starfish

Every starfish story1 matters

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starfish

Where would we be without other people’s ideas and perspectives? Without being able to see through another person’s eyes and re-see ourselves through their stories? You’re wearing Lululemon! Is it the best place to get running gear? And why (!!) are you are moving to China? Our lives are totally infused with the perspectives and patterns of others — families, friends, colleagues, and advisors. With people we value, every comment offered is a potential waypoint nudging our thinking and refreshing the way we see the world.

But, as dispensers of words, we’re often unaware of the influence they have on the receiver. Significant chains of events can stem from a passing conversation — or sometimes even from things we don’t remember we said. Pro-Vice Chancellor Māori at the University of Waikato, Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith tells a wonderful story about the importance of kind words, as she recalls a student who unexpectedly came to visit her after an absence of nearly twenty years. It seems that the professor’s words of encouragement and vision to the then struggling student so long ago had sustained this young woman through an epic journey of academic and personal success. When the student returned to thank her, Professor Tuhiwai Smith thought back to her own wish to improve “the life chances, opportunities, and frameworks for Māori”. She was surprised to find herself achieving this with a few wise words whose particular weave had lasted through time; inspiring and protecting a learner.

Listening to stories from the heart such as this can be magic — stories speak to a very smart place in us where we tend to remember what we heard. Sometimes, as a result, we change the way we operate — not because someone told us to — but, because we ‘saw’ and discovered for ourselves something shiny and valuable in there, and we decided to have it too. In this purposeful listening, we give ourselves the space and the key to unlock our own door to empathy, intuition, and new possibilities for understanding. This is powerful learning, and very different from being in the “They’re-telling-me-what-to-do’’ space.

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conversation

Feeling you need to have that conversation?…Help is here

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conversation
Photo: Allie Lehman

The other day I asked a scientist from a research company about what was important to him in employing new people. Unhesitatingly he replied:

“More and more, I’m finding that the way we communicate with all sorts of people is really important. This is actually what we’re looking for – people who can communicate with each other so they can collaborate and also with the ability to work with our diverse clients to ensure their needs are met. So they need to be good listeners first. We can get ten people with the knowledge background we need, but we need communicators …”

We’re hearing this everywhere. So what does this mean for our learning places? For learners in the classroom and for teachers and leaders needing to provide good role models? What does it mean for the raft of others working in schools — community workers, advisors and facilitators?

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Story Hui — a design for social good

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Good design

Image: Sebastian Holmbäck and Ulrik Nordentoft. From Normann Cpenhagen website

Good design needs to make life better for us in some way — and that is not just about appearance. Design also needs to perform, to change our experience and fulfil its purpose.

Does the beautiful chair with its natural pine legs and elegant shape feel comfortable to sit in? Does the fancy potato peeler you bought from the kitchen shop actually work? A well-designed chair — or even your new potato peeler— needs to do the job better — and in doing so — somehow improve our lives.

As we fully engage with the new learning world, taking with us our old mishmash of broken furniture and ideas, we can see that nowhere is there more need for good design than in the ways we collaborate and think together. Impressively rising from the industrial rubble we have architecturally designed learning spaces and compelling digitally inspired pedagogies. But our ability to humanly engage in powerful dialogue — to really think together, to truly share, and to pool our intelligence not just our knowledge — this needs smart social design. As we make our own personal shifts from ‘me’ to ‘we’, ideas around the principles of social enterprise, social design, and social entrepreneurship offer us some direction.

Story Hui — designed for our 21st Century world

Story Hui has been created around a theory of social design (see MOMA Director Antonelli – Design’s positive influence on the world), and is a hand-in-glove fit with our complex 21C world of capabilities and work. The Story Hui process itself manages to elicit many of these capabilities in participants as they work together. It involves group storytelling that:

 

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Government will spend $359m on education – could this lead to a more collaborative approach for us all?

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$359M to education

A $359m education initiative announced by the Prime Minister last week has a direct focus on raising student achievement. It involves recognising excellent educators by creating four new management roles for schools – change principals, executive principals, expert teachers and lead teachers. A major tenet of the plan will be a focus on collaboration between schools.

If National wins the election, it plans to introduce the four new roles from next year.

Change principals: tasked with turning around a struggling school. Twenty positions nationwide, each receiving a $50,000 allowance per year on top of their base salary.

Executive principals: ‘highly capable principals’ with a proven track record who will lead and mentor other principals in their community. Two hundred and fifty positions nationwide, $20,000 allowance per year.

Expert teachers: will work with the executive principals in specific areas like maths, science, technology and literacy. One thousand positions nationwide, $20,000 allowance per year.

Lead teachers: ‘highly capable’ teachers with a proven track record who will act as a role model for teachers in the wider community. They will have an open classroom to allow other teachers to observe and learn. Five thousand nationwide, $10,000 allowance per year.
 
The commitment of such a large sum of money to support what is effectively a 'culture-change' strategy for New Zealand education heralds the most significant change since the 1989 reforms of Tomorrow’s Schools which sent us along the pathway of school autonomy and competition.

PPTA President Angela Roberts says that the $359m investment, while not being a silver bullet, is a positive step and she believes that the new roles will lead to more collaborative approaches. She says that enabling schools to support each other rather than compete against each other is a good response.

Gail Gillon, pro-vice chancellor at the College of Education, University of Canterbury also welcomes the more collaborative approach and says that the government has accurately identified one of the key challenges in the schooling system.

It appears that most public response to the initiative has been cautiously optimistic. While this is a good start, as educators, we can’t afford to be uninvolved, standing back to see if it will work. Real transformation of schooling needs to involve everyone. To bridge the gap between good ideas and effective action we will need to act collectively, each one of us personally stepping outside our ‘autonomy bubbles’ and starting to make a bigger space for collaboration in our professional lives.

So how do we shift our mind frames from acting as working groups – as people acting alongside each other, to functioning as teams where collective action contributes to a whole result? History has shown that events where large numbers of people have made a powerful move together have usually been born out of an experience of difficulty or injustice. Maybe education’s current disparate impact on a large percentage of New Zealand children makes this one of those important times.

However with the best will in the world, we can’t all be executive principals and lead teachers. So where to begin? Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher is about small, sustainable acts and appropriate technologies. His notion of ‘smallness within bigness’ is useful in determining the value of our individual input. We can start small.

So, in partnership  with National’s initiative, what if several thousand acts of real collaboration and teamwork by New Zealand teachers were equally as powerful as an investment of $359m? Working together, could we exponentially increase this investment in our future?

Let’s not just stand back to see what happens, let’s lean in, operate within Schumacher’s ‘smallness within bigness’ notion and function as a team with this initiative. An opportunity for a ‘leg up’ has appeared – let’s take it.

For all of the officially released documentation about the initiative see http://www.minedu.govt.nz/theMinistry/EducationInitiatives/InvestingInEducationalSuccess/KeyInformation.aspx

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