Disruption

Reflective practice and lifelong learning, are fundamental dispositions for educators in Aotearoa. We are guided by a professional code which asks us to demonstrate a commitment to providing high-quality and effective teaching, to analyse and review our teaching practice, and to innovate through inquiry. While we proudly claim a world-class education system, in terms of educational equality, New Zealand ranks in the bottom third of all OECD countries (UNICEF Office of Research, 2018). It is increasingly evident that disruption is needed. Disruptive education calls for us to go further, moving beyond our pursuit of improved practice to creating entirely new ways of doing things which make the old methods obsolete.

People of Aotearoa have a whakapapa of disruption. Linked by the histories of our land, we all share a connection to Māui; well known for his stories of innovation and disruptive action.

Māui the disruptor: At one time, all the fire in the world needed continual tending as only the flames of another fire could be used to start a new one. Māui, the disruptor, wondered what would happen if all those fires went out, he leapt to action extinguishing every last spark. The disappearance of their vital fire threw the people into turmoil; Māui needed to find a new solution. So he sought out Mahuika, goddess of fire. Mahuika was open to hearing Māui’s plea and offered a new flame so that Māui could return fire to the world. However, Māui was not satisfied with the idea of reverting to the way things had been. He destroyed each flame Mahuika offered and challenged her to consider a new approach. Drained of all but her final spark she flung her last flame toward Māui, setting alight the forest behind him. Honoured by this gift the trees guarded the spark now within them. From then on, by rubbing two sticks together from these trees Mahuika’s flame would be released. Now people possessed a source of fire, disrupting the old practice of flame keeping, as a new and more efficient approach, became available to the people of the world. (Grace, 2019)

This story of how Māui brought fire to the world helps us to understand the potential for disruptive change, that displacing established practices can create a place for us to consider an entirely new way of reaching our goals. So how did Māui embrace disruption? His curious nature helped him to think beyond the comfortable norm. Māui’s bravery meant that he fearlessly acted on his hunch to explore beyond current circumstances. His steady tenacity enabled Māui to persevere in his pursuit of a new more effective solution.

The teaching and learning in many of our institutions undeniably looks, sounds and feels comparable to the systems of 100 years ago. We must acknowledge that many of these old approaches no longer serve the goals and visions of learners today. It seems that innovators in education have not yet disrupted the current state enough to force the shifts needed to reimagine an education system which equitably serves the needs of all stakeholders and their communities. So, how might we get there? What are we doing to enable disruption in our education settings? Moreover, are we going far enough?

One way for us to facilitate disruption is by embracing new technologies. Technology can act as a catalyst for disruptive change. Consider how the entertainment giant Netflix utilised the technology available to disrupt the entertainment industry. Providing a more efficient system, which met the developing needs and expectations of its users rendered the previous models insufficient and led to the demise of preceding giants who chose to retain the walk-in video store models which had served them well in the past.

It is the evolving needs of its users which drives disruptive change in any industry. As we are challenged to embrace disruption in education, we should reflect on who it is that our education system is working to serve. Learners placed at the heart of learning should be empowered to drive disruption. Those holding power to enable disruptive change in education will determine the future of our communities. Let us consider who has been empowered by our existing systems to affect change and how we might deconstruct these power structures to bring all stakeholders to the table. There is massive potential for these shifts to enhance our nation’s commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi in upholding Kāwanatanga, Tino Rangatiratanga and Ōritetanga. We should appreciate not just the impact that disruptive education might have on our communities but also the impact that our communities might have on disruption in education.

He whakatōhenehene te karawhiu! Kia mārama ki ngā karawhiunga o te whakatōhenehene i te ao ako me te wātea o ētahi tū āhuatanga ki te whakatōhenehene.

The new norm. Recognising the impact of disruptive forces in our educational context and harnessing the opportunities to disrupt the status quo.

Examining trends in education may be one way that we can predict where disruption is most likely to take place. Consider how these Ten Trends are causing disruption in current practice and how we might explore the potential for these trends to disrupt our teaching and learning contexts.

A focus on wellbeing
Cultural narratives
Social mapping
Real-time reporting
Schools as part of the community
Changing role of teachers
Micro-credentialing
Big data, small data
Human capital
Understanding success

The CORE uLearn19 conference themes of Kirirarautanga | Citizenship, Whakatōhenehene | Disruption and Auahatanga | Innovation intertwine to help us to recognise new ways to effect positive change. The following focus questions empower us to consider our role in influencing disruption:

How do we build the capacity for continuous disruptive change in ourselves and our learners? What competencies are required
How can we disrupt in mana enhancing and inclusive ways?
Where disruptions are evident in your educational setting, how do we know that they are occurring for the better?
How can we understand and respond to the disruptions that are happening in our society? What have we learned from past disruptions to take us into the future?
What effect is digitisation having on the workplace and how can we best utilise the opportunities?

Imagine the impact of an education system, which genuinely reflects the needs of those it serves. When all learners, educators, whānau and community are empowered to be disruptors in our education system, we will witness disruptive changes which move beyond doing the same things in better ways, to being presented with new ways of reaching our evolving goals. As we embrace our innate Māuitanga and the qualities of curiosity, bravery and perseverance bestowed on us by our whakapapa as New Zealanders, we will discover new ways of teaching, new ways of learning, and new ways of being, to share with the world.

edSpace is CORE Education’s online network for educators to connect with others, discuss strategies, and share information – join edSpace here. Once you’re there, head to our uLearn discussion forum, and join the discussion about Disruption.

What actions might you take toward activating disruptive change?

References
CORE Education. (2019). Ten Trends. Retrieved March 19, 2019, from http://core-ed.org/research-and-innovation/ten-trends/

Grace, W. (2019). How Māui brought fire to the world / Māori Myths, Legends and Contemporary Stories / Te Reo Māori / Support materials / Home – Mātauranga Māori. Retrieved from http://eng.mataurangamaori.tki.org.nz/Support-materials/Te-Reo-Maori/Maori-Myths-Legends-and-Contemporary-Stories/How-Maui-brought-fire-to-the-world

Iny, D. (2018) Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners, and Experts with Something to Teach. Washington, Columbia Country: Influential Marketing Group.

Ministry of Education. (2019). Kia Takatū ā-Matihiko. Retrieved March 19, 2019, from https://kiatakatu.ac.nz

UNICEF Office of Research (2018). ‘An Unfair Start: Inequality in Children’s Education in Rich Countries’, Innocenti Report Card 15, UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, Florence. Retrieved March 19, 2019, from https://innocenti.unicef.org.nz/

Photo by Yaoqi LAI on Unsplash

Change is the new black

Educational change is inevitable and it’s all the rage (although some may argue with the second half of that sentence). A rapidly evolving and turbulent world, our growing understanding of the nature of learning and, in New Zealand, the need to change how our education system performs so that Māori students enjoy and achieve education success as Māori (Ka Hikitia – Accelerating Success 2013–2017); all mean that educational evolution is here to stay.

The challenge with educational change these days seems to be the amount and sometimes exponential pace of it. This volume and speed creates a need to look past previous iterative approaches to improving teaching and learning, and instead, become transformational as we strive to evolve our own practice in both a rapid, and meaningful way.

However, effectively managing transformational change is a change in itself. Transformation calls for innovation, risk-taking and creativity; and engaging in mahi where the outcomes may be unknown. Without resources, time and support, this form of change can feel overwhelming, laborious and like it’s ‘on top of’ an already saturated workload.

In a previous post I co-authored with my colleague, Rachel Westaway, we suggested that school leaders explore Agile values and principles to support transformation and innovation in schools.
In this post, I will delve deeper into an agile tool called ‘sprints’ that supports teams to work through transformational change; hopefully experience some creative freedom; and provides a framework and process that promotes embracing uncertainty while minimising risk. This way, managing change and innovation should not be overwhelming and may actually be enjoyable.

What are sprints?

The concept of sprints originated in the IT/project management world where they are one of the key components of the scrum framework, supporting people to work collaboratively to address complex problems and unpredictability. Scrum is founded on agile principles, with an emphasis on creating value, and making progress through regular reflection, adaptation and teamwork.

Sprints enable teams to work collaboratively to tackle large problems or significant change by breaking down the work into small, time-boxed, increments (a.k.a sprints) and focusing on what is most important.

In the education world, the sprint approach can be used to manage, improve and innovate on practice to support our learners’ needs, allowing educators to be more adaptable, creative and flexible in working through significant change. Sprints can be anywhere from one to three weeks long (as a guide only). Put simply:

Using a sprint approach can break down and simplify what can seem to be an overwhelming, long-term challenge, into smaller manageable parts.

Agile Schools has developed Learning Sprints; a programme that provides tools, resources and professional learning. They recommend 3 key phases in a ‘learning sprint’:

1. Prepare

a. Define: What student learning outcome do we want to focus our practice improvement on? For which students? What evidence justifies this decision?
b. Design: What small, specific actions can we take in our classrooms to improve student learning?
c. Assess: What evidence of student learning will we collect?

2. Sprint

a. Teach: In what ways are we deliberately improving our teaching practices?
b. Monitor: How are we collecting evidence of student learning? What is it telling us?
c. Support: How are we harnessing peer and expert feedback?

3. Review

a. Analyse: What progress did students make and how did our actions contribute to this?
b. Transfer: How can we transfer what we’ve learned into future practice and ways of working together?
c. Reset: What professional learning could we engage in next, in order to help us maximise our impact on student learning?

Implementing sprints in a teaching inquiry

The sprint process is strongly underpinned by evidence-based practice and therefore aligns closely with the Spiral of inquiry. Used as an approach within a longer-term inquiry, sprints can provide an opportunity to evaluate the impact of our actions over many cycles within the wider inquiry space. Not only does this allow new learning to become embedded in the way we work but the speed (velocity in ‘scrum speak’) at which the team can move and adapt is accelerated.

However, before contemplating the use of sprints within an inquiry, it is important to discover and define what is going on with our learners. The scanning and focusing phases of a teaching inquiry will support us to create collective learner statements about targeted students in a particular educational community. We can then explore how these challenges relate to the nature of learning (OECD 7 principles of learning) and the Key Competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). The NZCER Remixing the Key Competencies: A curriculum design deck is useful for this. In developing a hunch we look at our own practices attached to any challenge/s.

This work might look something like this:

Diagram: Fionna Wright – CORE Education, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

When working collectively through the inquiry phases we should discover overarching themes, for example:

“Our learners are engaged in learning activities outside of school and are far more engaged at school when learning is personally meaningful to them.”

The challenge for us therefore is to design learning activities that are more meaningful for students with a diverse range of cultural backgrounds, interests and learning needs. (The creation of User stories to support this thinking is another useful agile approach but this will need to wait for another blog).

So, what do we need to learn and how will we take action, and check that we are making enough of a difference for our students?

Using sprints to manage, improve and innovate on practice in a collaborative, structured, iterative way; whilst collecting relevant evidence to measure the impact of our ideas and actions, helps us figure out what to learn and the necessary actions to take in an adaptive way. It helps us therefore to develop adaptive expertise–the ability to apply new knowledge ideas and skills flexibly and creatively. (Dumont, Istance and Benavides 2010, 3).

This is the approach that Agile Schools has taken with a range of activities in their Learning Sprints toolkit. Amongst these in their Define phase is Boulder, Pebble, Sand. This activity allows us to break down our learner challenge into bite-sized chunks of practice that we can then review, transfer and adapt new learning and ideas before going into another sprint.

It is important to note that, whilst I believe the outline of this activity is useful, I would lean more towards ‘doing with’ students and possibly whānau in identifying and developing learning outcomes. That is to say, if our challenge is to design learning activities that are more meaningful for students with a diverse range of cultural backgrounds, interests and learning needs, it would seem to be reasonable to co-design learning outcomes and activities with the students rather than for them. I also wonder if we should change the language from ‘learning outcome’ to ‘student-valued outcome’. This places more emphasis on designing a response to challenges or opportunities around the nature of learning and the key competencies in the NZC. It also supports the design and implementation of learning experiences that are more human-centred. The Guide to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is useful for this.

Reviewing a sprint

The review of a sprint can look a little bit like a SCRUM meeting in which teams review the evidence collected during the last sprint. Using the Learning Sprints Check-in Tool teams ask questions like:

What learner progress did we see?
What did we learn?
What worked well?
What didn’t work well?
Where to next?

Recording individual ideas on post-it notes to move around and look for patterns, positives, needs and gaps is helpful when answering questions. For example:

Images: Fionna Wright – CORE Education, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This process leads to a collective, in-depth examination of practice that supports the transfer of new learning and consideration of next steps.

So, if the concept of breaking down large, often long-term challenges into a small, structured, incremental steps appeals to you, then sprints might be a process that is worth considering. I’m in my early days of exploring this approach but I believe that, in education, sprints can:

support collaboration and innovation
provide a clear, simple process that is easy to manage
promote rich discussion and deeper learning
allow for flexibility, adaptability and innovation
encourage evidence-based practice and provide accountability
provide structure to more effectively measure the impact of actions
inform future practice.

As an aside, a useful consequence of implementing an ongoing sprint process is the development of a growing portfolio of robust evidence that reflects the Code of Professional Responsibility and Standards for the Teaching Profession (NZ Teaching Council).

If a sprint approach to managing challenging change can help us to continuously measure, adapt and improve our practice, it would be great to consider how it could also be used with our students.

Featured image by Will H McMahan on Unsplash

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