While sitting in on a seminar on Mental Toughness as a teachable, as well as genetic, attribute, I came across the work of Dutch researcher Nico Van Yperen. Being mentally tough means that we take control of our futures, we enjoy challenges as opportunities rather than threats, and we have deep involvement in meeting our own, personal goals. But if you're a leader, your actions can also be responsible for helping or hindering others' capacity to have mental toughness:
Van Yperen believes it is possible to influence achievement orientation. Generally, one's environment will shape these choices. For example, work settings with a compensation system that identifies and rewards individual performance will encourage a performance orientation.
One that rewards groups of people equitably encourages a mastery orientation.
Managers' comments drawing attention to the task encourage mastery. Comments comparing individuals encourage a performance orientation.
Managers who display their own pleasure when performing the same tasks as their people, encourage mastery. Those who don't, encourage a performance orientation.
Hard working, effective employees are a valuable asset we'd like to preserve. Helping them be satisfied in their work by encouraging a mastery achievement orientation is one way to do it.
Design Thinking father Tim Brown blogged a while ago this great pleading from some of Britain's best designers and design educators for Government and schools to heighten the importance of design, technology, design thinking and prototyping skills through the vehicle of engineering subjects such as design and technology. It's a great clip, with many great reasonings as to why making learning concrete makes so much sense.
However, as impatient as I ever am, it's not enough.
Design thinking - learning how to scope out and solve problems within seemingly vast areas of knowledge and experience - is something I believe belongs as a framework across the curriculum. It's as core a skill as literacy and numeracy, but a lot less well understood by teachers outside the design technology world. It needs the time, attention and thinking power of educators to be understood as a framework that contains so many of what we already know are powerful learning and teaching strategies for student improvement.
With NoTosh, I've been fortunate to foster and see the beginnings of this whole-school approach to design thinking in schools around the world, with our partners in the UK, US, Australia and the Far East. The Design Thinking School is taking hold in many areas, and challenging the status quo in some painful ways in others.
But challenging the status quo, that content cannot be covered unless a teacher or day-by-day curriculum is 'delivering' it, is what we're all about. And, school by school, that sea change - design thinking throughout the school, not just in the design technology class - is happening.
In early February I presented, in French, a 90 minute story about how design thinking and the educational worlds of formative assessment, school building, curriculum and assessment strategy are all bound together.
I wanted to show to the audience at Clair 2012 in New Brunswick, Canada, what can happen when these apparently unrelated worlds of technology startups, product design and formal education are bound together by leaders with foresight and an understanding of the detail and complexity of learning, amazing learning opportunities can happen.
It was a joy to speak about the complexity of learning and teaching, with the time and audience who got it - it was, after all, New Brunswick teachers that taught me how to really teach through their French immersion, project-led pedagogy.
It's the first time I've ever had a standing ovation for a talk, especially one that was 90 minutes and between opportunities for the audience to drink wine and eat cheese. I was taken aback by that. And even more humbled by the words from Stephen Downes, who also braved his fears of keynoting en français at the event:
I've had my criticisms of Ewan McIntosh in the past and I will no doubt have my criticisms of him in the future. But they will be a bit tempered from now on, I think. Ewan McIntosh weaved what can only be called magic at the conference I attended at Clair 2012, in northern New Brunswick. It wasn't simply because his French is easier to follow than his English ;) - he wove a tapestry of ideas together talking about what it is that will draw out students, interest them, engage them, and get them to be more than just followers of orders. It was one of the best presentations I've even seen - visually beautiful, low-keyed, personal and engaging. He has clearly learned a lot from his work with TED, but also, with 90 minutes to work with, the talk was never rush, never forced, and, in the end, exactly the right length. He received a standing ovation at the end, very much (to my observation) a rarity at education conferences. Well deserved.
I think part of it was to do with speaking French, but not because I was making an effort to speak it or anything, more that as a result of speaking my second language in an unfamiliar context I took extra care, and extra time from the normal 45 minute keynote sprint, to weave the complexities of our learning world in a simple way.
It was great fun, and I'm grateful to Roberto Gauvin, the Principal teacher at Clair's learning centre, for the opportunity to come through the metre-thick snow and -30˚C freeze to work alongside such a dedicated group of franco-canadian educators.
You can download a copy of the talk from the Clair 2012 website (right click/control click and select "Save As..."). Better still, you can see the actions stemming from it and other talks when you dip into the manifesto for change, the DeCLAIRation, a pragmatic document for change based on what we all heard from the four speakers and our many corridor conversations.
How To Start An Education Revolution
Part of the manifesto is an ongoing Revolutionary Google Doc, developed in a furiously productive 50 minute BarCamp session that I led on Starting A Revolution. I've been reading Gene Sharpe's work on real, political revolutions, and wanted to produce a live, step-by-step guide to education revolution, much along the same lines:
This growing document is designed by 100 educators who gave up a Saturday morning in a gym in Clair, to provide links to research that disprove the key naysayer arguments for curricular, assessment and pedagogical change in the classroom. Well, it's a dream document for a keynoter, even one with 90 minutes, because the Saturday morning exercise allowed us to revisit and question all those things we had heard from the keynoters through two days of conference, and back up our views with research and leading practice, rather than anecdotes.
It's open until March 11th for changes, and then we're going to use it to create change in the Francophone and, with some translation, the Anglophone worlds of education, by create a copy that can be sent to every politician and Principal we know.
RSA Opening Minds promotes innovative and integrated ways of thinking about teaching and learning. It helps students to develop the skills they need to be creative, resilient learners, citizens and employees of the 21st century by making its starting point not school subjects, but competences students require to find their place in society.
To help teachers and principals find out more about the curriculum, and how to get involved, the RSA are holding an event this March 3rd, covering off the key questions and offered a chance to see how a competence-based curriculum works in practice.
Kingsbridge Community College, Devon, will explain the competence framework and ethos of Opening Minds, how to develop and implement a curriculum and the outcomes and impacts it has had for one designated Training School.
Cardinal Heenan High School, Liverpool will explain why one school decided to apply to become an RSA Opening Minds accredited school, their experiences of developing a curriculum and how they have been supported by a Training School.
Whitley Academy, Coventry will deliver a practical session about how to develop and implement an Opening Minds curriculum. The session will cover top tips based on lessons learned and about the outcomes and impacts for the school, teachers and pupils.
Wood End Park School, Hillingdon, will share the experience of a primary school who are developing and delivering an Opening Minds curriculum and their plans for the future.
St John’s School, and Easton Royal Community Primary School, Marlborough will focus on the ways Opening Minds is being used to support pupils through the transition from primary to secondary school.
Oasis Academy, Enfield, reveal the challenges for developing Opening Minds and how can these be overcome to ensure schools deliver high quality teaching and learning.
You can find out about the benefits of action research and how the Opening Minds schools are harnessing these to share learning and best practice.
The RSA Academy and Capital City Academy will ask: how do you assess competence development and what are the challenges? Also hear how schools are working together to identify the most effective means of assessment.
The RSA Academy will also explain the Opening Minds curriculum and practice that the RSA Academy use at KS4 and you can find out about the Diploma they are developing.
Do you have a plan that you stick with, no matter what? Do you have a plan at all? Do you have a plan that you're prepared to give up totally when a student proposes something, anything, interesting? Are you patient, listening to what's going on, allowing yourself to be pulled, and slick enough (skilled enough?) to react and create something magical out of your box to make a lesson sing?
When we're working with our Design Thinking Schools the main challenge that comes up, at the beginning at least, is the desire of educators to forward plan to the extent that improvisations - or mistakes - can't be seized upon to create something much better than the plan the teacher had written, and probably stayed up until 11pm on Sunday night writing.
Stefon Harris explains in his TED Talk how this over reliance on the plan is, in jazz, a form of musical bullying. As someone who, in his early twenties, almost gave it all up to be a big band drummer, I know exactly what he means, and I know how it feels when 17 other musicians move their plan to accommodate for another's idea.
But I can also picture it in the classroom, where a "gift" is offered up by a students' question (or a student's lack of understanding) but isn't built upon by the teacher. Who or what are you going to allow to improvise and shift your plan today?
Ewan McIntosh is a teacher, speaker and investor, regarded as one of Europe’s foremost experts in digital media for public services.
His company, NoTosh Limited, invests in tech startups and film on behalf of public and private investors, works with those companies to build their creative businesses, and takes the lessons learnt from the way these people work back into schools and universities across the world.
Do you worry that your school or district could better harness its people, digital technology or physical space? Do you want some actionable inspiration, a mentor for a learning journey with your staff?
In a keynote or masterclass we can give them concrete ideas based on experience, enthusiasm fired by a vision of what can be, and backup before and after to make it happen for them.
