The 21st Century Principal: digital disruption

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Recipe for Being Disruptive in Education by Questioning Everything

"What today's disruptive world requires are everyday Gallileos, who ask their own versions of: What if our assumptions are wrong? How would that change how we think and what we do?" Bill Jensen, Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic

"We are in the midst of a massively disruptive era, where most every system or rule for how we do things has been, and will continue to be, up for grabs," writes Bill Jensen in his book Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic. This same era is bringing massive disruptions to they way we do public schools too. According to Jensen, in this constantly disruptive age we live in, we have three choices basically:

We can be extremely proactive. This means we ask the questions no one else is asking or willing to ask. These are the inventors and entrepreneurs who will be the causes of the next wave of what Jensen calls "innovative disruptions."
We can be mainstream proactive. People who do this actively question most every "system, structure, and rule" placed before them. They choose the ones they will ignore. According to Jensen, they work around or change their lives according to these that they ignore.
We can be reactive. These are the people who accept most everything handed to them. According to Jensen, they "hold on for dear life, waiting for the personal disruptions to subside."

As an institution, I can't help but wonder whether the education bureaucracy values those who are reactive rather than those who are extremely proactive when it comes to disruption or anything else. In 24 years of education, I have learned that the education bureaucracy does not like individuals who ask questions or individuals who disagree with "the program." Jensen uses the analogy of Galileo, who questioned the current geocentric system, but paid dearly for it. His questioning of current beliefs cost him his freedom. There's something in bureaucratic institutions like public education that abhors questions and that moves to stifle them.

But according to Jensen, if we really want to be ahead of the disruptions, then questioning we must do. He suggests that this questioning begins with ourselves. "In a world of constant disruption," he writes, "if you can't examine yourself on a regular basis and come to radically new conclusions about your role and what value you add and your strengths and weaknesses, it will be extremely difficult for you to examine all the status quo rules and structures that surround you." We must engage in this constant self-examination to be proactive in a disruptive world. We must maintain a "healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo" if we are going to be proactively disruptive as well. We must ask tough questions.

In today's world, with all the education "reforms" swirling about us, there is ample opportunity to ask tough questions. We can't accept every new set of standards, new technology implementation plan, or new instructional fad without question. I can't help but wonder that perhaps our education system got into its current state because of a fundamental unwillingness to ask tough questions. What we need to do as 21st century educators and school leaders is to "Question Everything" as Jensen calls it. Nothing is immune and nothing is off-limits for questions. According to Jensen, the following are more true today than ever:

"Solutions to today's most wicked problems and biggest opportunities will come from asking the questions no one else is asking."
"You can only ask the questions worthy of pursuing if you're willing to also question your own deeply held assumptions."
"Everything is up for grabs. Respect the people involved...Question everything else."

We can only tackle our most challenging problems in education right now by asking the questions no one else is asking. For example, the questioning of the effectiveness of the Common Core Standards, our obsession with standardized testing, and many of the other reforms on the table is not heresy. It is as it should be. These reforms need to continually be subjected to hard and continual questioning. Too often, the education bureaucracy has chased these kinds of policies, only to find out years later, they did not work as intended, because no one continually asked the tough questions.

We live in a disruptive age in education, and the bureaucracy that surrounds us as educators is working in overtime to try stifle questioning and examination. That is one thing our education system has done extremely well. But, if our public system of education is to survive, it must embrace those asking the tough questions rather than dismissing them. It must realize that no questions are off-limits.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Adopting a Digital Disruptor Mindset to Transform Education

“When people adopt technology, they do old things in new ways. When people internalize technology, they find new things to do.” James McQuivey, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation

When it comes to engaging in innovation with technology, the mindset we take toward technology is extremely important. We can either take a "technology adopter" mindset or we can take a "digital disruptor" mindset. As James McQuivey states in his book, Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation, "Digital disruptors think about opportunity differently." To the technology adopter it's always about the technology. How can I use the technology to help me do the things I currently do better? In contrast, a person with a "digital disruptor" mindset sees the technology as the means to engage in entirely new and different possibilities. Which leads me to ask the question: Which mindset predominately drives technology policy in your school or district? Is it a "technology adopter" mindset or a "Digital Disruptor" mindset?

In case you're wondering, here's some characteristics of each.

Educators with the "technology adopter" mindset:

Immediately view a new technological device as a means to do what they have been doing, better. This type of thinking limits the view of technology as only being able to enable teaching and learning as we have been doing it under a 20th century, industrial-age school model. Some examples of this kind of thinking is using e-texts to simply replace physical textbooks. There is no change in pedagogy, just a change in how the information is delivered. Another example of this thinking would be viewing the computer as simply a more efficient means to deliver a multiple-choice test. The power of digital lies in its ability to complete reinvent assessment, not perpetuate the old.
See technology’s potential limited by current practice. In other words, technology adopter-educators see only their current teaching practice and are not open to any other. "It's worked for hundreds of years, so why change?" is the attitude. Technology then becomes the means to deli ver what is seen as time-honored traditional forms of teaching and learning, such as lecture or heavy use of textbooks. Technology will never be used innovatively when educators limit it's potential to their current understanding of educational practice.

The opposite to the "technology adopter" mindset is the "digital disruptor" mindset. Those in education who adopt this mindset become:

Educators who imagine new ways of doing things. Armed with new technology, they use the capabilities of those technologies to reinvent teaching and learning. These educators have been trying to do that with new online learning environments, new instructional models such as PBL and maker-based classrooms. This mindset views technology as a way to completely reinvent how we teach kids. For example, we don't just purchase e-reader devices and e-books. We ask questions that leading the use of these to transform our instruction and student learning.
Educators who see the unlimited potential of technology to disrupt current education practice. Education is a system that is stubborn and resists efforts of transformation. That's why seeing technology's potential as a "disruptive" influence is often times viewed as a negative. Cell phone and social media bans are good examples of that. Yet, if we adopt the view of technology as and opportunity to disrupt, to turn upside-down what we do in schools, we have the potential to transform education into a system that meets the needs of every child.
Educators open-minded and willing to let go of the old when it fails. This is a tough one for many in and outside of education. It's as if for every step forward in reforming education, we move three steps backward because of a nostalgic view many hold toward their own schools of the past. They brag about how schools in the 30s and 40s, even 50s did so well, yet forget that dropping out of school was a legitimate career path then, and schools could, and did, discard kids as defective raw materials when they didn't conform. Those schools in the past did do a good job for some, but aren't sufficient in an age where the expectation is that all kids learn. With the digital disruptor mindset, nothing is held sacred when it comes to transforming education.

We can choose the mindset with which we approach technology and its potential. The mindset we choose will determine whether we engage in transforming our schools or whether we simply continue to tweak an outdated education system. We can choose the mindset of a technology adopter, which means we continue to look for ways to enhance an obsolete, 20th century model of education, or we can choose the mindset of a digital disruptor. The digital disruptor mindset means we employ the technology to engage new opportunities for reinventing both teaching and learning.