Making change in Alberta schools

Education in Alberta is changing.

The Alberta Government and the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) are spearheading change with Inspiring Action on Education and A Great School for All: Transforming Education in Alberta. 

I see Alberta a little like this: 

At the top is The Government and the ATA trying to lead change by lifting the system into the 21st Century.

At the bottom are individual teachers, students, parents, administrators and trustees who are innovators and early adopters of change. These people do the heavy lifting because they are the ones actually doing the everyday work of school while simultaneously making change.

In the middle is everyone else who makes up the system. This includes teachers, students, parents, administrators and trustees who are busy everyday making Alberta's education system work. This group is made up of the early majority, late majority and late mass.

Geoffrey Moore defined the gap between Early Adopters and the Early Majority as "The Chasm". In my picture above, the chasm can be found between the heavy lifters at the bottom and the rest of the system.

Making change in Alberta schools requires Inspring Education to cross the chasm to what Malcolm Gladwell defined as "The Tipping Point", where a majority of schools start to adopt ideas and change their practices. Inspiring Education has not yet crossed the chasm. 

Innovators and early adopters know that navigating across the chasm brings both crisis and opportunity. While the Government and ATA lift from the safety of above, it's the innovators and early adopters in the schools (at the bottom) that risk getting squished by the weight of the system. 

On one side of the chasm, innovators and early adopters are driven by research that others don't know about so that they can do things differently and better. 

On the other side of the chasm, the early majority, late majority and late mass are driven by social proof which is to say that they want what many others have and are talking about. The status quo, regardless of quality, lives comfortably on this side of the chasm.

Teachers who are interested in crossing the chasm will always find more support in schools and school districts that are also interested in crossing the chasm.

Teachers who are interested in crossing the chasm but find themselves working in schools and school districts that are not as interested in crossing the chasm will likely not find the support they need and risk being labelled as outcasts, rebels, troublemakers and crazy.

What responsibility does the Alberta Government and the Alberta Teachers' Association have in supporting innovative teachers who work in schools and school districts that are not innovative?

Change from within

I was reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter's blog post Innovation: Who Else is Doing it? and I found myself quite impressed with her message.

Two points struck me as ugly truths.

Firstly, if you truly wish to be successful, you have to have a strong tolerance for failure. It's been said of Winston Churchill that he had 10 ideas in a day but only 1 of them was ever any good - and often he didn't know which one it was.

Secondly, it's odd how pride can cloud one's judgement. Have you ever noticed that it can sometimes be easier to take advice from a stranger or external expert? Have you ever noticed that deferring to your spouse, best-friend or colleague can be a hard pill to swallow?

Kanter summarizes this well:

The search for innovation benefits from listening to people who are not the usual idea generators, who might look and seem different. "Open innovation" has become a popular catchphrase, signifying that it is acceptable to look outside the organization for new ideas because all creativity does not lie within. But then I see another conservative bias toward external innovators, even when more of the creativity might lie within, in the minds of junior employees or occupants of routine jobs that are treated disdainfully. Better a maverick from halfway around the world or crowd-sources on the Internet than a nerd in one's own organization. People already in the organization are often the most under-utilized asset.

Sometimes getting a fresh perspective from an external source can be both refreshing and innovative; however, sometimes the experts are the ones who are busting their chops in the trenches right next to you.

Renovation is not the same as innovation

Youngme Moon writes about the limits of data in her book Different:

We allow this kind of formal market research to seduce us nevertheless. Consequently, we are more committed than ever to gathering it, using surveys or focus groups or customer interviews. We are more committed than ever to aggregating it, in the form of PowerPoint presentations and executive summaries. We are more commited than ever to drawing conclusions from it, conclusions that typically lead to some kind of renovation of our existing value proposition. And yet, as I noted in early chapter, renovation is not the same things as innovation, and there are times when I wonder whether we wouldn't be better off putting our market machinery aside for a few minutes, just to see what we're capable of coming up with without it.

I know that I am not the first to point this out, but here is the problem with formal market research. Consumers will always be able to tell us how much better they'd like our products to be. But we cannot expect them to be able to tell us how different thsoe products could be. And more important, we cannot expect them to be able to tell us how it might be possible for us to surprise them.

What this means is that if we want to move beyond the incremental kinds of augmentations that dominte our product marketing activity, we need to look beyond the granular pieces of data that our market research infrastructure is likely to generate. Those peices may be rigorously objective, but they are guaranteed to be woefully incomplete. They will only give us half the story. To get the other half, we need to take responsibility fo the hard work fo imagination ourselves.

I am alway hesitant to make education metaphorical of business, but Youngme Moon's vision of business meshes well with my vision of education.

Data has come to be God in education. In business, data is driven by market research. In education, data is driven by test scores. And those test scores then drive our decisions.

Data is very limiting mostly because it tends to conceal more than it reveals.

Test score data tends to squander innovation and places a kind of blinder on educators - employing a kind of test score tunnel vision. Your goal, if you chose to accept it (as if we had a choice), is to raise the scores!

It's time we put our test score, data-driven machinery aside for a moment and let's see what we are capable of coming up with without it. It's time we strike a balance between our analytical and intuitive thinking.

Our over-dependence on data is sabotaging reform in an educationally neutering kind of way.