Creativity in designing schools. "When people talk about how hard it is to change our public schools, they're usually referring to curriculum reform or employment contracts. But there's another area where change is difficult: design. When a proposed school building doesn't look exactly like what folks think a school should look like, officials freeze. "
"In conjuction with our partners in the Rethink Learning Now campaign, we have produced an ESEA Toolkit for you to use in making your voice heard around ESEA reauthorization."
IMAGINE AN assessment system in which teachers had a wide repertoire of classroom-based, culturally sensitive assessment
practices and tools to use in helping each and every child learn to high standards; in which educators collaboratively used
assessment information to continuously improve schools; in which important decisions about a student, such as readiness to
graduate from high school, were based on the work done over the years by the student; in which schools in networks held one
another accountable for student learning; and in which public evidence of student achievement consisted primarily of samples
from students' actual schoolwork rather than just reports of results from one-shot examinations.
The teachers understood that learning doesn’t have to be measured in order to be
assessed.
It focused on teachers’ personal “connection[s] with our subject area” as the
basis for helping students to think “like mathematicians or historians or
writers or scientists, instead of drilling them in the vocabulary of those
subject areas or breaking down the skills.” In a word, the teachers put
kids before data.
All that does is corrupt the measure (unless it’s a test score, in which case
it’s already misleading), undermine collaboration among teachers, and make
teaching less joyful and therefore less effective by meaningful criteria.
"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring,
others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be
remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought
to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a
consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the
business world or involves digital technology.
Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity,
and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless
officials to raise test scores at any cost).
With a good dose of critical
thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't
have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin
to take back our schools."
As these systems evolve, the number of inputs and outputs generally increases.
Each time a new node is added to the network, the number of potential
connections required scales exponentially
Furthermore, because there is only one standard, there is no incentive for
innovation, which means that the system cannot evolve.
Single standards are notoriously difficult to overcome or dislodge, even when
they become ludicrously inefficient, as is the case with the Western “QWERTY”
keyboard layout.
the system has great difficulty overcoming its own internal structure and
adapting to the change.
Complex systems of this type, that are too loosely structurally coupled,
maximize their openness to innovation but do so entirely at the cost of being
able to exploit those innovations when they are useful
a panarchy
The bow-tie structure manages these tensions by occupying an “edge of chaos”
zone in between too much rigidity and too much flexibility, between too little
diversity, and too much.
There is a need to capitalize on potential efficiencies in one’s current
environment while at the same time remaining flexible enough to adapt if the
environment changes
confusing the necessary cluster of evolving core elements with a “standard
Future networks operate on multiple standards in the core — optimal levels of
infrastructure arrived at by open innovation in the periphery that makes its way
into the core as adoption and usage increase.
widely agreed upon cultural understandings and practices.