I have a short video of my school to share with you.​

Below, our school principal Stephen Harris leads a tour of one of our learning spaces. From the language he uses about learning, and space, you can get a pretty good idea of the vision and driving forces behind our journey of transformation over the last 5 or 10 years. I have learned a great deal from Stephen, and feel extremely fortunate to be able to work with him. 

Direct link to video.​

​50% or more of our school learning spaces now have a similar openness and flexibility as the space Stephen tours. I would identify space, relationships and culture as three crucial elements in any institution. The three are in intimate conversation with each other, and shape each other. 

You may notice that we don't have codes for our rooms like a prison. Our learning spaces have names.​ We don't have bells, either, but I guess that's another story for another blog.

This is post #2 on Design. Click here for the back-story.​

​Click here to read about the end result (an event in Melbourne) that is the culmination of Design for PD.

So, I'm a n00b when it comes to design. ​ The good news is, that providing you're willing to give yourself over to a counter-intuitive process, you can 'get it' and reap some benefits very quickly. 

For myself and some colleagues the perfect chance to put the process to the test arose as we sat down to envision a new kind of teacher-PD experience.​

You see, we've had, literally, thousands of visitors (about 3k in 3 years) come visit our school. So we asked: "what if we ran our own event, taking to the road for those who can't travel?​​"

The Core Challenge​

We wanted to run a workshoppy, conferencey sort of thing. You can spot the irony and the dilemma immediately: you can't talk about student-centred learning from a microphone​. If you had the courage of your own convictions you wouldn't be teacher-talking, now, would you? Whatever we created, it couldn't be microphone-driven! No, no, no! 

A Collaborative Alliance

Collaboration is a force-multiplier. I recruited two co-conspirators, Mark Burgess and Lou Deibe. Now, Mark has been practising the design process, and I asked him to lead us through it.

​The night before we met, Mark's wife made these posters for us​.

​We then used these posters to define a kind of test subject. We quickly created 'Meredith', with a full back-story and character profile. The trick is to be really specific and detailed. 

So, even as we started defining our challenge, and exploring issues and ideas, Meredith was there with us. Meredith is entirely fictional, but she grounded us, and later we envisaged 'Mel', and could return again to a kind of anchor point: an exercise in empathy to counter our tendencies to get caught up an ego-centric vision reflecting only our own dreams.  

Mark guided us through an iterative process where we defined our challenge, researched around the topic, posed questions, and tried to get clarity over what we could really bring to the table. 

​It became clear to us that we had process​​ to offer, not content. The revolution at NBCS has never been a 'model' per se, it's a process of questioning, reinventing, re-envisioning. 

As​ we wrestled with these questions together, the giant post it notes became a shared thought-space more powerful than any google doc. They're tactile, organic, graphic and transparent. 

(Any teacher reading this post: consider covering your walls with butcher's paper and handing out art-liners to the kids. Your physical space will become a giant wiki. The walls will scream "POWER TO THE PEOPLE"; giant table serviettes ready to record the students' insights & ideas and code them onto the building itself.)​

You can see the way our three brains engaged collectively, looping out of our skulls and splashing onto the walls thanks to simple pen and paper. 

In the video (right), I'm genuinely panicking about the content vs process question. 

Lou goes back to our 'Meredith' character (on right of screen)​ and brings us back to a seductive question: What if...?​​​

This became a winning direction. It allowed us to pitch the whole experience as seduction to get creative. 

As the day unfolded, so we slogged a path toward clarity! It was exhilarating, creating something new from a blank slate, bouncing off each other! Collaboration truly is a force-multiplier. It trumps lone-wolf, every time!​

Whichever official design 'steps' you follow, the process is iterative, so after we tested our ideas against Meredith's experience, we went to Mel's, and cycled through as time allowed.​

All of this took a day, but in my next post I'll document how you use the same process in as little as an hour and still come up trumps with some dynamite outcomes.​

​Mark, Lou and myself met again for a second block to get the logistical detail down. We came up with such insights and strategies as:

- we won't kick off with a plenary or anyone with a microphone. Instead we'll go straight into experiential, project-based learning, breaking the same script we aspire to break at our school.

- ​we'll leverage question-walls & google docs for on-the-day collaboration, connection and networking.

- we'll allow / invite teachers to peal-off from the Day 1 learning program as soon as lightning strikes and they have a great idea about what they'd like to try to prototype.

- we'll leverage our conference website to create a kind of on-site flipped-conference, so that teachers who just want to soak up the support materials, templates, scaffolds, etc, in an introverted style are empowered to do so.​

​If I've intrigued you, pop back to the first post to bounce over to the free online courses that will get you up and running very quickly with a design process. 

The End Result: 'Making it Mobile' Event and Metaphor

If you are in Australia, come join us in Melbourne on Sept 13 and 14 - it won't be anesthetising (how's that for a hook!?) and you'll emerge from day 2 with a working prototype, rather than some abstract ideas & a bag full of advertising materials.

The​ meaning of 'Making it Mobile' is student agency: agency to explore, be curious, to own their own learning, make something authentic and meaningful.

This implies physical mobility, and mobility through the curriculum. Our final three experiential workshops for Day 1 are: the Learning Matrix, Flipped Learning, and Project-Based Learning, each designed to give teachers a scaffolded way forward to up-the-ante toward true student-centric pedagogy.  Oh how everyone is talking about it! But let's do it! Let's actually do it!

We're going to repeat the event in Auckland and Christchurch later in 2012 - watch this space!

​Next Episode:

​Next time, using the design process with 100+ staff, and how no one can run PD from a microphone at our school again!

And finally in Post #4, can 180 Year 5 & 6 students use the design process to create 180 passion projects? (Hint: younglings rarely disappoint when we harness their agenda for learning). ​

If you keep your ear to the ground, you'll spot a pattern in all this: a reversal of the modern splitting of knowledge into disconnected chunks, in favour of immediate, hands-on, authentic building, making, creating.  ​

Design-Thinking in Teaching and Learning

A Flirtatious New Idea

A sea-change whirls around for a while before it bites you, smites you, leaves you stricken, smitten!  Since 2010 the phrase 'Design Thinking'  has been itching in my mind, due particularly to Ewan McIntosh's work with his company 'NoTosh'.

I tip my hat to Ewan. You see, the corporate world uses 'Design Thinking' to solve intractable and wicked challenges. In March I visited Cap Gemini's Accelerated Solutions Environment in Sydney where this is exactly what happens.​ McIntosh realised that we could do with some of that in the edu-world.

Then, in March of this year, a team from my school returned from the Hasso-Plattner-Institut at the University of Potsdam in Germany, where they had 'Design' training. They immediately set about training up our staff here at NBCS. My school will never be the same again.

“If I said that your worst solutions for the challenges you’re facing might just be your best way out of a tight spot, would you believe me?”

— Ewan McIntosh

What is "Design"?

'Design' is, in fact, an entire art-form : a discipline and skill-set that you can study and improve.

Design is the art of collaboratively re-imagining the components that go into an experience. You can apply it to any situation, in your home life, at work or at school; apply it to a lesson plan, a classroom, a physical product or an abstract process.

Make something! A prototype! Reimagine what a classroom is, what it could be! Get your hands dirty, build, rebuild, rebuild!

Our lives and contexts have a rhythm of decay and rebirth, stagnation and renewal. They are never stable. You can never stop redesigning. It's all flux. Design is therefore an art worth my learning.

Design in Schools

In future posts in this series, I am going to document how we've been using design in a school context, in our PD structures, and with our students, starting with Year 5 & 6.

In particular, I will show you how I've worked with a team to apply design to a re-envisioning of what a teacher conference could be. Along the way I've learned more about the design process.

The end result is this: http://scil.com.au/makingitmobile a two day experience we are running in Melbourne on September 12, and 13 in 2012. I'll post more on how it came together in my next post, but the design process lead us to such decisions as:

• Teachers can engage in hands-on, experiential learning within minutes of arrival.
• They'll be equipped with time, time, time, to build, experiment, and prototype a learning experience that will be ready to use when they leave.
• It will undermine the pacifying scripts of guru-with-a-microphone, and facilitate crowd-sourced collaboration.
• Facilitate multiple paths and options so that as soon as inspiration strikes, a teacher can get creating.

I've documented the design process as we've gone. In the meantime, I'd love to see you there!

Get Design-Training, Now, Free

In the meantime, I can direct you to scott-free, state-of-the-art training in design, produced by high-level experts and practitioners, accessible over the web, and requiring only an hour or two to complete.

There is nothing stopping you applying design principles and practising design skills within minutes of engaging with the core processes.

Stanford's free virtual crash course: http://dschool.stanford.edu/

Ideo's free 'Design Thinking for Educators': http://designthinkingforeducators.com/  don't miss their free downloadable toolkit!

Coming soon, in post #2, how design has become a game-changer for us at Northern Beaches Christian School / Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning.

Dear ClassDojo, it's Complicated

PREFACE:

Just after posting this blog, I discovered Vivo Miles:

From the site "It’s the 21st century right? So, when you do something worthy of a reward at school, you want something a little more interesting than a sticker or a stamp in your planner from your teacher, yeah?"

That is OFFICIALLY more DEPRESSING than the "Day Made of Glass #2" video showing futuristic classrooms with ROWS OF DESKS FACING THE FRONT.

Anyway, on with this post:

My friend and colleague Cameron Paterson has blogged about ClassDojo and repeated the well known criticism that external rewards kill intrinsic motivation.

If you're not up to speed on ClassDojo, it sets up a very shiny list of students and allows you to award and subtract points, even via your mobile phone, with compelling sound effects. With the class list up on the big projector screen you've got a big bag of peanuts for your monkeys.

Which is, of course, Paterson's criticism. And yes he is dead right about the dynamic. It's not that it's new, either, schooling is mostly composed of similar systems that we may not notice simply because we notice new things more than the familiar.

The graphics and message of ClassDojo, at face value, has no trace of the irony I propose below, and at face value suggests a veritable caricature of behaviourism. 

Nevertheless I feel a strong urge to try to shift the discourse on ClassDojo, and more broadly on reward-mechanics to a different level. There is a distinction that screams relevance at me.

I commented on Cameron's post, and will reproduce the comment here below:

I certainly have a reaction against the smug teacher graphic on the classdojo site because it says to me “Look, I’m in control!”.

Yet I too have used it in my Yr 8 French class, mostly to see how the students relate to it, and different ways it can be framed. Gathering field data, I guess.

But the main thing I want to throw into the mix here, is that reality is more complex than “an extrinsic reward kills intrinsic motivation”.

There is indeed what we might call a ‘valley’ where, when you start offering an extrinsic reward, the intrinsic motivation drops. I don’t dispute this dynamic.

However there is a far side to that valley, and it occurs when the individual has a mental model that is able to contextualise the reward mechanism from a higher, savvy, perspective. When they can deconstruct it. I’m saying that there is a sort of literacy to it.

I’m particularly aware of this due to my extreme familiarity with computer games.

You reckon we play monopoly to earn fake cash and beat the other guy? We play monopoly to socialise. The game-dynamic of earning cash is contextualised within what is clearly a constructed, artificial system.

So, we sit above the system, not underneath it. The motivation backfire occurs when the individual has a perspective within the system, mistaking the system for reality. If they look on the system from above, from without, then they can engage with it for their own purposes. This is where the language of gaming is perfect for making sense of this dynamic.

In discussing a study where this effect was shown, Amabile and Hennessy conclude, “It would seem that as a result of their training, these children had learned to treat reward not as an element that detracts from intrinsic interest but as something that can add to overall motivation. They had learned to overcome the deleterious effects of reward – so much that their levels of intrinsic motivation (and therefore levels of creativity) seem to have increased.”

Now, would anyone dispute that our young people are going to be navigating (ARE ALREADY navigating) a world absolutely chock-block full of extrinsic reward systems designed to hack their brains, distort their authentic drives, and make them obey a third party agenda (from work to death for a company through to buy this brand of chocolate)?

The solution is NOT to ban such mechanisms in schools but to contextualise. We need a game-mechanics literacy. Students should be experiencing these systems and taught to deconstruct them, as a scaffolded experience to ‘wise them up’.

In other news, savvy computer gamer kids might be getting just this experience, yet another example of the computer game industry doing a better job of schooling our kids than school does.

But that’s a shame. Being purist about reward-mechanics does nothing to help students deconstruct a world full of them.

I’ve written at length about these issues over at my happysteve blog.

I am not, for one moment, suggesting that teachers are using Classdojo in the way I am describing – simply that the discourse around it could move to a far more constructive space if it transcended its current terms of reference. 

The reference for the study I referred to is:
Amabile, T. M., Hennessey, B.A., & Grossman, B.S. (1986) Social influences on creativity: The effects of contracted-for reward.
in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 14-23.

The Curious Case of the Flipped-Bloom's Meme

(This is the sequel to 'Anatomy of a (Flipped) Meme')

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Last post I dug up the history of the Flipped Classroom idea. In this thrilling conclusion I look a variant: the "Flipped Bloom's Taxonomy" meme, which isn't even a meme yet, although in the last three weeks it has looked to get enough traction via one very influential blog post.

Do a google image search for Bloom's and see what shapes you get:

The very first image has been FLIPPED upside down! This image has been around for years, but it's only the last few days that Twitter has lit up with the NEW Flipped-Bloom's MEME!!

Never Meant to Be One Way

Of course, Bloom's taxonomy was never meant to be linear or sequential.  

The version I always knew was a pyramid:

But as with the general flipped learning meme, if you look you can find plenty of examples dating back years.

This looks like a flipped pyramid right here, dating from 2001:

And the taxonomy was revised in 2000 by Loren Anderson, who also appears to have turned it upside down, although I can't get a really good reference for this. This is the upside down graphic that comes up first when I run a google images search for Bloom's: 

Much criticism has been levelled at Bloom's, but although "a more radical approach would be to have no taxonomy at all" (2003), human beings LOVE a taxonomy, especially one with a one-syllable name and a nice stable pyramid under it!

Don't get rid of Bloom's, just swivel it 180 degrees! 

May 5 - A Conversation with Aaron Sams

Aaron Sams mentioned the Flipped Bloom's idea to us when we met him a few weeks ago: "The other thing is just trying to find different models in the way this whole flipped approach works because it’s not just one way to put them."

"So, the idea is how do you approach Bloom’s?  Do you go from the bottom up, or do you approach Bloom from the top-down?  If we can minimize the remembering and understanding stuff, you start with the project, so project-based learning starts top and they tap down as needed versus starting at the bottom with content and climbing your way to the top and, hopefully, you get to a culminating it in to your project."

May 15 - Enter Shelley Wright

So, dear reader, imagine my surprise shortly after returning from my pilgrimage to my leafy Australian home, to come across this post: http://plpnetwork.com/2012/05/15/flipping-blooms-taxonomy/

 

Except that, I didn’t read it there, I read it on the Mindshift blog where it was republished: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/05/flip-this-blooms-taxonomy-should-start-with-creating/ 

Her original post was on May 15, and the Mindshift clone was May 17. 

Which of the two sites has a larger readership, I do not know, but the little bunny-meme went virile. An excerpt search shows the blog being linked to in 454 other sites as of today, May 26.

 

This is a fractal jump in scale, but it doesn’t count as full-blown viral, yet. It could be a flash in the pan, a blip on the radar.

I've been counting the tweets mentioning 'Flipping Bloom's' each day since then:

16 May - 10

17 May - 2

18 May - 80 (Mindshift blog is a super-node?)

19 May - 70 (Mindshift blog is a super-node?)

20 May - 30

21 May - 30

22 May - 22

23 May - 21

24 May - 29

25 May - 6

26 May - 19

You can just feel this new virus striving for life, pushing, pushing to jump up another order of magnitude or two into fractal viability.

So had Shelley Wright Spoken to Aaron Sams?

I logically concluded Shelley Wright must have heard the idea from Aaron Sams. So I asked Shelley, but she's never heard of Aaron! 

Detective hat on, I bounced back to Aaron and asked where he heard the idea from. He couldn't recall hearing "Flipped Bloom's" from anyone else, but said he'd been using it for about 6 months in his presentations.

He did, however, point me to Lorin Anderson's "inverted pyramid" which I've mentioned above.

Further searching by yielded another interesting find: 

Back in 2009, we have "Inverting Bloom's Taxonomy".

"INVERTING!?" PEOPLE! How many times must I tell you! Don't say 'invert', say 'flip'! The punters want 'flip', they don't want 'inverting'. 

This 2009 version got little traction.

Let this be a lesson to everyone: if you turn something upside down, and want people to pass around the idea, choose your keyword carefully. 

Inevitable Ideas

"There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo

It's all context.

Bloom's taxonomy pyramids floating everywhere, sunny-side up.

Then an inverted graphic from 2001.

"Inverting Bloom's" in 2009.

Still all quiet on the western front. 

Then the "FLIP" engine, lurking in wings, catches the wind in 2010. 

How long could it be until someone connected the FLIP-engine to Bloom's pyramid? How long until someone thought "that ain't just inverted, that's flipped!" 

Was this inevitable? Aaron Sams and Shelley Wright seem to have been saying it concurrently, unaware of each other.  

And will Shelley Wright's post with its beautiful graphic be enough to tip the equation up to the next level?

I really hope so. I like Bloom's the other way around.

Project-Based Learning in a Soothing Package 

Flipped Bloom's is remarkably close to Project-Based Learning. But you try saying "Project-Based Learning" or even "PBL" a few times! Sounds a leetle beet hard! A leetle beet threatening!

It tells me I've been basing my learning model on the wrong thing. "Try project-based learning" implies "You have been basing your understanding of learning on the WRONG FOUNDATION." Aggressive!

Not a bad meme, PBL, for the revolutionaries. We might need to repackage the idea for the punters.

"Flipping Bloom's" is more diplomatic, and seductive.

"Don't worry, we're just taking something you aleady know and love, and we're putting a fresh angle on it!"

"Hey, anyone can turn something upside down! Just turn it upside down!" 

I hope that the Flipped Bloom's meme travels up the fractal scale dimension. I hope it continues to get traction.

Variant Graphics

Some crazy radicals, even since Shelley Wright's post, have been doing OTHER things to Bloom's that cannot be summed up in one cute syllable.

I give you Kathy Schrock's interlocking cognitive processes. She uses cogs:

 

And Edna Sackson dares suggest learning is not linear, and uses steps and ladders, and little people who appear to be dressed in Bloom's triangles (coincidence I think)!

(Edna has said since that this dates from 2010 - http://whatedsaid.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/constructing-meaning/. In that post she quotes Jay McTighe as advocating 'turning Bloom's taxonony on its head'. HA HA!! SO CLOSE TO 'FLIP'!! Imagine that: "so, Jay, you're saying we should... so to speak... 'flip' the taxonomy?" But in 2010 Pink and Khan had not pushed the term to its current giddy heights.)

But can anything compete with the flipped romance? As Edna Sackson says, 'Flipping is the new black.'

A Flipped Romance

'Flip' is  like the puppy dog version of 'change'.

Change growls, flip purrs.

Change threatens, flip seduces.

Flip implies something can be freshened, not made reduntant. It can be redeemed, invigorated, reborn, without a change in substance or identity. When you flip something, you don't rip out its heart, you look at it from a reverse angle.

'Flip' comes without a surgeon's knife. It knocks at the door like a showman, and offers to teach you a magic trick. Just put this here and that there, and tadaaaa!

No damage done.

So all the debating, blogging, playing with the language, is really giving people a paradigm that sits between death by stagnation and death by assault. From experience, stuck between that rock and that hard place is actually where I normally do grow, but if 'flip' can get in there first and tempt me out with some bread crumbs and the promise of a better world, I shan't complain. 

Australian readers may recognise the advertising equivalent, 'Don't stop it, just swap it', and recognise the limits of this method!

 

If Flipping Meets Occupy 

I predict this won't be the last thing we see flipped. 

In one conceivable future, the occupy meme will meet the flipped meme. If that happens, all bets are off! 

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