lindgren-Streicher reflected on the incredible experience, sharing his gratitude with a number of influential people who have helped him along his journey. It's a great post, and now that I have spent the summer reflecting about many of the changes sweeping through our school and my role within them, I want to follow suit and start developing a regular gratitude practice of my own, beginning with how I ended up where I am today.

Though I always had an interest in technology and Google in particular, I never really pushed the envelope as far as I could in my current job and wasn't even aware of the possibilities that tech offered. Then, in the fall of 2012 our school went GAFE, and so I decided to attend a Google Summit in Boulder, CO in August to see what others have been doing with Google, working under the assumption that I was farther along than I really was.

It was the first educational conference I attended, and needless to say, I was stunned by the creativity that people were bringing to the table, and the things they were doing with their students opened my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking about teaching (especially as I look back on my notes from the summit). That's when I first met +Wendy Gorton, +Molly Schroeder, and +Mark Wagner. They introduced me to the professional world of educational technology and inspired me to get out of my comfort zone by trying new things. And Wendy in particular introduced me to the world of the Google Certified Teacher and the community that GCTs have created for themselves. I was hooked and wanted to be a part of it.

In looking back, though, I wasn't even on Twitter at the time of the Boulder summit! Thanks to what I learned there about the power of being connected, I soon got back on, after two previous failed attempts. It makes me smile to look back on my first Tweet:

Back on Twitter, after some time away.

— Moss Pike (@mosspike) October 1, 2012

It wasn't long before I stumbled onto #caedchat and started regularly participating in the weekly conversations, where I met countless other passionate educators who have since shaped my own thinking. That's where I first met Karl, and I also had the good fortune to start developing a relationship with the HBUSD crew, including +JR Ginex-Orinion, +Chris Long, +David Theriault, +Sean Ziebarth, among others like +Alice Keeler . These guys have helped me to see the value of sharing and leading by example through the interesting things they do seemingly every day.

With that momentum, I applied for the GTA in Mountain View in Dec. of 2012, though without luck. I applied again for Chicago in June of 2013, thanks to some inspiration offered by +Alice Chen, and this time luck was on my side. I had an amazing time in Chicago, thanks to the best community of educators I know and for whom I will always be grateful. They taught me the value of community and hammered home the power of the "Yes, and..." mindset. If I name one, I'd have to name them all.

It was in Chicago that I started to think about innovation and the role that design plays in education, and shortly thereafter, in the fall of 2013, I learned about design thinking and the #dtk12chat community devoted to its role in education. Through #dtk12chat, I met the Mount Vernon crew and a number of other regulars on Twitter who have had a major impact in how I now think about innovation and change. +Trey Boden, +Mary Cantwell, and +Dan Ryder, to only name a few, have made me realize that change first and foremost is about people, which has had a profound impact on how I now approach the teaching profession.

So many others have helped me along the way that it's impossible to thank them all. But these are some the folks who have been present a major turnposts in the evolution of my own thinking, and I'm grateful for the educational community that they have helped to create. Thanks go to Karl for inspiring me to write this post. I'll echo his call for others to consider who has helped them along their own paths and share it out.

—

A new school mission statement was just recently unveiled to our community, after a year of work building it. It goes well beyond traditional academic emphases, and I expect it to be a beacon for decades to come, and I'm quite proud to share it:

Harvard-Westlake strives to be
a diverse and inclusive community united by
the joyful pursuit of educational excellence,
living and learning with integrity,
and purpose beyond ourselves.

This year, I plan on cultivating a gratitude practice with my students. Once a week, we'll take about 10min to write down on a Post-It note something we're grateful for or share something good that happened in the week, and then we'll post it somewhere in the room for others to see (with or without names attached to the note). By doing this, I hope that we can create a more mindful classroom experience that underscores our new mission by actively engaging with gratitude and sharing it within our community. It should be a great year.

EduCon 2014 and Engagement

The Franklin Institute

The more conferences I go to, the less I find myself interested in discussions about specific tools. Instead, it's the new ideas that excite me, in that ideas have the power to outlast tools and make more of an impact on what we do in our classrooms. So, when I learned about EduCon in Philadelphia last December, a conference dedicated to innovation and building schools of the future around these ideas hosted by the rather impressive Science Leadership Academy, I immediately signed up.

EduCon is very similar to the EdCamp model, with "conversations" proposed by attendees, in place of invited speakers and vendor-driven content. I was pleasantly surprised at how little "tech talk" infiltrated the conversations. The sessions were all fantastic, as were the student hosts at SLA, who were impressive for their leadership and gratitude for being at the school. The Twitter buzz in advance of EduCon was as energized as I've ever seen, which was complemented by the conversations that were had while at the conference. All in all, I hope to make EduCon a regular part of my conference rotation, and I'd love to host a conversation of my own someday soon.

Love Park

In particular, I was drawn to a conversation on design thinking, run by +Trey Boden, James Campbell, TJ Edwards, and Jenny Novoselsky from the Mount Vernon Institute, one on mindfulness in education with Sarah Macdonald and Lydia Maier, and another on positive psychology, given by Alexa Dunn and her graduate students. Over the past year, I've found my own thinking to be heavily influenced by design thinking and mindfulness, and so I was eager to discuss these ideas with other educators in the open "unconference" forum at EduCon. They didn't disappoint (cf. my conference notes).

But there was so much more happening at the conference that I had the good fortune to participate in: David Jakes and Christian Long's inspiring session "Wonder, By Design" served as a call to action for the importance of wonder and creativity in schools, and Carey Pohanka introduced me to the concept of the "gemba" (cf. Deborah Adler's TED Talk) in her session "Going to the Gemba," which is the Japanese word meaning the "real place." Going to the gemba is basically making a direct observation of the process as it is happening, and fits in quite well with the empathy component of design thinking.

As I participated in what was one of the highest sustained levels of conference engagement I've seen (look back at the #educon Tweets and those that continue to come in), I started to think about what engagement really is. I've used the term quite often but never really though about what it is and how we measure it, until we had conversations about it at EduCon.

A few weeks ago, +Krista Moroder mentioned Philip Schlechty's book Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work in the ISTE Young Educator podcast #3, in which Schlechty defines engagement and argues convincingly that designing for engagement (rather than planning for outcomes) should be a top priority in schools. Without true engagement, in his hierarchy, students become compliant or worse (cf. the "Levels of Engagement"), and the ingredients necessary for intrinsic motivation to learn something that Daniel Pink discusses in Drive, namely autonomy, mastery, and purpose, won't be found.

With this in mind, the idea of engagement and the importance of designing learning environments to support it has become my new focus. Engagement encompasses the design thinking process, mindfulness, and everything else I've been working toward, I think, and it has direct application to both students and teachers. To my mind, it makes more sense to me than the often-used terms "student-centered" and "21st century," and it doesn't need to involve anything special (i.e., no tech guarantees engagement, nor does IdeaPaint, etc.). I intend on spending the spring and summer thinking about designing more engaging environments that encourage creativity and innovation for both faculty and students, and I'm very eager to hear what others think about engagement and how it's approached at your schools. #HMW design for more engagement?

Top #EdBlogs2013 Posts

2013 was a productive year that saw quite a bit of professional development and new thinking, highlighted by traveling, where I made new colleagues, and attending the Google Teacher Academy in Chicago. In reflecting on this year, +Eric Saibel has inspired colleagues who blog to share their most influential posts of 2013 for the #EdBlogs2013 series he's collecting, and I'm honored to participate (read his own post here). Taking a page from +David Theriault, who reworked the organization of the #EdBlog2013 idea (cf. his fantastic #EdBlogs2013 post), I'll reflect on 2013 thematically, organizing my post around some of the ideas that I've been interested in this year. And I'll keep the summaries of each post, so be sure to give them the love they deserve.

Innovation and Mindfulness

I've been very interested in creativity and innovation, along with the part that mindfulness plays, thanks to my PLN. I now believe that creativity is one of the most important skills that we should be teaching (alongside collaboration and empathy), and the following posts are just of the few of a growing body of literature that has helped me to think this way.

• Daniel Goleman, whose book Focus I enjoyed, has a couple of posts shared in LinkedIn on mindfulness and creativity that I enjoyed reading: Three Must-Haves for Team Creativity and Mindfulness: When Focus Means Single-Tasking.

New Pioneers blog

• Collisions of Creativity from the magazine Mindful is a good piece on the relationship between mindfulness and creativity.

• Lee-Anne Gray (@DrLeeAnneG) wrote a great post on the need for mindfulness in education as a source of innovation titled Why Mindfulness is Needed For Education Innovation.

• I love the idea of starting a "life hacker" club build around the modern world, as outlined in Start a Life Hacker Club at Your School by Adam Renfro in the +Getting Smart blog.

• Stephanie Harrison's (@cultivace) This will make you happier at work is a great post on bringing mindfulness into the workplace, offering several suggestions for doing so. Creating a mindful culture within the workplace is one of my long-term goals, assuming that, if teachers are generally more mindful and happy, we can also help students to be more mindful and happy.

• Finally, this academic year I began to realize the importance of the relationship between pedagogy and physical space and never fully appreciated it, until +Alice Keeler led a revelatory session at #edcampSFBay last August on the topic. The conversation was inspiring, and +Kevin Ashworth followed it up with his own room redesign in a 2-part blog post on his work (Part 1 | Part 2). We're undertaking our own room redesigns of History, Visual Arts, and World Languages classrooms, and Kevin's work will serve as a source of inspiration for us to craft true collaborative space for our students in a mindful manner.

Design Thinking

Mindfulness and design thinking are very similar in a number of ways; to my mind, mindfulness is an internal application of the external principles of design thinking, and they're both critically dependent on problem definition and system awareness. In designing new forms of pedagogy, especially around technology, I've tried to keep a number of basic principles in mind, and the following posts.

• Last winter/spring's #etmooc was the first digital experience that opened me up to the value of taking risks and the importance of building a PLN. In particular, +Christina Hendricks wrote a post Etmooc: Rhizomatic Learning In Philosophy Courses on the concept of "rhizomatic learning." which was one of the first blog posts I read that challenged the way I thought about learning and pedagogy.

Creative Confidence

• Eric Saibel wrote a great piece The Art of Coaching: Or, Disrupting the Echo Chamber that has helped to give me a framework to apply design thinking at our school, particularly the concept of the disruption and the "echo chamber," or the repetitiveness of thinking that we can find ourselves stuck in as a group that too often prevents us from identifying the core of a problem.

• Grant Wiggins, in his post Beyond teacher egocentrism: design thinking, has some great thoughts on what design thinking means in education, and he share some of the same ideas I have about the ways that the ego gets in the way of creating this type of environment.

• In an important discussion about transparency in education, Brad Ovenell-Carter (@Braddo) asks the question Can a radical transparency replace grading?. It's short but asks a great question that opens up discussion of standards-based grading and general openness, of which we still have far too little.

• Though not published in 2013, Cathy Davidson's (@CathyNDavidson) idea of crowdsourced grading in How to Crowdsource Grading grabbed my attention. I haven't yet put this idea to use in this form, but I love the approach to empowering students in this way.

Gamification

2013 was the year of gamification for me. I got to know the concept in the spring, though through some ideas of the summer, and now I'm working toward creating a gamified Latin IA course around our new 1:1 BYOL program. Fortunately, a number of excellent blog posts have helped me with the work.

• Tanya Sasser's (@TanyaSasser) post 3 Things I Wish Everyone Knew about Gamification corrects some common misconceptions about the role of game-based learning and gamification in education.

playwaresrudios.com

• +Rory Newcomb has a fantastic blog series on gamification, starting with Gamification 101: Why Gamify? Part I. It's a minefield of great ideas for anyone interested in game-based learning.

• +Jennifer Roberts has some helpful words of advice on the importance of good game design  in her post Broken Games.

• And last but certainly not least, IDEO founders Tom and David Kelley have a great post on the real-world value that games have for learning with How Daydreams and Videogames Can Make Us Confident In Real Life (Yes).

Quisquiliae

I'll close with some random yet influential posts on professional development, the MOOC, language study and the humanities in general.

• +David Theriault's The Magnificent 60: Introducing Your #gtachi Participants is brilliant for so many reasons, mostly because it paints such a colorful picture of all the amazing people who participated in the #gtachi last July.

• At the beginning of last summer, +Jennifer Peyrot shared her Summer Learning Fun on her blog, which helped me to rethink how I approach the summer. In particular, it's a good idea to plan out some activities to ensure a fairly high level of productivity, lest it go by too quickly.

• In August, I had the opportunity to help +Nancy Minicozzi organize and run the PlaydateLA conference. Her reflections in Playdate L.A. capture the excitement I also felt for providing PD to over 100 people, rather than receiving it at an event. It was such a positive experience that the PlaydateLA team is already looking forward to doing it again next August.

• If you're not yet a regular reader of the digital journal Hybrid Pedagogy, run in part by +Jesse Stommel, I highly recommend having a look. His post The March of the MOOCs: Monstrous Open Online Courses, along with the #moocmooc event last summer, helped me to see the larger possibilities of connectivism and constructivism that the MOOC can bring to education.

• Language teachers are always concerned with promoting language programs, especially as STEM disciplines grow in popularity. +Dana Ariss wrote a great post Learning Languages: Who Says You Can't? that underscores the value that language study has for resilience and taking control of learning. I'm now interested in promoting an "Hour of Language" in a way similar to December's Hour of Code event.

• Along with the diminishing interest in language study, the Humanities have also been suffering (cf. what's happening at the university level). Ben Stern understands Why Humanities Still Matter In 2013, however, and argues a strong case for the importance of the Humanities in understanding the world we interact with.

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That wraps up my 2013, more or less. In addition to blogs, I've also been reading a fair number of books that have all shaped my thinking to a large degree, and I've share some thoughts here on a few of them. But as we begin 2014 (and now that my coding streak has finished!), I plan on carving time to read more blogs, and I'll be looking forward to the ideas that develop from them in this year.

Change and the Giving up the Ego

endlessorigami.com

Someone recently mentioned to me that "change requires giving something up." At the time, I wasn't sure how much I believed it, but after thinking about it for a week, I do now. Depending on what kind of change is being proposed, there's a variety of answers to the question of what should be given up; but in more cases than not in education, based on what the conversations I've had, it's the ego that's at the center of this discussion.

Early in graduate school, I was giving a paper at a conference, with Joshua Katz, a brilliant Classicist and Indo-Europeanist from Princeton, in attendance. Afterward, we chatted about it, and he told me that he liked the paper right before he asked me, "Do you believe it?" I was shocked at first, but I quickly realized that he wasn't being critical. Instead, Katz was telling me indirectly that research wasn't always about being right; rather, it's about the exploration of ideas and the fact that it's not necessary to believe in an idea 100%, before sharing it.

Later, I had the great fortune to work with Calvert Watkins, who also reinforced this way of doing research. Despite being one of the most prolific and greatly respected Indo-European linguists in the field, he openly encouraged colleagues to criticize his work, with the hope that our understanding would only grow. He never put his ego before the ideas.


Team Geek and and the Ego

"If you spend all your time working alone, you're increasing the risk of failure and cheating your potential for growth" (Team Geek 5).

Thanks to Brian Fitzpatrick's great presentation at GTACHI about the principles that govern how software teams work well together, I've picked up his book Team Geek (co-authored with Ben Collins-Sussman). It's about good leadership practices, including the role that the ego plays in being a leader, namely, its destructive power (Team Geek 66-67). Reading through Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman's experience with ego, I'm more certain than ever that the changes that need to happen to build stronger learning environments in our schools requires us to give up our egos, as Katz and Watkins taught me.

During some recent professional development work, in which we were talking about the power of a backchannel, some complaints were offered about the students' ability to focus on the teacher and the lecture, if their attention was directed to the backchannel. Basically, I heard several questions of the sort "If students are not listening to me, then how can they be learning?", which sheds much light on the lecture-centered culture that continues to pervade education.

I can't help but interpret this attitude as driven by ego that stands in the way of change toward a more student-centered structure. As Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman argue, ego gets in the way of the kind of trust that gives a team (or students, in this case) a sense of accountability and ownership of their work. I fully agree and will add two other points that I blame on ego:

• A lack of trust within a team engenders a fear of failure, when then creates a closed community, rather than an open environment, where team members feel welcome to share ideas.
• Egos also create defensive cultures, where change and new ideas are too frequently met with judgment and second-guessing, instead of curiosity and enthusiasm. Cf. Daniel Pink's concept of "buoyancy" (discussed here) and responding to ideas with "Yes and...", rather than "No" or "But..." (To Sell 193).

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, discusses the "cognitive ease" (59) that dulls our otherwise rational logic. When our minds are strained, we are prone to suspicion and are less intuitive and creative (59), so, based on this fact, systematically being on the defensive during conversations and meetings prevents us from being innovative by finding new and creative ways to solve our problems.

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I learned from Katz, Watkins, and several others, including, above all, my advisor, Brent Vine, that it's ok to be wrong, and, moreover, that it's important to take ownership of failure. It's the attempt and the process that's more important for learning than the results. In many way, then, my experience in graduate school can be seen as a sort of extended #20time project (however tortuous!), since it teaches that exploration and failure go together. Of course, that kind of positive experience depends critically on the quality of the mentoring. I was fortunate to have mentors who relished in the role, and they have set bar for my own expectations in dealing with colleagues and students.

With that, I'm looking forward to giving up any ego and any expectation of control this year. I hope to participate in creating the type of environment where we work together, feeling comfortable and even excited to try new things, and one one that believes "if you're not failing now and then, you're not being innovative enough or taking enough risks" (Team Geek 18).

What are you giving up and why?

Caveat Venditor: Pink's To Sell Is Human

I loved Daniel Pink's Drive and found it extremely relevant to many of problems confronting education (cf. some of my thoughts on it), so when +Chris Long suggested his newest book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others for a #CAedchat summer read, I eagerly jumped right on it.

In To Sell, Pink addresses the techniques that effective salesmen use, after making a compelling case that the majority of us today, especially those in academia, are indeed salesmen. Effective "sales" (in all senses of the word; I'll use it here very loosely) must incorporate attunement, buoyancy, and clarity, Pink argues, and I found his discussions around these three principles illuminating for the way we deal with each other when we're exchanging ideas and opinions.

Briefly, attunement is what's necessary to be a good listener, which I think is right up at the top of the list of valuable leadership skills to have. Additionally, the ability to take the perspective of all involved sides of a given exchange has shown to be more valuable than simply showing empathy (73). To be "buoyant" is, in part, to ask questions to make people think about an idea, rather than make statements, since questions can generate more intrinsic motivation for an idea (103). And clarity involves finding new problems, not solving old ones, and curating our information, not just accessing it (132).

Some other quick notes of interest with regard to teaching that caught my attention:

• When making a sales pitch, selling an experience is often more effective than the promise of material items (137).
• Making a partner look good (don't argue!), so that one doesn't feel the other is taking an advantage (198).
• The best sales are both "personal and purposeful" (210).

All of these features belong in the classroom: We should be selling the experience of education to students, rather than product like grades and stickers, and we should make them feel good about their experiences by allowing them to do interesting things with their learning (e.g. project-based learning, 20% time, etc.). Without personal investment and a clear purpose in learning, our "sales pitches", however well-intentioned, aren't likely to find as much success as we'd like.

Just as importantly, Pink's concepts of sales deserve application to administration and leadership. Next fall, I'm going to assume a joint TIS role with a few other colleagues, when we begin our 1:1 laptop program, and with To Sell in mind, I'm looking forward to paying closer attention to various behaviors in meetings, like perspective, mimicry (75ff.), positive emotions (108), optimism (111), and the different kinds of "pitches" (161ff.) that we use sell our ideas to others. With a little more attunement, buoyancy, and clarity, I'm confident we'll be better equipped to handle the problems we'll certainly face.

First and foremost, I'm going to make it a goal to be a better listener to both colleagues and students in all my dealings with them, with the hopes that we can make our interactions more personal. I'm also going to test out introducing important ideas by asking questions, while striving to make the purpose behind them clear, and I will try to teach my students how to ask better questions and find better problems to solve. I'm going to try to say "yes and..." with positivity (193) as much as possible, rather than "yes, but..." or even "no".

We'll have much more to say on To Sell later this summer in the #CAedchat book club discussion of it, which everyone is welcome to join.

Thoughts on Interest-Based Learning

Our second session assignments for the MIT Medial Labs Learning Creative Learning MOOC is to, in part, read through some of +Joichi Ito's blog posts on learning and respond with our own thoughts about what we found most surprising or interesting, and offer disagreements or questions, should we have any.  Moreover, we're challenged to keep it short, so I'll refrain from delving more deeply into the ideas below.

The first thing that comes to my mind in Ito's discussions of "Formal vs. informal education" and "Reading the dictionary" is the debate between content vs. creation that I've been thinking about for a while (cf. a recent blog post on the question).  The formal system that the majority of schools currently work with certainly needs adjustment, but I don't think that the system alone is to be blamed for its inability to engage interest-driven students, namely, the students who enjoy reading the dictionary.  We've got to adapt and find new and interesting ways to motivate them.  When Ito wonders "how many people have personalities or interests that aren't really that suited for formal education, at least in its current form", I first read this sentence as a reference to teachers, rather than students.

I've recently picked up Susan Cain's Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking to help me to work toward an understanding of how introverted learners will be able to adapt in a more open, student-centered classroom (N.B.: that's not the focus of the book, but rather a question I have).  If we were to radically modify our system to the purely informal model, would we exclude all the learners who thrive in the formal, structured system (e.g. Ito's sister), like many of the introverts at our school?  Is there a proper balance between the two extremes, and if so, what does that classroom look like?

I enjoyed "Dubai and learning about the unknowable", partly because I'm currently reading Watts' Way of Zen, and partly because I've tried to build mindfulness and self-reflection into my daily routine, not only in teaching but in everything that I do.  In fact, I had a chat with a colleague about the need for us to continually reflect on why we do what we do with technology throughout the process of integration.  Given how "traditional" and content-based our school is, leaving us with little time to reflect back on everything we do in a given academic year, it's the perfect place to learn to "meditate" on these questions.  Once we're comfortable knowing that we don't know all the answers and definitions of the pedagogical "buzzwords" that we've been throwing around lately, we can relax and start moving forward.