collaboration-feature

Building Collaboration — chicken or egg?

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Kia ora everyone

Collaboration and how groups work together fascinates me! What is it that makes it work in some contexts and not in others? Why do some relationships and situations result in highly effective and worthwhile collaborative teams developing and flourishing, when seemingly identical ones don’t? Collaboration sometimes appears to develop in a mysterious, uncertain, and ad-hoc way. Leaders can actively build the conditions for collaboration to develop and it doesn’t; then conversely, highly effective collaborative relationships pop up in the most unexpected places in an organisation. Why does this happen?

Patrick Lencioni, in his Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2012), highlights the fundamental importance of trust in any team environment. Collaboration, I believe, can only evolve and work well in teams that also work effectively. The rest of the characteristics he identifies are built on the assumption that there is a highly trusting and strong relationship developed that is robust enough to support healthy and positive conflict and accountability. These processes also ensure a developing commitment to the goals and outcomes of the organisation as well as the people in it. The illustration below of Lencioni’s framework is based on a blog post where the author describes in detail a highly dysfunctional team.

dysfunctional team

In this video below, Lencioni expands on his thinking to discriminate between ‘predictive trust’, where you know someone well enough to be able to predict their actions and what they will do in any given situation, and ‘vulnerability-based trust’, where you are able to admit you don’t know or understand and able to be vulnerable in front of and with each other.

Patrick Lecoioni Trust

Click on the image will take you to YouTube

The challenge for change leaders in any context is the chicken-and-egg conundrum here. Doing the work and building the collaborative environment in some ways is often dependent on trust and collaboration already being in place. The difficult thing can simply be getting things underway — how to get people to begin working together and ‘suspend their disbelief’ about a process or the benefit of a change initiative long enough to get things started.

I see that strong processes and expert facilitation/leadership can be key here. It can be easier to get people to trust a process than to trust a person or leader. Engaging in the processes (like the protocols in the Learning Talk books for example) can then show people a way forward and lead to developing relationships and trust in leadership. These issues apply to all leaders, whether in formal leadership positions or not, in big contexts, or simply working with one other person.

All this is super messy. It is one of the key challenges of establishing new teams. It is also one of the exciting and hugely satisfying parts of being a leader. These skills and capacities for building trust and developing collaboration are ones that you can learn and engage with regardless of whether you are in a position of leading change in your context, in a formal or informal leadership position, or you are someone preparing yourself for leadership in the future.

So, what things have you found successful in building a team from the beginning? How have you ‘scaffolded’ people into trusting and collaborating sufficiently to begin ‘getting the job done’? How have you continued to build trust beyond the predictive into vulnerability?

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te reo Māori safe place

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

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(Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6)

te reo safe place

Recently I listened to the Radio New Zealand interview with Te Taka Keegan and something he mentioned opened an avenue of new thinking for me.

“When you become fluent, you can see things through a different lens.”

In 2007, I was privileged to be a CORE eFellow. The quote by Wittgenstein in the title of this post informed my eFellow research, which looked at podcasting as a tool to help students develop their oral language capability. My findings revealed that some students needed time to develop and become confident in their use of oral language within a safe space. In this way, they can develop the necessary skills before being expected to use those skills combined with standing in front of an audience. With podcasting, students could record and listen to themselves, and practise, and improve. They could then tentatively put this recording out to the world for others to engage with through a podcast, but still be one step removed from the oral presentation. Emboldened by the positive feedback of their peers, they could take the next step of using those oral-language skills within a real-time presentation to the class or school.

The key learning was that we needed to enable those who couldn’t speak in front of people to continue to develop the necessary skills in a different environment. And, in this way, I felt that I had supported these students to extend the limits of their world.

Now, the same quote has come to mean something more to me as the limits of my world expand.

There is a debate in New Zealand at the moment about the inclusion of te reo Māori as a compulsory subject in schools. Te reo Māori was given official language status in New Zealand in 1987, and te Tiriti o Waitangi is a founding document of this country. New Zealand is a bicultural society — so, let’s look at Keegan and Wittgenstein again:

“When you become fluent, you can see things through a different lens.”

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”

If we are truly to live the vision of being a bicultural society, shouldn’t we all expand our world and see this country through the lenses available to us? Shouldn’t we truly be able to ‘talk’ to each other and bridge the barrier that is in place through these limits? Don’t our children deserve to be able to see the world through as many lenses as possible? Especially if one crucial lens was taken away from some of our children through draconian policies that banned the use of their language in the first place.

jane nicholls

I am in the privileged position of having the choice to be part of a bicultural society. I can make the choice to see through another lens. Many of my friends do not have that choice — as someone once revealed to me:

“When my children and I open our door in the morning to head out to school, we don’t have a choice to be bicultural. We have to step out into the dominant culture and look for signs of our own culture within that world.”

I am taking the time to learn and practise my reo in a safe space, which is my very supportive workplace. Through its support and encouragement, I am emboldened to begin to expand my language as I step out into different parts of my world. Our schools can be that safe place for our children to learn and practise.

Have you found your safe place yet?

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creating or creativity

Creating or Creativity?

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Recently, I’ve found myself engaged in several conversations around what it means to create and whether you need to have creativity to do so. It could be argued that creation is the process taken and if done creatively, then it becomes an outcome of much higher order of thinking.
creativity or creatingOne question that seems to resurface regularly is ‘Do you need to be creative to create something?’ Again, we need to return to the simple definitions of the two terms and highlight their differences. One is clearly a verb (to create) while the other is an adverb (creatively) but is this enough? Sure, you can create something with relative ease. It is a process. Something that can be tracked and talked through. A fine example of creating is the simple act of following a recipe. If followed correctly, the outcome has been predetermined and will be successful. However, if we look at the very heart of what it means to be creative, the use of imagination and original ideas, then I would argue that following a recipe is not. Should you choose to deviate from the recipe and experiment with different textures, flavours, and spices, then you should expect a more unplanned outcome.

Fastcompany.com suggests, “Creativity isn’t a talent you either have or you don’t, it’s a skill that you can build with these practices.” The article that follows, suggests several simple steps to improve your creativity. But hang on — by its very definition, creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create. Surely, if an idea is original it cannot be built upon in the first place!

Looking further back into history, the Ancient Greeks suggested that creativity was a divine gift from the gods; one that was given to some, but not all. Those who had it were chosen for a purpose and given an incredible reward to further the thinking of their peers.

Some 2500 years ago, Democritus (c. 460 BCE – c. 370 BCE) asked Hippocrates (c. 460 BCE – c. 370 BCE), “Why are extraordinary men in philosophy, politics, or the arts melancholics?” After a lengthy conversation, Hippocrates reasoned that they were not melancholics, but geniuses with such tremendous creativity and ability to think differently, that their emotional state was unable to cope. So, is creativity now a gift from the gods that only a handful possess? Much like our clothes have changed, we need to accept that our views can do the same. We now believe that creativity lies within us; it is not bestowed upon us by another.

So, are we any closer to unpacking the difference between the two concepts and their application? The challenge we have is that many intertwine the expressions, and I sincerely hope that my brief outline above shows just how different the two terms can be. In its simplest form, creative is something you are or can be. To create is something you can do, but not necessarily through your own creativity.

A colleague of mine recently facilitated a staff meeting around questioning and inquiry thinking. She was challenged towards the end of the meeting when talking about students being given the opportunity to create. A teacher in the room asked the simple question, ‘What about the students who just aren’t creative?’ Herein lies one of the common challenges we face. The teacher, although well within her right to challenge a concept she felt uncomfortable with, was suggesting through her question that one cannot create without creativity.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this thinking.

Create
All students can create. If given the opportunity to do so, the tools or skillset and enablers to access learning, every student can produce something. Therefore, by its very definition, they can create.

Creativity
Creativity is a wholly different concept. Original thoughts and inspiration are needed. Many use innovation as the verb best suited to creativity, over the simple act of creating something. Creativity relies on thinking differently, pursuing imagination and ideas, to develop a concept or ‘create’ something fresh.

Although I accept creativity can be involved in creation, I do not believe it is a ‘must have’ ingredient. In the case of the teacher asking her simple question, I felt the need to both challenge it and unpack it on two separate levels. The question, although relatively innocuous, was flawed because of its initial assumption. If rephrased to meet the criteria I’ve suggested, it could be one of two:

  • What about the children who cannot create?

Or

  • What about the children who have no creativity?

The first, I believe, isn’t reliant on the child, but the scaffolding and planning supplied by the teacher. If you give a child a simple set of instructions, they will create. Some will create exactly what is asked for, while others will end up with something quite different, but all will have created something. Surely, it stands to reason that with the right level of support, every child has the ability to create.

creativityThe second question puzzles me. A well-known children’s author, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, wrote in her book, ‘Also an Octopus’, that a good story ‘…starts with a little bit of nothing...’ and beautifully followed up with, ‘and everyone has a little bit of nothing.’ My point is simply that to be creative in its purest form, we often start from nothing. When not starting from nothing and building on the ideas of others, much of the challenge around ‘starting with a little bit of nothing’ has already been tackled. So, to answer the question in a roundabout sort of way, I truly believe that every child has a little bit of nothing and that every child has a wonderful imagination. It’s just a question of finding the right catalyst to ignite the fire —  and the right tool to enable the flow.

Without creativity, the world would be a very different place. Someone, somewhere, once decided man should walk on the moon. They were creative. Innovative. That someone, undoubtedly with the help of many others, created the technology and equipment to make it happen. Well, every child has their moon — we just must find a way to help them get there.

 

Image credits
Innovation Lightbulb https://pixabay.com/en/photos/innovative/ CC0

“Photographic proof that NASA faked the moon landing” https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2695056366 CC2.0

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hens-feature

What do you use your Moodle for?

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free-roaming hens

Technology doesn’t always get used in the way that the creators originally intended. By the turn of the millennium, for example, my 486-66 tower computer was being used to prop open the office door; it was Lifehacker air conditioning. Today, it is well established in our minds that there are technologies that disrupt, and technologies that sustain. Then there are technologies that can be used to either disrupt or sustain; Moodle is one of these technologies.

Martin Dougiamus, the creator of Moodle, in an article in Moodle Docs titled Philosophy, stated his case for constructivism, constructionism, social constructivism, separate, connected, and constructed behaviour. He said, “Moodle doesn’t FORCE this style of behaviour, but this is what the designers believe that it is best at supporting”. So, from the start, he had conceived Moodle as a disruptive technology that would give students an online environment of their own, a voice, and agency. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers grabbed the platform and used it not to disrupt, but to sustain their teacher-centric practice.

Here are some teacher-centric ways you can use Moodle: Create content for the students to read; publish a list of useful links to get more reading; post a video of yourself talking in an authoritative way about your subject; create a quiz so the students can self-assess their progress; post homework exercises for students to do over the weekend. If you’re a geek teacher you can create badges and award them to those students who choose to play your game. That’s using Moodle to sustain teacher-centric practice.

Here are some learner-centric ways you can use Moodle: Set up a forum where students can ask questions, let the other students answer first, let them upvote good answers,  only intervene if you need to; set up an empty glossary and invite the students to explain concepts in their own words, solicit feedback through the comments; encourage the uploading of short video clips made by students as they reflect on their learning journey; spend some time showing the students how a wiki works and familiarising them with markup language, then encourage them to create their own revision resource; invite them to co-construct a revision quiz. That’s using Moodle to disrupt.

Here are some truly radical ways to use Moodle: Flip the online space – make all the students teachers and all the teachers students, switch roles, take teach-back to a whole new level; encourage your students to open free accounts on H5P and embed their interactives into the Moodle space; suggest each small study group creates a whole Moodle course around their project for the other students to access, don’t tell them how to do it just watch and learn from what they do. Now as a modern teacher all you have to do is follow Sugata Mitra’s Self Organised Learning Environments and make like a granny. Login to the Moodle and use the comments and forums they will have set up to appraise and support.

It was popular once to say everything becomes television. Today you could say everything becomes a network. This freer more distributed knowledge base is moving like tree roots to dislodge the pillars of the monolithic Learning Management Systems like Moodle and Blackboard. In an attempt to regain control, the universities started offering MOOCs like tweed jacketed, pipe-smoking professors making lame attempts to be hip. They entirely ignored the original intention of the MOOC as it was conceived by connectivists Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier, and once again the old school hijacked a learning environment to sustain their old institution-centric practices. I never used to understand the famous Marshall McLuhan quote, “The medium is the message”, but I totally get it now.

One technology that has emerged to support the trend towards distributed and democratised knowledge is rather charmingly called, Tin Can. I recall as a child turning two empty baked bean cans and 10 metres of string into a field telephone. For people who want a more important sounding name, it is also called xAPI or the eXperience API. xAPI is SCORM turned on its head. SCORM was the aviation industry’s solution to delivering consistent pre-approved learning packages across a world campus to a guaranteed consistency and standard. Faced with compliance training of a hundred thousand baggage handlers, it was a reasonable solution. xAPI allows the learner much greater freedom and ensures them recognition for their efforts. Now, free-range learners can roam the networks, and their interactions with learning objects embedded almost anywhere in the wider online environment can trigger a log entry to a Learning Record Store (LRS). Over time, the aggregate of these interactions builds up into a useful and insightful history of the learner’s journey. It’s early days for xAPI yet, but I think we will see it linked with micro-learning, micro-accreditation, and personalised learning environments.

If we are preparing our students through project-based learning for the increasingly likely gig economy, then the employer of the future turns out to be someone remarkably disinterested in what you have done and interested only in what you can do for them now. If you’re a geeky data-informed learning designer, then you’ll be best-fitting regression lines to learner trajectory scatter plots to predict their future performance. The employer of the future is more likely to turn to a recommender system that produces a list of suitable candidates available to start now than they are to browse portfolios. Anyway, the employment agents of the future won’t be people, they’ll be an algorithm.

 

If you would like to connect with CORE’s LX Team, come, see what we can do.

 

Image Credit:
Free range hens, Mullaghmore:
cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Kenneth Allen – geograph.org.uk/p/5280001

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design thinking

iCubed: How design thinking develops lifelong learners

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In an interview with Jesse Mulligan on RNZ in June, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, said that we have to accept being “perpetual newbies” in this digital era. He argued that, “We’re going to have to become lifelong learners. I think this is the major meta-skill that needs to be taught in schools.”

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agrees: “The capacity to continuously learn and apply / integrate new knowledge and skills has never been more essential.” (OECD, 2012, p. 8)

Handily, for us here in Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa (TMOA) mirror these sentiments. No doubt we are familiar with the call to develop young people who are confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners.

why, how, what

Doubly handily, the NZC doesn’t just leave us floundering with the abstract notion of the ‘lifelong learner’, but gives us the key competencies by which lifelong learners are developed. If you like, the key competencies are the ‘how’ to the ‘why’ of the NZC’s vision; they directly support it.

The ‘what’ is the ‘stuff’ teachers decide to do, guided by the essence statements of each learning area. And while there is a lot of ‘stuff’ competing to be on the list of things teachers could do, I’d like to suggest design thinking as a way to develop the key competencies, and thus nurture lifelong learners.

It’s difficult to capture in a succinct sentence what design thinking is. It’s a methodology, it’s a mindset, it’s a kind of inquiry process on steroids. David Kwek does reasonably well when he defines it as, “An approach to learning that focuses on developing children’s creative confidence through hands-on projects that focus on empathy, promoting a bias toward action, encouraging ideation and fostering active problem-solving” (Kwek, 2011, p. 4).

i-cubed

I like to think of design thinking as being a way to bring people together to explore, learn, and co-develop solutions to real-world problems. I see it as having three broad phases:

  1. Immersion: researching, scoping, thinking, exploring, and, most importantly of all, empathising.
  2. Ideation: synthesising, defining, brainstorming, creating.
  3. Implementation: prototyping, pitching, gathering feedback, refining, problem-solving.

I call it iCubed.

And, I believe that as learners grapple with each phase of the design-thinking process, they actively encounter the five key competencies: thinking, relating to others, using language, symbols and texts, managing self, and participating and contributing.

By way of a brief example, a few years ago my Year 8 English class was exploring how we might welcome new students into our school. We began by putting ourselves in the shoes of a new student. We close-read some passages, we role-played, we conducted interviews. We were using language, symbols, and texts, relating to others and thinking. After generating loads of creative ideas, we formed groups around those we thought might have the greatest impact. We made prototypes, pitched to each other and to key members of staff. We sought feedback, refined our ideas, and worked together to find solutions. We were thinking, managing self, participating, and contributing.

While this is a high surface overview of both the learning and the key competencies that were being fostered, it was clear to me that design thinking is a powerful way to develop creative, empathetic thinkers. And my students thought that too. As one said, “Design thinking helps you to learn how to process ideas into something to help people”.

In other words, my students were being “critical and creative thinkers, active seekers, users and creators of knowledge, informed decision-makers” (NZC, p. 8). They are lifelong learners.

Philippa is also presenting on this topic as part of CORE’s Breakfast programme. She’ll be in Dunedin on 8 November.

Bibliography

Other resources:

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