Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

"I like it" is not good enough

Creative conflict is the ability to agree to disagree, and use the disruption of a disagreement to make your work better. It relies on the partners in disagreement to both be on top of their game, both of them respectful of the other's views on how something might be made better.

Teachers seek this creative, quality feedback discourse every day in their students' work. But every month I bump into another educator who will not "believe" that the practice I'm sharing with them will make their students' outcomes better. The frustration of practice being negated by a simple "I don't believe this will work with my students / in math / in this school" is hard for me to mask - if you want to know one of my 'buttons', press this one.

The video clip I show in return, helps those who don't understand creative conflict get the point, without having to take it personally. It also shows the subtle difference between simply taking research "as is", and having a critical eye on the research.

Barenboim's masterclass pianist plays at a dynamic which is not written in the piece (like a teacher choosing to ignore what a piece of research says). When pushed on why he does it, he says: "because I like it". Barenboim has two options in his potential reply. One would be:

"But the manuscript says this, so play it like that".

This is the musical equivalent of what might be said by the emergent research-led cabal who wouldn't have a teacher teach a certain way unless it had been researched robustly that way first.

Instead, Barenboim asks him to reflect, to think about why he's taking the manuscript / the research and interpreting it differently, in his own style. It's an example of the fine line between virtuoso and just getting it wrong, in spite of what the manuscript suggests you might do for 'success'. And the clip makes the subtle, nuanced point in a way far more subtle and nuanced than most edu-speak can ever manage.

Learning about the unknown unknowns #28daysofwriting

Designing the unknown | Long Version (25min) from CGS Mines ParisTech on Vimeo.

Sometimes the 28 days of writing is really the 25 minutes of watching.

My question: when a teacher uses Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's backwards design or understanding by design type methodology for learning, and nothing else, will your students ever experience the more real-world feeling of trying to fathom the fuzzy, ambiguous unknowns that lie ahead?

Unknown unknowns. #ungoogleable thinking for #28daysofwriting

Designing the unknown | Long Version (25min) from CGS Mines ParisTech on Vimeo.

In short: you don't know what you don't know. And given that you do not know you don't know it, there's no way for you to ask specific-enough a question to get a specific answer back, from Google or for a friend. It is the theory behind the much simpler concept I came up with, of "Ungoogleable Thinking". 

I write the Masters course at Charles Sturt Uni on Designing Spaces for Learning. The key concept above is  described in this video clip. It's simple, and at the same time one of the most complex concepts for my students to get their heads around.

The key point made in the video is what my team and I have tried to show through our work with schools: as you cannot seek out the answers to questions you cannot ask, you need another way to 'bump into' those unknown unknowns. The only two ways to do this are chance (have someone tell you something you didn't know - but that means a lot of teacher talk to get to a few morsels of new stuff for a whole class) or you enter into a voyage of discovery - everything else is going to be stuff you know you don't know, or that you know already. 

This is where a teacher can curate resources, and provoke learners, to such an extent that we can take a safe guess that students will bump into concepts that they didn't know they didn't know. And when this happens, the learner needs to connect this new concept to what they know before, thereby creating new understanding and knowledge. 

This means that, while useful some of the time, the traditional "understanding by design" project is unlikely to ever facilitate deeper learning of the "unknown unknown" variety. Why? Because the teacher has defined the end point and an ever-convergent route of arriving there for the students. 

In our design thinking work, we tend to look at much fuzzier problem areas, leading to multiple routes to several potential outcomes. Learning goals are not met at the end of the project, therefore - there are too many potential routes to showing understanding or problem-solving for even the most expansive rubric to be usable. Instead, success criteria are met during a much more predictable period of immersion, where the resources curated by the teacher are highly likely to help learners understand their prior knowledge (known knowns) and stuff they knew they didn't know, but can find out to help them answer key questions (known unknowns). A troubling provocation is often the launchpad for students to try and take prior knowledge and new ideas, to try and create something new. 

It is only at the point of students making their own independent synthesis of the rich information they've gleaned, that a potential disjunction might be created, a point at which the student wants to dive deeper or off at a tangent to explore a much fuzzier area of their understanding of the world. 

If ever you are seeking ways to help every student hit their zone of proximal development, then Hatchuel and Weil's C-K Theory is not a bad place to start (though you might need more than 28 minutes of reading and viewing to get it, and see how your practice might change thanks to it!).

"I like doing it that way" is not good enough #28daysofwriting

This morning in Edmonton I'll be giving a keynote made up almost entirely of musical metaphors for educators. I've only given the talk once, but it proved particularly powerful with my group of Swedish educators at the time, because you don't need to speak great English to understand the lessons we can learn for our own classrooms.

In the excerpt above, young pianist David Kadouch gets pushed by  pianist Daniel Baremboim. In fact, he gets a pretty hard time when he changes the dynamic - when he plays an E flat note louder than the pianissimo (super quiet) the composer asked for. When asked why he was doing it the young Kadouch replies: "Because I like it". Baremboim is not impressed:

"I'm very sorry, with all due respect, it's not good enough.

"If you had thought of a good reason... I would have said 'chapeau'. But "I like it" is not good enough.

I'm not trying to compare what you're trying to do with the way I think it should go. I'm trying to help you achieve more of what you want to achieve yourself, so that's why it's important that I know why."

Baremboim points out that, because the student has not thought of the reason he is playing something in a certain way, he cannot justify playing it that way.

When I think of teachers' practice, I hit the same kind of conversation daily. I'm no Baremboim of teaching, but I can ask "Why" to find out why a teacher thinks that planning or teaching in a certain way is the best way of achieving what they want to achieve. Knowing the why, we can then both work together to ascertain if, from the world of teaching and learning savvy that we can access, the chosen path is really the best one at all.

This is the essence of design thinking. We design (take time to consider each element of) our thinking (we actually think through for ourselves; don't just assume that the first answer is the right one). 

Alas, most days the initial response is more or less what Kadouch says: "Because I like doing it that way; Because I've always done it that way; Because I saw someone else do it that way." None of these answers is good enough.

There's no care, no design, no thinking.

Here are some simple "Whys" where "because I like it" isn't good enough. And the resultant conversation might help open up some better learning in any classroom:

• Why do you start a lesson with a teacher's voice?
• When people are talking why do you keep going?
• When students are clearly producing pretty but shallow work, why do you let them give the presentation?
• When that kid wants to make a movie again, why do you let them?
• Why do you, and not your students, choose the resources and activities that they will undertake each and every hour they're with you?
• Why do you assume that student-led learning of content will lead to students 'getting through' less content than if you stand and deliver it?
• Why do you think maths students cannot undertake student-led projects as effectively as in social studies?

The full masterclass can be viewed on YouTube.

Related articles

Engage, Inspire, Empower - language learning and technology

Stop thinking out of the box - the box IS the thinking #28daysofwriting

#28daysofwriting - it starts with one

If this isn't nice, I don't know what is #28daysofwriting

 

Kurt Vonnegut, writer and famous speech giver at US university graduation ceremonies, made this point to one group of soon-to-be-non-students: If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

It is the end of a story about his grandpa who, on a summer's afternoon, would find the shade of a tree under which he could rest with a glass of homemade lemonade. The family didn't have a lot of cash, the grandpa worked hard every day of his life, but no matter how relentless the day-to-day was, he would always repeat this phrase as a reminder to those around him that, at the end of the day, this is all still amazing to be part of.

This kind of optimism, as you might call it, can often disappear in a flash in the busy-ness of business or school. Things become impossible, hardgoing, relentless(ly difficult). And the reasons we give for that busyness nearly always involve someone or something else - the system, the job, the weather... 

For many years, people would ask the salutary "how are you?" and my answer was a stock one: "I'm tired."

It was my wife who pointed it out to me, presumably because everyone else was too polite to express their boredom with my reply. The fact is, most people feel tired most of the time, until they make a switch in their life. That switch is deciding that the only person who can turn that frown upside down, who can make crazy stuff happen (or attempt to, and enjoy the process), is you. And in Vonnegut's case, that switch came from saying out loud the one phrase that brings us back to the good elements in what we or our team or our family is doing at any given moment: If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

The relationship to doing better at our work is there, too. Dylan Wiliam points out that too much teacher development resembles the doctor's surgery: let's find out what's wrong with you and work on fixing that. Instead, the research shows us, we should really be finding out what we're already doing well in and then build on that good practice to become experts in it.

It makes sense, for at that point we really can say to ourselves: If this isn't nice, I don't know what is?

Likewise, when as a Twitterer or blogger your inner snark chooses to pick over the rights, wrongs, exactitudes or impressions given by others who have chosen to write for an audience, hold him back and ask yourself: If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.

It's a great phrase. It doesn't ask "if this isn't expert / the best / the most bombastic experience of my life, I don't know what is?". It merely asks if things are not 'nice', a word I was always taught to avoid but for which there is a specific, useful purpose for us all in the midst of the busyness that can get in the way of really enjoying, embracing and smiling through the one precious life with which we can make a difference.

 

When is failure a failure? Maria Joao Pires has an answer...

The 1st Movement of Mozart's D Minor Concerto is an obsession about feeling loneliness and despair. That is exactly as virtuoso pianist Maria Joao Pires must have felt as she realised that she had practiced the wrong concerto for a summer concert series.

This clip is a wonderful example of agile leadership. In the moment of panic, the conductor takes control, not with a baton or by stopping the orchestra, but with a beautiful embracing smile, and a jovial reassurance that she would manage.

Pires then takes the leadership role on, summoning her memory, her expertise, talent and prior learning, to tackle the new concerto she hadn't been prepared to play in the first place.

When we talk about failure in learning, it is vital that we talk about failure and what we learn from it. Failure for failure's sake is a tragedy. Pires had 'done her homework' and knew the other concerto (and probably many others) by heart, from experience. She had also done her homework in being able to 'make the show go on', regardless. But no doubt, she'll rehearse with the orchestra before future live performances, she'll make the time to have that preparatory phone call. Thankfully, her learning gives her the opportunity, post-performance, to try again and get it right.

Most learning in school, though, does not give time for failure to be learned from. Instead, even though half or more of the students in the classroom may have scope for improvement, teachers feel compelled to "move on", to "get on" to the next piece of content, or to get onto the test. Really, in an ideal world, the student makes the decision about when they are 'done', ready to move on to the next thing, and often they will know what that next thing is.

Where the teacher holds all the planning in their hands, though, when the teacher perceives curriculum and success criteria as teacher-destined documents, and not as documents to flesh out hand in hand with students, this 'ideal world' does not happen.

Make the first step of 2015 towards letting students really do their homework: give them the curricular and success criteria tools we've normally kept behind the teacher's desk, and work out with them how their projects, their ideas and their ambitions meet them halfway.

Related articles

Inspiration is everywhere. Even in Galena, Kansas...

Inside Out Thinking Down Under - provocation for learning

Google Teacher Academy with NoTosh: a heck of an opportunity

 

Teachers take the seemingly impossible and make it happen. Every day. Teachers are the moonshot profession. We want to work with as many of you as possible in London and Amsterdam this year, at our GTA design thinking workshops.

When NoTosh took the Google Teacher Academy (GTA), we wanted to move it beyond simply exploring 'tech tools' and see if we couldn't harness the talents of educators, a sprinkling of technology, and a foundation of inspiration and moonshot thinking to really change the world of education.

Well, Google let us do it.

This weekend is the time to get your application in for London or Amsterdam's GTAs this autumn. Applying is the first step in opening up an amazing year ahead:

• two weeks to put forward the education challenges you face on your doorstep or in your classroom;
• two days intensive design thinking / technology professional development and action with the NoTosh crew, Googlers and selected Google Mentors
• six months support from the Mentor team to put your prototype ideas into practice and continue to transform learning in your school.

If you're a school leader, please apply yourself, or encourage your teams to do so. If you're an innovator teacher, jump in and share your dreams for learning. If you're an educator in FE, HE or early years, consider representing your sector with an application, and add something different to the mix.

The Google Teacher Academy has been redesigned to help teachers gain understanding of the latest technologies while working in collaborative teams to solve chunky challenges that they've identified. Participants will be coached in harnessing the design thinking process to select and frame the chunkiest challenges in education, locally and globally, before working over two intensive days to prototype solutions alongside Googlers and selected expert coaches. 

Design thinking is an innovation process used by some of the world's most successful organisations to find and solve the greatest challenges on the planet. It is a simple process that can be harnessed back in your classroom, putting your students in the driving seat of their learning.

Selected expert mentors and Googlers will introduce new technologies with the potential to transform learning, as well as revisiting more familiar tools with a lens of student-centred learning in mind. 

Participants will learn by doing, working in teams of fellow educators to trial their ideas there and then, before being supported for six months by a mentoring team as they try out new methodologies and technologies in their classroom.

NoTosh, your facilitators for this journey, are global experts in innovation, creativity and learning, with offices in Edinburgh, Melbourne and San Francisco. The entire team plus a group of selected educators from the UK and Netherlands, will be on hand to support you as you put your ideas into practice.

You can apply for GTA London and GTA Amsterdam until September 22nd. 

Why not?, and the power of getting on with it

We are all artists. But not all of us should exhibit.

So says John Hegarty in "There Are No Rules", which I continue to dip into during my break in Tuscany. I laughed when I read this line, because, in my own drawing/sketches case, it's too true. We can all be creative, but not all creative produce is equally stop-you-in-your-tracks creative. The thing is, you don't know until you start to create, whether or not it's going to be worth exhibiting. You've just got to start. And this is why starting is so hard - we can be fearful that what we produce will not be worth exhibiting, so we don't even bother to start it off.

But when I'm on holiday, I don't care so much about what other people think. Most tourists display this characteristic, with their clothing choices perhaps, or their behaviour in the bars on the Southern Spanish coast. I display this characteristic in "having a go" at things I'm normally afraid of wasting time on: writing, drawing and sketching.

I tend to create more on holiday than I do during the working year, the audiences being smaller (Facebookers are also on holiday, the readership lower, the conferences closed for another season) and the canvas being less daunting. One of my favourite holidayish things to do is to draw on paper placemats before my meal arrives, using my daughters' coloured pencils to create whatever comes to mind. I've spent this week on honing my horses skills, learning how to draw them again (when I was 3, I could draw a good horse, jumping over a hedgerow).

During the working year, all of this would draw a simple question: "Why, Ewan?". But during holidays, no-one questions WHY I want to draw horses. On placemats.

It's the distinct lack of "why?", in fact, and the implied criticism that seems to come with those three letters, that relaxes me, helps me concentrate, helps me focus my efforts on one thing, and doing it best I can, and often a little bit better than that, in fact. No devil's advocate. No "have you thought about doing cats instead?". No "why?".

Just a "why not...?"

Cross-posted to the fabulous NoTosh Facebook wall.

You can pre-order my new book, to be released in August: How To Come Up With Great Ideas And Actually make Them Happen.

Related articles

#EduTECH 2014: Agile Leadership

The most important thing you need to know about creativity

#NeverSeconds: Students can change the world - when we get out of the way

Choice - how much is just right?

How much choice do humans want in their life? Between 3 and 19, if you read into the research by Choice guru Sheena Iyengaar. Her TED talk on choice is the most accessible way in, and her research papers are on Google Scholar. My new friend David Bill took me to the bourbon bar pictured above, in the French quarter of San Francisco and, indeed, the choice was so overwhelming I went for the drink I rarely do these days: a draught beer. When faced with overwhelming choice, we can get unimaginative.

So here's my question: do you offer at least three choices to students in every piece of thinking, learning or 'work' that they do? Most of the time when I ask this, the answer is a resounding "hmmm". Followed by a quiet 'no'.

We've been playing with the notion of Generative Student-Led Topics to get over the lack of real choice evident in so much enquiry- or project-based learning. Basically, we're exploring how teachers really design choice into learning, without inadvertently removing it. There's a brief summary of how we're doing that on the fabby NoTosh Lab pages.

Rosendale Book: How we learn what we learn

One of the schools my firm NoTosh is lucky enough to work with every week is Rosendale Primary School, in south London, UK. Its teachers, its students and its leadership team are a treat for Tom, who spends every week with them, and for Peter and me when we're lucky enough to come in as reinforcements. For nearly two years, we've worked alongside teachers and leaders there to develop thinking and strategy, as well as some damned good practice, around formative assessment, 70% negotiated timetables and design thinking in the curriculum, which now permeates their work from Reception through to the final year of school. Neil Hopkin and Kate Atkins, the Executive Head and Depute Head respectively, with their staff have developed a truly Tots to Teens strategy for their students. And they talk about it all the time on their own learning log.

To share with parents and the wider world how they do what they do and why they do it, Neil and Kate have authored a great online and paper edition book, outling How We Learn What We Learn. It's a gem, and a year-by-year manual on how to inspire creativity and excellence in learning.