Growth and Collaborative Commitment: The Innovation Equation
“Here
we go again. Another Superintendent’s Conference Day! “More professional
development! Wonder what they will tell us today?” If you are a teacher
or know a teacher, I guarantee you’ve heard these comments before.
Unfortunately,
many professional development efforts around the country continue to fall short
as they focus on the “initiative” and not enough on collective commitment to
growth and collaborative practices that ultimately unleash professional
capital. And, while many suggest we are limited by time, I’ll advance we are
limited by our design and thinking.
Michael Fullan states, “Most everyone espouses that ‘all kids
can learn,’ but are less ready to say ‘all teachers can learn.” As school
administrators we often expect teachers to teach the “whole child,” but do we
“walk-the-walk” when it comes to educating the “whole teacher” or leading the
“whole school”?
To
be fair, in the factory model we inherited, schools were never about tapping
and nurturing the human spirit or growing educators. Now, through the combined
powers of connected learning, a systems thinking approach to leading, and
cultivating the “whole school” we are seeing opportunities to accelerate
organizational intelligence. But, how do school leaders reclaim and reshape the
vision for professional learning? How do school leaders connect with
teachers and begin to tap the latent energy within our organizations and build
this momentum for change.
As
the Lead Innovator (Respectful Disruptor) in Farmingdale Schools, I do a lot of
work with teachers and school administrators in building an innovation mindset
for our organization. Our learning events at Farmingdale have attracted our
teachers, principals, directors, central office personnel and the board, as
well as many other educators from other districts. Focus is
rarely ever on “drive-by trainings,” yet is on group engagement and
building strong peer networks that transform culture through ongoing
collaboration, perspective building and risk-taking. Having principal
support and active engagement has amplified this experience. As
principals and teachers are given the autonomy to learn, they’ve taken charge
of professional learning and we’ve seen more leaders emerge and share their
learning with their PLCs.
Below,
I share some of our high leverage areas for leading professional learning aimed
at unleashing professional capital. Call it a holistic, organic or even a
“whole school” approach, our techniques are deeply rooted in the belief that
all teachers and administrators continually seek their potential as educators,
but need the structure and space to turn over old mindsets. Our approach
is echoed in this quote from Mahatma Gandhi, “Unless
the development of the mind and body goes hand in hand with a corresponding
awakening of the soul, the former alone would prove to be a poor lopsided
affair.”
Chip
Away at Old Mental Models
Throughout
our journey we’ve learned that to move beyond incremental change we need to
create more opportunities to surface our personal and professional views and
perspectives. The focus of our work resonates with what Laura Lipton and
Bruce Wellman examine in their book Got Data? Now What? “The real work
of change begins with having open conversations about our mental models and
assumptions” (Lipton & Wellman, 2012).
It’s
been two years now that we’ve offered our Summer Tech and Learning Camp in
Farmingdale. The first day of camp is about developing personal commitments to
action and recalibrating our mindsets for the journey ahead. In these events,
the group becomes the focus of change and as facilitator I’m attentive to group
interactions, the energy, and cumulative learning being produced and shared.
These enlightening experiences put aside technology and lesson plans, allowing
time and structure for teacher and administrators to reflect on their purpose
and role in leading and learning. Our success has been measured not just in the
shifting mindsets, but in how engagement has created more natural leaders and
system thinkers.
Less Change, More Momentum
What
if we thought of our organizations as a mass of energy that either maximizes
the use of system resources or fails to tap the potential energy stored in the
system? Similar to an object in motion, organizations also display
momentum. In 2014, I shared my thoughts and ideas for why Farmingdale
created and hosted
Long Island Connected
Educators Meet-up. It was at that point that I developed the innovation
equation, a key framework for building the energy needed to sustain the
innovation mindset in your school. It begins by looking at the Mass (or
carrying capacity of our organization to learn/un-learn) times the Velocity (or
engagement in learning). In Farmingdale, we started to host a number of informal
learning events aimed at building a healthy leadership ecology. The
emergence of new natural leaders has also created a resurgence of followers. As
I reflect back and look at this through the lens of diffusion of innovation, I
caution school leaders to show restraint and follow the advice of Fullan who
says, “Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast,
and that may mean allowing momentum to build from those ready to lead.”
Leverage Leaders, Change the Conversation
All
across New York, there are teachers in every school who are dedicated to
constant improvement. What remains is figuring out how to get all teachers and
school leaders to spread that degree of collective responsibility and
professional capital. Our efforts over the last
three years aim to “disrupt” our thinking and have that thinking spread through
the school. Again, our energy is focused on building momentum with those
ready to lead and finding new creative ways to spread that energy has been our
focus. To that end, we’ve hosted learning camps, informal meet-ups and begun
restructuring our traditional learning events all aimed at creating more system
thinkers and natural leaders in action in Farmingdale. By making our
camps, meet-ups and other learning events informal and driven by teacher
interest, we are identifying leaders at all levels who naturally interact with
larger parts of the system. In this way, our capacity to learn grows as a
result of improved engagement.
As
we begin the 2014/15 school year, our principals have assumed the role of lead
learners and system thinkers. Efforts have been on creating environments
where teachers need to learn to participate and new norms for learning are
routed in self-organization and are intrinsically motivated.
Social Intelligence and Integration
In
Farmingdale, our teachers and administrators continue to see the power of
Twitter and other social tools. In fact, given the widespread adoption of
our “social mindset” we’ve seen momentum become accelerated and as knowledge
flows in and out of our organization we tap the wisdom of the collectives. Our
work this year has been about supporting those teachers already committed to
connected learning, while simultaneously leveraging their learning with their
peers. Principals who connect with other principals have also started to
integrate ideas like Tech Tuesday’s, collaborative documents, professional
portfolios, which has created new channels for storytelling, technical
assistance, sharing of materials and strategies, as well as other online/offline
endeavors of teacher joint work/planning.
As I reflect back on the last three years, one theme emerges for us. It’s about tapping and developing the deeper intelligences of self, others, and the collective system at a time when we really need them. I think more and more educators see
the huge potential synergy here to reinvent professional learning. With a
deeper understanding of systems thinking, grounded in mindfulness and creating
an energetic and spirited learning organization, faculty and staff are becoming
the agents of change. This new ecology
represents an exciting and relevantly new dimension of the whole learning organization.
As lead innovator, I love watching how teachers’ and
administrators’ learning is recalibrating and reorienting our organization to
better cultivate the needs of our stakeholders – the children. As we forge new connections via our connected learners
and see more natural leaders emerge, I am anxiously watching for the “turning
point” and the key opportunities for our school to disrupt itself.
Author: Dr. Bill Brennan (@DrBillBrennan) is lead innovator in
Farmingdale Public Schools. A graduate of Fordham University’s Doctoral program
in Educational Leadership, Bill led a National Study of School Principals,
Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning. Dr. Brennan continues to
teach, write and speak on building digital age learning organizations. He
challenges school leaders to re-design organizations to better cultivate human
and social capital.
