9 comments on “Investing in job redesign”

1. Thank you for writing and sharing this provocative post on the evolving roles for educators. You briefly touch upon many important technological trends, and summarize some important shifts. The most exciting, and important, advantage that technology presents is the hyper-individualization of knowledge pursuits – especially in high school and university studies. Let each student become a hunter and gather of information.

   Yet psychological identity and sociological factors will not disappear. May I suggest that emphasizing both a more global perspective and greater knowledge of local culture/traditions is another compelling aspect of a quality, renaissance education? Perhaps an explicit acknowledgement of the far more competitive, flat earth – where a child in Peru and a child in Nigeria can compete with children in the Netherlands, India, New Zealand, France, Greece, England, and the United States – would make your list more persuasive. Likewise, adding an explicit committment to democratic values – such as transparency – highlight why the children raised in Canada are more likely to be prepared for our emerging global culture than a child raised in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Openness and access to information matter.

   Or so it seems to me.

2. I agree that very little thought is going into the fundamental problem of restructuring education to take advantage of new technology. I’d have to say take the money from tech, teachers and specialists and create the following:

   1. Instructional Designer team so you never have to purchase textbooks or print materials and focus on rapid e-learning and customizing e-learning for local students.

   2. Have teachers teach 50% F2F and 50% online. They can teach more students and have more one-to-one interaction.

   3. Develop a new breed of highly trained mentors. They can be counselor, tech assistant and help with student management (i.e. discipline).

   This would completely re-purpose funding to support student choices and online learning implementation.

   Don aka drsgtbrown

3. David, one of your early posts, Slowly by Slowly (http://bit.ly/ilrBDX) motivated me to share some of my views about change and systemic inertia. I believe that Snyder’s work is asking educators to broaden their search for solutions beyond learning. As both an educational publisher who risked a career by pursuing digital resource development in the 90’s (perhaps more about that later) and a business process consultant through much of the last decade, I have seen his financial model from many perspectives. The veracity of the numbers partly underlies my perspective on systemic inertia.

   How do I interpret “This is the time to be re-inventing American education – class-by-class, school-by-school – from the bottom up, in what Thomas Jefferson called the “civic laboratories” of our state and local governments”. I interpret him to be asking “How can a system (education) that spends most of its finances on labor and capitol investments (buildings) optimize the power of digital when it can only spend a very small percent of its revenue on those digital investments”. His suggestion is to rethink the financial underpinnings if you want a different result.

   What might that mean in human terms? Below are two provocative ideas that provide evidence-base practices (EBP) from different cultures and represent the scope of change he is advocating.

   1. After WW 11, Japan rebuilt its education system and one of the things it did was to have students be responsible for school cleanliness. (I don’t know if this was the continuation of earlier practice or an innovation motivated by post-war shortages.) Perhaps they wanted to save money or perhaps they wanted to have children develop the responsibility to maintain a clean work place. As current custodial staff retires, might we adopt that idea and rethink how we maintain cleanliness in our schools. The savings could be redirected to support digital learning.
   2. Sugatra Mitra (http://bit.ly/aA4NX9) talks about using the Granny Cloud as a way to make knowledgeable and committed older people a valuable asset in children’s learning. I wonder if he would feel comfortable in considering that as an EBP based on how First Nations understand and value the contributions come from elders. Might some of our senior citizens contribute to having a largely volunteer component in public education without a commensurate increase in cost?

   David, I fully understand why thinking about these types of changes are not part of the dialogue. But when you combine this post with George Couros’s recent post Do Something (http://bit.ly/jZFIaD), this is where both your ideas point my thinking.

   Neither of these may be the correct or optimal change, but I interpret them to be the type of system changes that need to be considered if we really want change learning across the landscape.

4. My apologies for the late response. I wrote a rather lengthy one and was almost done, then let my laptop battery die and lost it. In trying to rewrite, I found that I could not recapture my points. I went on in a rather lengthy way about how my experience in China (coupled with recent challenges in the middle east) has led me to see that democracy would destroy China right now. In coming back to this post again now, I realize Eric was talking about ‘an explicit commitment to democratic values’ and that is actually different altogether than what I went on about. So I’m refocused now and ready to look at redesign.

   Eric,
   Local identity and global perspective are key elements of a great education today! An excellent addition to where education is shifting:
   Transparency (open teaching),
   Responsibility (before accountability),
   Individualization (customized tools and learning),
   Permanence (of teaching and learning products), AND
   Perspective (local & global)

   I fear that inequalities in transparency, openness and resources will only be magnified around the globe before things get better.

   Don,
   Here is my slant on your 3 points:

   1. I like ‘Instructional Designer’ and wonder if that couldn’t be done at a Provincial level (in Canada) rather than school districts replicating everything?

   2.I’m actually heading back to a job, ‘VP of LINC’, that includes in its umbrella ‘online learning’ and one of the things my district does is put their online teachers into the high schools as their home base, to help promote F2F/Blended learning as part of what they do. I’m excited to see what that looks like when I get back!

   3. This is an interesting new mentorship role, for supporting online learners, which I had not thought of before.

   Martin,
   You’ve offered two insightful and quite different suggestions and my perspective on the two vary significantly.

   1. I don’t want my kids cleaning a school. I want my kids being provided an excellent learning environment and I want them to come home excited about their day, not telling me that they moped the cafeteria floor after lunch. Cost saving is important, but when a principal or teacher have to clean up vomit, I’m not sure their expertise is being used in a thoughtful way, (the custodial support has been increased in the schools mentioned in the link for the upcoming school year). I want my kids to learn about responsibility and caring for their community, but custodial support is important. I’d like to see more of an effort to connect custodial support to the learning community at schools, but not have them removed for cost savings.

   2. I love the Granny Cloud and think it should be expanded to the entire community: What if an accounting firm let one of their accountants work at a high school as a tutor or offering tutorial support one afternoon a week? What if a stay-at-home-parent group went around to several schools offering ‘literacy circle’ support to schools as they ran a program one-month at a time? And at the other end of the spectrum, what if students volunteered at an after school program to help parents new to the country with conversational English? I think we can go a long way to tap into the resources of the community and make schools truly community schools. Great cost savings and a better local ‘perspective’ Eric mentions above. (Thanks for helping me think big on this topic.)

   Thanks to all three of you for your insightful comments!

5. Hello David,

   Thanks for the feedback to the two ideas I put forward. They are simply tactics to deal with the heart of the problem Snyder is talking about. Successful deployment of technology has three large cost centres (equipment, training, and culture change). Collectively, they are beyond the boundaries of current educational funding paradigms. Do you agree with that premise?

   If you don’t agree, the rest of my position is far less relevant.

   If you do, how does a county – and clearly he was talking about the US but it certainly applies to Canada – rethink the paradigms in order to successfully imbed 21st century learning into the mainstream of education?

   My view has been formed by working with educators, raising children, developing learning resources (print and digital), visiting 100’s of primary and junior high school classrooms, managing white and blue collar staffs, and consulting with public and private sector organizations. As it relates to learning, intrinsic motivation is more effective than extrinsic motivation; given an EFFECTIVE LEADER, digital tools can be highly successful in promoting intrinsic motivation for a significant number of learners (especially but not exclusively those that experience a sense of failure about learning); the human cost of not optimizing every child’s potential is not tenable; current school systems are unable to finance (as per Snyder) the transition and then sustain the change broadly and hence reduces the number of learners who will achieve their potential. Hence look for different models to deal with the underlying financial challenges so you can increase the success rate.

6. Thanks for continuing the conversation Martin!

   “Successful deployment of technology has three large cost centres (equipment, training, and culture change). Collectively, they are beyond the boundaries of current educational funding paradigms.”

   I agree with this, but I do think (should I be saying hope?) things are changing. The elements are getting cheaper as:
   a) Students bring their own ever-decreasing-in-price equipment/laptops/internet-ready-devices to school;
   b) Open-ware provides cheaper alternatives to engaging tools, social software, and even training;
   c) The option to be a disconnected or un-engaged educator is diminishing.
   We are NOT there yet, but I see this on the horizon.

   So, my thoughts on finding different models to support positive sustained change:

   • Start with some effective leadership as you suggest!
   • Use open software rather than expensive learning management systems.
   • Support students bringing their own devices to school. (Yes you can subsidize for those that can not afford this, and from what I’ve seen, electronic device rental to needy children tends to be very well taken care of.)
   • Look to the community for meaningful connections (#2 in my comment above.)
   • Decrease the amount of content covered in many course so that teachers and students can spend time ‘uncovering’ the curriculum rather than trying to ‘cover’ it.
   • Integrate blended programs where students are connecting both digitally and face-to-face.
   • Spend on providing teachers with time in their schedules for learning. (Use cost savings elsewhere, but actually spend on restructuring and job-redesign as Snyder suggests.)

   That’s a start anyway… things that I believe will make the education model more sustainable and, I would hope, more successful.

   I love this point that you make, it epitomizes the need for meaningful, urgent change: “the human cost of not optimizing every child’s potential is not tenable”.

7. I am delighted to continue this conversation.

   I believe all of your suggestions above point in directions that can contribute to the change envisioned. But returning to one of my underlying beliefs, achieving these types of changes at the unit level is very different than achieving it at a system level. (Remember “Systemic Inertia”.)

   I like to apply a particular lens to thinking about change. I refer to it as removing “barriers to success”. I understand where I want to go, but I know that there are hurdles to get there. What are they and how do you deal with them.

   Let me give you an example from my earlier publishing career. In the mid 90’s I championed a project that became “The Learning Equation”. It was a partnership between four provinces, two territories and a publisher to develop a digital and comprehensive grade 9-12 mathematics program. For the sake of this example, let me limit my story to the process to write content.

   In general, we came to understand that developing digital content that was equivalent in depth, breadth, curricular applicability, student appeal, assessment support, etc. needed to cover a lesson, required about seven times more writing resources (that does not include design, editing or programming) than to develop the comparable print resources. That actually translated into needing about five years to develop a years worth of digital content (vs. about one year of effort to develop similar coverage in print). I saw the amount of time needed as a “barrier to success” because we had one year to complete a grade level but five years worth of work to write, architect, layout, program and test the program. I set about to understand what the component barriers were, how to deal with them and then how to implement the solution.

   Working with some excellent educators, we assembled a team of about 16 math educators/writers; developed a two week training camp to align the baseline elements (curricular objectives, pedagogy, learning structure, interactivity models, layout templates, etc); and then organized an early summer writing camp at a high school. We changed compensation models from a royalty to a fee for service (why would a teacher give up two weeks of summer on speculation). Although writing was at the core of what happened, the actual process bore no relationship to how Canadian educational publishers developed print. The writing process had to be understood in terms of its component parts and how they relate to the entire development project.

   And again, I do think your suggestions are all worthy of deep consideration. I believe that when your suggestions are considered in light of a systemic framework, you encounter “barriers to success” of a similar scope. For example:

   • Decrease the amount of content covered in many course so that teachers and students can spend time ‘uncovering’ the curriculum rather than trying to ‘cover’ it.

   What stakeholders are standing in the way of decreasing content? Let’s removed the abstraction – content – and replace it with Grade 11 Physics. Who need’s to be onside to allow the content to decrease?

   • Provincial curriculum change a is usually a 2-3 year process
   • Universities need to accept the new incoming graduates
   • Parents need to accept a different model for Physics education and know that it won’t inhibit their children’s opportunities
   • Teachers have to give up their favourite topics
   • Teacher practice needs to shift from transmitter to facilitator

   If each stakeholder represents a potential barrier to success how do you remove those barriers?

   Am I suggesting to not try to change? Absolutely not! Am I suggesting that individual efforts to move to a 21st Century (Personalized) Learning paradigm stop? Absolutely not! I am suggesting that system thinking (of which the domain of formal education is an immutable and primary component)needs to be applied to reach the goals I believe we share.

8. Great example of removing “barriers to success” given! I also like your point about system thinking and how important it is to be applied to help foster change happening (faster and more effectively than without system thinking).

   Of the points I came up with above, really just from the top of my head ~ thinking out loud ~ ‘Decrease the amount of content covered in many course[s]’ is easily the one that needs systems thinking more than the rest, and is probably the one point that faces the greatest barriers to change that I mention.

   Case in point: As a math teacher, I remember on the topic of graphing data, I recognized that the “Box and Whisker” graph was really nothing more than a “teacher tool” in that the only time in one’s life that you would see this graph is in a Math text book (or on a Math test). Required to teach it, I simply taught many other approaches then spent 10 minutes on this, showing students an example, asking them in a quick discussion to identify some information drawn from one of these graphs, (and quite honestly telling them that this was a pretty useless way to share data beyond a school Math textbook).

   BUT… I did nothing to challenge why this is part of the curriculum. I did nothing to share my views with other Math teachers in my building, much less educators with power and influence to change things. In other words I did nothing to influence systemic change.

   So, your point is well explained and well taken. If we want to see ‘real’ change, we have to find novel ways to challenge how things are normally done, and we have to be thinking about the greater system and how we can meaningfully influence it. And as hard as this is, it is worth the effort!

   Above I mentioned ‘my thoughts on finding different models to support positive sustained change’. I still think curriculum change to reduce how much is needed to be taught is a key component of this as it opens the door for innovation. Perhaps this may not happen in Physics 11 as a starting point but rather something like Planning 10 that does not have a Provincial final? In this way, ‘Teacher practice shifting from transmitter to facilitator’ can be modelled and help inspire the need to change the system.

   I’m reminded of the quote, “Adults are more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting.” We need to find ways to promote new actions that are effective and potent. Removing the barriers to success and meaningful change involves trying to do things differently at all levels… (And it also needs a few brave souls to openly, and publicly, buck the system!)

9. David, well said. As I did my morning round of twitter and blog gazing, I came across this statement at http://www.schoolcio.com/ShowArticle/39916:

   “If you were faced with the choice to change or die (literally, die), would you change?

   The answer may surprise you. In his book Change or Die, Alan Deutschman relates the tale of heart patients whose doctors told them to change their lifestyle or die within a few years. That’s a pretty clear mandate. After two years, how many do you think changed? Three quarters? Half? A third?

   Try 10%. Yep, 1 out of every 10.

   Most of us are surprised by this number because we suffer from something that social psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error (FTA). That’s the tendency to blame people for behaviors rather than systems. In other words, we assume that if people don’t change, it’s their fault. They’re not trying hard enough, or they lack motivation. But the evidence doesn’t support the theory. Often people don’t change even when faced with really big incentives, such as their own life, because the systems that surround them don’t support the change.”

   I thought you might find his perspective interesting in light of our recent conversation.

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