Quite a grounding read on innovation and the role of technology in education. Penning down my takeaways from the book here for future reference!
Tl;drs/ Reminders to self:
Students want to feel successful and make progress, and have fun with friends.
Each child has different learning needs at different times.
Our goal is to meet students exactly where they were academically and let them progress at their own paces and according to the modality that work best for them.
The starting point for design is understanding the student perspective and designing with student motivation as a guiding star.
Ideally, the teacher role pivots away from being the ‘‘sage on the stage,’’ to being ‘‘guides on the side".
Culture is formed through repetition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
Sustaining Innovation VS Disruptive Innovation
Sustaining innovations refer to those that are sustaining to the incumbent system. Sustaining initiatives lead to improvements to the established design.
Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, compete according to a new definition of performance. In the context of education, disruptive initiatives lead to an entirely new way of thinking about teachers, facilities, and the student experience.
Sustaining innovations will improve the traditional classroom, whereas disruptive innovations are more likely to transform schooling into a system that is personalised, competency-based, accessible, and affordable.
***One common misperception is that sustaining innovations are bad and disruptive innovations are good.
Sustaining innovations are vital to a healthy and robust sector, as organisations strive to make better products or deliver better services to their best customers.
Disruptive models are on a different trajectory from those within the hybrid zone.
***I wonder: What is SLS being perceived and subsequently used as? Sustaining or disruptive innovation? Is it meant to be disruptive but currently doesn't have enough buy in, and hence is being used as sustaining innovation? How to move it towards disruptive? (if that was the intention?) What can it do that traditional classroom practices cannot?
Why factory-model schools fall short today
In the 1900, the majority of students would take industrial jobs and did not need a deep education; only 17% of all jobs at the time required knowledge workers, This is in contrast with over 60 percent of jobs now requiring knowledge workers (Oct 2014).
The fact that many students dropped out of high school, did not attend or complete college, or did not learn much academically, did not cripple students when they left for the workforce nor did it significantly hurt the economy.
With a system that mandates the amount of time students spend in class but does not expect each child to master the content, most students are forced to move on to the next concept when the whole class moves on, not when they are ready.
This was not a problem for a long time because we had different goals for our school system, but it has become one now that the world—and our hopes for our children—have changed and our schools have not.
Online learning has the power to help teachers differentiate and customise learning to fit a student’s needs. Today’s schools were designed over a century ago to do just the opposite of differentiation and customisation - they were designed to standardise the way they teach and test.
Student-centred learning
Each child has different learning needs at different times. Each student learns at a different pace.
We all have different aptitudes, and different levels of background knowledge. We bring different experiences/ prior knowledge into each learning experience, which impact how we will learn a concept.
It is important that we are able to customise—or personalise—an education for each student’s distinct learning needs.
Seat-time system vs competency based system
Student-centred learning is the combination of personalised learning (what some call ‘‘individualised learning’’) and competency-based learning (also called ‘‘mastery-based learning’).
Competency-based learning would mean that students must demonstrate mastery of a given subject—including the possession, application, or creation of knowledge, a skill, or a disposition—before moving on to the next one. In other words, they work at problems until they are successful in order to progress.
Some strengths of individualisation:
It awakens in students an awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, which inspires them to conquer their daily online assessments and move on to master new skills.
It helps students feel less afraid to admit what they do not understand, because they are all working at their own pace.
Meanwhile, teachers have detailed knowledge of how each student is doing every day, which allows them to respond more appropriately to struggling students.
They spend less time grading assignments and more time analyzing student needs and delivering small-group or individual instruction.
Blended learning as the enabler
Online learning can allow students to learn any time, in any place, on any path, and at any pace at scale.
It is a simple way for students to take different paths toward a common destination.
Students develop a sense of agency and ownership for their progress and a subsequent ability to guide their learning.
This free up teachers to become learning designers, mentors, facilitators, tutors, evaluators, and counselors to reach each student in ways never before possible.
An important caveat: just because a school adopts online learning does not guarantee that learning will be personalised or competency-based.
E.g. schools that intend to individualise instruction with online learning end up foisting technology onto busy teachers who have neither the time nor the know-how to reorient their classrooms around each student’s personal needs.
Part 1: Understanding
Chapter 1: What Is Blended Learning?
Function of School:
Homeschooling and full-time virtual schooling will not substitute for brick-and-mortar schooling.
Most children need a safe place to be during the day outside of the home while their parents are busy. In fact, one of the main functions that schools perform is purely custodial.
Most students also want a physical place to hang out together and have fun, as well as a place to receive help from their teachers.
What Blended Learning Is:
In Part through Online Learning
Any formal education programme in which a student learns at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.
The technology used for the online learning must shift content and instruction to the control of the student in at least some way for it to qualify as blended learning from the student’s perspective, rather than just the use of digital tools from the classroom teacher’s perspective.
In Part in a Supervised Brick-and-Mortar Location
The student learns at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home.
An Integrated Learning Experience
The modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.
The online and face-to-face components work together to deliver an integrated course.
Role of Technology in Blended Learning:
Tech is used for hosting information AND the delivery of content and instruction.
Tech needs to inform subsequent lesson plans/objectives; not standalone.
Blended learning is different from technology-rich instruction. With the former, students have at least some control of the time, place, path, and/or pace of their learning, whereas with the latter, the learning activities are standardised across the class.
Models of Blended Learning:
1. Rotation
Students rotate — either on a fixed schedule or at the teacher’s discretion — among learning modalities, at least one of which is online learning.
Often students rotate among online learning, small-group instruction, and pencil-and-paper assignments at their desks OR they may rotate between online learning and some type of whole- class discussion or project.
Station Rotation
Small-group direct instruction
Individual learning
Modeled and independent reading
Lab Rotation
Similar to Station Rotation, but students walk to a computer lab for the online-learning portion of the course. The idea is to free up teacher time and classroom space by using a computer lab and a different staffing structure for the online component.
Flipped Classroom
Students consume online lessons or lectures independently. Time in the classroom, previously reserved for teacher instruction, is instead spent on what we used to call homework, with teachers providing assistance as needed.
If students don’t understand what is presented in a real-time classroom lecture, they have little recourse. The teacher can try to slow down or speed up to adjust to differentiated needs, but inevitably what is too fast for one student is too slow for another. Moving the delivery of basic instruction to an online format gives students the opportunity to hit rewind or fast-forward according to their speed of mastery. Students decide what to watch and when, and this—theoretically at least—gives them greater ownership over their learning.
One critical difference: classroom time is no longer spent taking in raw content, a largely passive process. Instead, while at school, students do practice problems, discuss issues, or work on projects. Classroom time becomes a time for active learning,
Individual Rotation
Students rotate on an individually customized schedule among learning modalities
Either an algorithm or a teacher sets each student’s schedule.
Individual Rotations are different from the other rotation models because students do not necessarily rotate to each available station or modality; their daily schedules are customized according to individual playlists.
2. Flex
Courses or subjects in which online learning is the backbone of student learning, even if it directs students to offline activities at times.
Flex schools start with online learning and add physical supports and connections where valuable.
3. A La Carte
This model includes any course that a student takes entirely online while also attending a brick-and-mortar school.
4. Enriched Virtual
Courses that offer required face-to-face learning sessions but allow students to do the rest of the work online from wherever they prefer.
Differs from Flipped Classroom because in Enriched Virtual classes, students seldom meet face-to-face with the teacher every weekday.
Chapter 2: Are All Classrooms Going to Blend?
Hybrid VS Disruptive Innovation
Hybrid innovations include both the old and new technology. They preserve the rough contours of a traditional classroom—the facilities, staffing, and basic operations—and at the same time introduce an element of online learning.
On the other hand, pure disruptions do not offer the old technology in its full form.
"Target Audience"
Hybrid innovations target existing customers rather than nonconsumers.
People design hybrids to make current customers happier, not to serve those whose alternative is nothing.
Customers want hybrids to outperform the existing system according to the old rules of the game, whereas disruptions compete on different terms and offer an alternative set of benefits.
Successful disruptive innovations do not challenge the incumbent system head on; instead, they find an alternative market that values them for what they are.
E.g. Pure disruptions are not focused on the job of keeping students in their seats for the prescribed number of minutes. Instead, students move through content at their own pace, making time-in-seat completely variable.
Ease of Operation
Hybrid models of blended learning are not noticeably simpler for teachers than the existing system.
In many cases they appear to require all the expertise of the traditional model plus new expertise in managing digital devices and in integrating data across all the supplemental online experiences in the teacher-directed rotation.
Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, stand out for their simplicity. They also encourage maturity and independence by allowing students to participate in the management of their own learning.
Role of Teacher
Ideally, the teacher role pivots from being the ‘‘sage on the stage’’ to still being an active member — or even designer — of the learning process but in a very different role, often in the form of a tutor, discussion facilitator, hands-on project leader, or counselor.
If students are learning in a blended setting, and you can’t figure out where the front of the classroom is, then it’s probably a disruptive model.
So, Are All Classrooms Going to Blend?
The disruption is likely to affect high school and, to some extent, middle school classrooms much more than elementary school classrooms (given widespread nonconsumption in areas such as advanced courses and foreign languages).
High school and middle school design typically features course-by-course modular architecture, which allows for modular online courses to be substituted into the system more readily.
What is to become of schools?
Schools may no longer have to be the primary source for content and instruction, but can instead focus their capabilities on other core services.
(1) Deeper Learning
With the migration of content and instruction online, some schools are starting to find systematic ways to help students apply their knowledge and skills in a physical context.
The Socratic discussions teach students to talk, listen, and challenge ideas in a face-to-face circle of peers and guides.
The projects require the students to work in face-to-face teams to apply the concepts they learn during individual work time and Socratic discussions. They also foster a ‘‘need to know’’ to motivate the online learning and provide a public, portfolio-based way for students to demonstrate achievement.
As online learning helps students to know, schools should be able to focus increasingly on helping students to do and to be.
(2) Safe Care
(3) Wraparound Services
E.g. counselling services, academic monitoring, development of self-direction in students, community services.
(4) Fun with Friends and Extracurricular Activities
Part 2: Mobilising
Chapter 3: Start with the Rallying Cry
The most successful blended-learning programmes are much more deliberate and generally share a common starting point: they begin by identifying the problem to solve or the goal to achieve.
They start with a clear rallying cry - a clear statement of intent about what all that computing power will accomplish.
Avoid the trap of ‘‘technology for technology’s sake’’ by beginning with a clearly articulated problem or goal that does not reference technology.
The problem or goal must instead be rooted in improving educational effectiveness—by such means as boosting student out- comes or opportunities, doing more with less, or improving the ability of teachers to do their jobs.
Defining the Problem or Stating the Goal
The most successful blended programs begin generally in response to a desire to:
(1) boost student achievement and quality of life through personalization
(2) provide access to out-of-reach courses and opportunities,
(3) improve a school system’s financial health, or
(4) a combination of all three
Should Leaders Focus on Sustaining or Disruptive Rallying Cries?
Both are essential!
Much of their core curriculum through the factory model and will continue to do so for years to come.
At the same time, blended learning is successfully tackling tough problems for core subjects, which suggests that leaders should pay close attention to the benefits it could bring to all traditional classrooms.
Why ignore an opportunity to improve on what we have?
To address both opportunities strategically and meaningfully, the key is to divide the two categories and brainstorm sustaining goals separate from disruptive goals. The broader reason to look at the categories separately is that sustaining and disruptive innovations serve different purposes and follow different patterns.
Threats VS Opportunities
If one frames a phenomenon to an individual or a group as an external threat, then it elicits a far more intense and energetic response than if one frames the same phenomenon as an opportunity.
Leaders who want to transform factory-style classrooms should start by framing nonconsumption problems as external threats.
After the initial threat framing, the leader should reframe the problem as an opportunity.
If an organization persists in seeing the problem as a threat, a response called ‘‘threat rigidity’’ sets in, and it ceases to be flexible and instead focus all resources on countering the threat by reinforcing and fortifying the old model all the more tenaciously.
Instead, reframe the initiative as a pure opportunity, worthy of a flexible, opportunistic implementation plan.
Chapter 4: Organise to Innovate
Many of the changes needed to create a student-centred education system are not all contained within a single classroom; there are limitations to how much any single teacher can do.
The trick is diagnosing the desired level of change, then determining what type of team is necessary and ultimately who needs to be at the table. (i.e. need to have a sense of the scope of the change that we want to realise.)
Functional team
Works in silos; works best to make improvements at the component level; avoids bureaucratic bloat that ties many efforts down.
Functional teams are best suited to deliver sustaining innovations for problems whose solutions do not require coordination with other teaching groups or departments.
They make changes all the time without impacting the rest of the school
A combination of team meetings, research into what others with the same problem did, and professional development are sufficient to find and implement a solution to their problem. (In contrast, no amount of research and professional development are sufficient to address problems that require lightweight, heavyweight, or autonomous teams.)
Lightweight team
Suits situations in which more than one group must work together to solve a problem, but the interdependencies between the groups are predictable.
Work best to bring about sustaining innovations; department heads often form lightweight teams to coordinate activities across the various subject areas.
Team members should represent the interests of their departments or classrooms throughout the process.
Heavyweight team
For when looking for a significant or breakthrough improvement—one that rethinks the architecture of the product itself.
E.g. changing the architecture of the school or district itself.
A manager with significant decision-making authority must lead the team; team members must leave behind departmental interests and instead work collectively to meet the project’s goal.
Autonomous team
Critical when the task at hand involves launching a disruptive model.
E.g. when initiatives are intended to replace the traditional classroom with an entirely new education model.
Key dimensions of autonomy relate to processes and priorities.
An autonomous team has the freedom to rebuild the budget, staffing plan, facilities design, and curriculum from the ground up.
Such autonomy is crucial because successful disruption is a two-part game — the new technology is the first part, but a new context is equally important, if not more so. Without a new context, the technology ends up layered on top of the existing model, and when the dust settles, little is different.
Tl;dr:
Classroom-level projects that do not require substantial or unpredictable changes to existing processes are the best fits for functional or lightweight teams. Architectural changes that require new types of interactions and coordination among different groups need a heavyweight team. Disruptive projects that do away with classrooms altogether and replace them with a new learning model are best suited to autonomous teams that can approach the solution from a new context and operate within a different set of priorities.
Picking the right mix of team members who are already excited to innovate—but also involving skeptics to hear their views or keep them involved so they don’t derail a project in a heavyweight team—can be an important, but tricky, balancing act.
Part 3: Designing
Chapter 5: Motivate the Students
When schools get the design right from the students’ perspective, they feel that school aligns well with the things that matter to them, and therefore show up to school motivated and eager to learn.
The key is to crawl into the learners’ skin and see their circumstances—including their anxieties, immediate problems, and innate motivations—from their point of view.
First, they want to feel successful. They want to feel that they are making progress and accomplishing something, rather than experiencing nothing but repeated failure or running up against walls.
Second, they want to have fun with friends. That means they want positive, rewarding social experiences with others, including with peers, teachers, coaches, and other potential friends.
Traditional classrooms are not optimised to help students form positive relationships.
Whole-group lectures offer little opportunity for students to form relationships with each other or with the teacher during that time.
Schools themselves are stretched to provide a full suite of academic, extracurricular, and social services. The elimination of bullying and the assurance of a safe, positive environment can fall through the cracks.
Architecture of a Job
Ultimately, and perhaps counter-intuitively, understanding the job—more than understanding the customer—is what matters.
This is because ultimately every customer is different, and how they take to the ‘job/product’ will be different; simply aggregating their experiences to design the product may lead to a “one-size-fits-none” experience.
Is it that they (customers) don’t know what they want/ why they make certain decisions?
Or rather they know what the job is better?
(1) The lesson itself? (2) Learning experience? (3) Wider school experience?
Fulfilling the Job for Students
Some meta-experiences that are critical from the students’ perspective:
1. Student Agency
For students to feel successful and make progress every day, one essential element is empowering them to set individual learning goals for their own personal learning plans and then providing them with enough time and the right processes each day to make progress toward those individualized goals.
Students need to experience making personal decisions about the direction of their learning and choosing from multiple options to learn the required concepts.
2. Individual Mastery
Students should make progress as quickly or slowly as they are able to demonstrate their preparedness to move on.
Each student’s pace should be individual, not collective.
Students work on skills that are ‘‘just above’’ their own current capabilities: not too difficult and not too easy, with occasional opportunities to stretch or challenge themselves. (Zone of Proximal Development 🤣)
3. Access to actionable data and rapid feedback
Short-cycle feedback loop allows students not only to make progress—and feel ownership of their progress—in steady, frequent increments, but also to have access to actionable data.
4. Transparency in learning goals
School should provide students with a clear view of what they are trying to achieve, not just in the course of a given unit but over their entire academic career.
Having a clear picture of what competencies they will be expected to master but also a sense of the time frame in which they must master those competencies help students to stay on track to realise their broader goals for success in life.
5. Meaningful work experiences
Students are more likely to hire school when their experiences there help them connect the acquisition of knowledge with the ability to be successful in life. School is better when it feels relevant.
Schools have to help students understand the range of career opportunities and life pathways that are possible, and to help them see how learning would be critical to achieving those goals.
6. Mentoring experiences
Mentorship as a critical part of helping students learn to build social capital—or networks of people—that students can use to achieve success throughout their lives.
7. Positive group experiences
Students must have positive group experiences in which they work with others to tackle hard projects and discuss issues that are of importance to them.
8. Other cirumstances
One important question to ask when brainstorming the student experiences that are best for your community is whether there are circumstances that beg for remediation before any other learning experiences.
Adverse, stressful experiences during childhood are hugely detrimental to a child’s ability to learn.
Chapter 6: Elevate Teaching
Designing the Teacher Role from the Student Perspective
Move Beyond Lockstep Instruction
Factory-style classrooms that reward students for ‘‘just showing up and staying awake’’ no longer cut it.
Ideally, teachers should transition away from being the ‘‘sage on the stage,’’to being ‘‘guides on the side.’; ‘to be more an orchestrator and inspirer than a traditional hard-charging, follow-me-up-the-hill commander.
Designing the Teacher Role from the Teacher Perspective
We know the role of teachers is crucial from the student perspective. But to gain teachers’ buy-in, a redesigned school must benefit teachers as well.
For any innovation that requires the adoption and use of multiple stakeholders to succeed, it must fulfill all of the jobs of all of the stakeholders or else it will not work for any of the stakeholders.
The opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, but just the absence of dissatisfaction. Similarly, the opposite of loving your job is not hating it, but the absence of loving it.
Integrating Teacher Motivators into Blended Designs
1. Extending the reach of great teachers
2. Assigning individual teachers specialized responsibilities
Teachers can choose among options such as becoming:
Content experts who focus on developing and posting curriculum
Small-group leaders who provide direct instruction as part of a Station or Lab Rotation
Project designers to supplement online learning with hands-on application
Mentors who provide wisdom, social capital, and guidance
Evaluators to whom other educators can give the responsibility of grading assignments and, in some cases, designing assessments
Data experts
***specialization unlocks the motivators of responsibility, growth, and advancement
3. Allowing teachers to teach in teams
4. Awarding teachers micro-credentials for the mastery of skills
When workers are given new and more difficult tasks, they experience the motivators of growth and learning.
5. Granting authority to blended-learning teams
Chapter 7: Design the Virtual and Physical Setup
Attempting to provide the latest is an exercise in futility, as the chosen equipment will soon be outdated, often before it is even installed.
The engineering concepts of interdependence and modularity should be the centrepiece.
Rethinking Physical Space
Many blended programmes are rearranging their furniture and physical space in a more open, modular way to align with the principles of student agency, flexibility, and choice.
Chapter 8: Choose the Model
1. What problem are you trying to solve?
Sustaining models of blended learning are better matches for core problems, and disruptive models of blended learning are better matches for nonconsumption problems
Targeting disruptive models of blended learning toward areas of nonconsumption works magic in two ways.
First, because the school community’s reference point is having no option at all with respect to the particular learning opportunity, it is much more likely to be delighted with the promising but new solution.
It’s a shame not to use disruptive models to address nonconsumption.
2. What type of team do you need to solve the problem?
Functional team. The problem is a classroom, department, or grade-level problem only.
Lightweight team. The problem requires coordination with other parts of the school, outside of the classroom, department, or grade-level teachers.
Heavyweight team. The problem requires changing the architecture of the school.
Autonomous team. The problem requires a new education model entirely.
3. What do you want students to control?
the pattern in general is that stand-alone models, most commonly the Station Rotation, Lab Rotation, and Flipped Classroom, allow less student control of path and pace during face-to-face classroom time compared to other models.
4. What do you want the primary role of the teacher to be?
In certain circumstances, arguably the best thing a teacher can do for a student is deliver excellent face-to-face instruction.
In other circumstances, when students are thriving with an online experience, the most helpful role for a teacher is to move away from the front of the classroom and instead help design each student’s learning, provide support, mentor, tutor, facilitate discussions and projects, evaluate student work and mastery, and enrich.
And at times the best role for teachers is to go online themselves and bring their expertise to a global audience as online teachers.
5. What physical space can you use?
The value of an oversized classroom space is that it allows for students to flow among multiple formats and for guides to roam more easily among students at individual workstations, in learning teams, and in other breakout areas.
6. How many internet-connected devices are available?
Prioritising Options and Making the Selection
Which question matters most in your circumstance? What constraints are locked in?
Once you have prioritised the issues that matter most or are deal breakers, add up the total points for each model, based on your answers to Questions 1 through 6.
Part 4: Implementing
Chapter 9: Create the Culture
Blended learning goes hand in hand with giving students more control and flexibility. If students lack the processes and cultural norms to handle that agency, the shift toward a personalized environment can backfire.
There is a need to pay attention to designing and creating strong cultural norms to cement their design together and make it run well.
What is Culture?
‘Culture is a way of working together toward common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.’
The instinct to work together toward common goals is not formed overnight. It develops gradually over time as people in an organisation work together to solve problems and get things done.
As this process of trial and error repeats itself, the people responsible refine their learning about what matters to the organisation—the priorities of the organisation—and how to execute them—the processes. They learn which behaviours the organisation rewards and which it punishes.
Eventually the system is so internalised that these processes and priorities become reflex.
Not only is culture powerful, but it’s also durable. Proceed with caution when managing culture because it is long lasting.
How to shape culture?
Simply talking about culture is not effective.
Attempts to changing its culture by creating a ‘‘change or perish’’ crisis, only to be met with fierce resistance and little change to show for it.
Educators can deliberately build a culture by following a set of rules:
✓ Define a problem or task that recurs again and again.
✓ Appoint a group to solve the problem.
✓ If they fail, ask them to try again with a different process.
✓ If they succeed, ask the same group to repeat the process every time the problem
recurs.
✓ Write down and promote your culture.
✓ Live in a way that is consistent with the culture.
Examples of culture:
Everyone can serve as a learner and a Guide. Coaching duties are spread throughout the community in a voluntary system of exchange, where the greatest gifts and needs can be matched to each other.
The quality of work is judged by peers, often against a world-class example, or rated by visitors at a studio exhibition. The best work is captured in electronic and hard-copy portfolios and will be used when students pitch for apprenticeships.
Guides serve students and parents as if they were valued part- ners; anonymous weekly customer-satisfaction surveys are sent to students and parents, and the results are published.11
The Power of Culture for Children
After establishing that skill, teach the children how; then, let them set the goal.
E.g. classroom culture:
Students know that when they are in a learning environment, there should be no down time.
Having students move efficiently between activities and from nonlearning activities into learning ones was therefore of vital importance so that students would not waste time once they arrived at their next activity and lose precious minutes of learning.
Positive Classroom Culture:
When a positive classroom culture is in place, a teacher is not necessarily alarmed at seeing students conferring with peers during personalised-learning time.
Although it may appear chaotic, if teachers invest in creating a strong culture up front, with clear norms and expectations, then the culture will in fact be quite structured, with clear methods to the madness.
The key is not that schools should always be quiet or always be boisterous, but that they should be silent when students need to be silent to maximize their learning and boisterous when noise and collaboration are in order.
The imperative for blended-learning teachers in this new environment is to be able to shape the culture into one of high expectations and of student ownership of their own learning.
Chapter 10: Discover Your Way to Success
Innovation implies experimentation and uncertainty; proceed only when:
(1) You have a plan that addresses all of the important details required for success,
(2) The plan makes as much sense to all members of the organization as they view the world from their own context as it does to the person making the plan, so that everyone will act appropriately and consistently.
(3) Outside forces—such as the reaction of teachers/students or the impact of other schools, programmes, or technology — must be reasonably stable and predictable as the plan unfolds.
Discovery-driven Planning:
Helps reduce the risks of innovation
1. Start with the desired outcome in mind
List all of the assumptions that must prove true in order to realize the desired outcomes.
Which of the assumptions (if any), if proved untrue, would most seriously derail the success of the project? Will it require a major overhaul of the plan? Is the impact just minor and does it require only a few tweaks?
If being wrong will be catastrophic to the project, assign it a priority value of 1; if it’s no big deal, assign it a 3.
Ask how confident you are that each assumption is correct.
A fun test of how confident people are is to see if they are willing to give up one year’s salary if they are wrong — meaning they have a high degree of confidence that they know the answer.
A rank of 3 signals real confidence, whereas a rank of 1 means no confidence at all that the assumption is correct.
Rank the assumptions from the most to the least crucial.
2. Implement a plan - to learn more
Implement a plan to learn—as a way to test, as quickly and cheaply as possible, whether the critical assumptions are reasonable. If the assumptions prove true, then organizations can invest in executing the strategy.
Plan to check the most important assumptions—those in Zone 1—first because those are the assumptions with the least confidence behind them that are also the most crucial to the project’s success.
It is often helpful to create what people call the ‘‘minimum viable product’’; this means slapping together the simplest product or prototype that allows the testing of the salient assumptions as quickly as possible.
As the team moves closer and closer to launch, the tests should become more comprehensive and precise—and perhaps more costly.
But the important thing is to not invest a lot of time and resources early before knowing whether the assumptions are proving true—or at least are in the right ballpark.
Create checkpoints to systematically test the assumptions—the checkpoints are specific dates when tests of several assumptions should be completed, so that the team can come together and evaluate what it has learned, as we discuss in the next step.
After the model is launched, there should be ongoing checkpoints to allow the team to step back and see what it has learned and might want to adjust, so that continuous improvement becomes baked into the team’s DNA.
One reason for designing and executing tests before rolling out the whole plan is to try to figure things out before going too far down the road with an implementation
Conclusion
Innovating is a process, not an event.
Following this process once, doesn’t constitute the end of the journey.
Instilling an ethos of continuous improvement is important.
Blended learning is a team sport.
Remember to include students on the team. If the role of school is to help students become successful lifelong learners, then helping them own their learning — developing student agency — is critical.
Schools should help them have increasing levels of control over the time, place, path, and pace of their learning. Not only that, but students can also assist in teaching and tutoring.
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