“One should never bring a knife to a gun fight, nor a cookie cutter to a complex adaptive system.” — Jarche, (2013)

Educators are designers of learning. Architects of experiences. Creators of discovery. We spend our careers searching for the best way to solve the wonderful problem of how to help young people learn and grow and thrive. It is second nature to seek solutions and to do so at a fair clip! Building planes while they fly is our speciality.

And therein lies the fundamental conundrum for the modern educator.

For, what we are increasingly coming to understand, through contemporary educational research related to learner-centred experiences, is that there are no swift solutions, no silver bullets and no quick-fix solutions.

And there never will be.

Darn it.

To be adaptive is ‘future-focused’

Gilbert and Bull (2015) remind us that if we want to create learner-responsive experiences, and also foster flexibility and ‘processing power’ so our young people can generate their own solutions, we also need to be ready to work in this way: … a future-oriented education system must be led by teachers who are adaptive, intellectual adults, not “consumers” of ideas, or followers of models and templates developed by others’ (p. 3).

The ability to adapt our expertise is one of the capabilities that defines educational fluency. Such educators ‘…tend to spend a greater proportion of their solution time trying to understand the problem to be solved as opposed to trying out different solutions” (Hattie, 2011, p. 6).

As educators, when we identify unexpected anomalies in our data, or when we hear that something is not working, we rush to solve the problem with what we believe is our best solution. It is likely to be based on our own considerable experience — and the best will in the world.

Even when we know that we do this, we still find ourselves falling back to solution seeking. It is challenging when we are surrounded by stories of other educators who appear to have found the solution (particularly the answer to ‘the future’!). In a recent professional session with a large group of principals, we identified a plethora of ‘solutions’ happening across our schools — coding, open classrooms, inquiry learning, BYOD, beanbags — all introduced with the absolute best of intentions, based on what we could see others doing across the sector.

Think ‘theories’, not ‘solutions’

And yet — what we must remind ourselves continually is that each and every one of these ideas is just a theory; an informed idea based on our own experiences and the experiences of others. But, because education — indeed, knowledge itself —  is mutable and complex, we must hold these ideas lightly, understand that what worked today may not work tomorrow; what worked for one school or student may not work for us. The minute we become wedded to a certain idea, we fail to adapt to the urgent and changing needs in our community.

As professionals, it is important to not only hold ideas lightly, but also hold the line around what is most likely to make a difference for our own learners and their communities. We need to adopt a robust approach to innovation and inquiry so that the introduction of new ideas is done in ways that help us stay curious about their impact. This approach might be termed ‘adaptive design’ (Bernstein & Linsky, 2016), and it offers us a way to combine deep, rigorous change leadership and innovative design processes.

So, I offer the following five notions or steps as a way to help us all hold our ideas lightly:

Do you remember the actor/director John Cusack? He of ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘Being John Malkovich’ fame?  I recently heard about ‘The John Cusack Rule’. When asked in an interview about how he saw his role as film producer, he said his main job was, ”To keep the set free from fear.”

This ‘rule’ was offered to me as a guiding principle for working in large-scale volunteering spaces — and it feels equally useful for anyone working with others through challenge and change. I have blogged twice this year about transformative change (‘Transforming learning’ and ‘Can we create conditions for transformation?’) — and this post continues this theme.

The John Cusack story was shared by Joe McCannon and Becky Kanis Margiotta, the two founders of the Billions Institute, and I was lucky enough to spend a day working with them as part of the Carnegie Summit on Improvement Science that I attended last month. Both Joe and Becky have notched up years in health and social impact fields, rehousing thousands of homeless and scaling the rollout of vital health services. Not in education — and all the more refreshing for it! Looking to other sectors can help us make new connections that can fuel innovative thinking back at base.

The following ideas were shared by them on the day and I offer them as useful nuggets to help us support and scale innovation in our own contexts.

Apparently, I once taught a ‘Grade A’ lesson. I know this because it said so on a slip of paper in the small, brown envelope that appeared in my staffroom pigeonhole following a UK school inspection (because that is how we received feedback in those days). I therefore assumed that my careful grouping of students by ability to explore poems of varying difficulty reflected best practice. I patted myself, perhaps rather smugly, on the back.

Ten years later, a chance conversation with a colleague about inclusive learning design sent me back to that lesson. As I reflected on my actions from that day with new thinking about building in support for those least well served, I began to see that my lesson (in which I made all the choices, making assumptions about students as I went) had not lined up as well with my beliefs around inclusive learning as I (smugly) thought it had.

That moment of seeing alternative ways to design more equitable learning environments was one that triggered a deep shift for me as an educator that is still colouring my work today.