Leaning into Geniusing Jan 2024.
If you're new to Genius Hours in school, here's the least you need to know.
They're simple to implement, and robust in rewards. Designed for success, the framework of a well structured Genius Hour allows students to own their learning.
Students lead. They inhabit their inquiry. They generate ideas, seek and explore resources, plan presentations to share with the broader community, and the zillion other things that kids do when they want their ideas to thrive.
Agency abounds. The joy of sharing what one loves is rocket fuel to a project.
Teachers coach. They help find and hold balance. They seek sparks, and fan flames. They help hone ideas, find resources, structure presentations, and the zillion other things teachers do to help their students thrive.
Everything is possible. The thrill of learning alongside kids is rocket fuel to a classroom.
Administrators facilitate. They celebrate ideas, secure and acquire resources, orchestrate presentations, and the zillion other things administrators do to help their communities thrive.
The goal is: Yes. The celebration of what children are capable of is rocket fuel to a school culture.
If you're leaning into Geniusing this year, let's connect.
The Dance of Innovation Dec 2023
Lest anyone confuse marching for dancing, let’s go over a few steps.
Lest anyone confuse marching for dancing, let’s go over a few steps.
The former Soviet Union, via its state planning committee Gosplan, used to compose five year plans. The rest of the country marched along to the drumbeats and dictates of those who hatched the plans. I'm sure those who sat in the comfy chairs considered those plans “inspired“ on day one. But well before the close of year five, perhaps even by month 5, those plans revealed themselves to be more insufficient than inspired, to say the least.
School curricula should not resemble collapsed communist nations.
Innovation is a dance, and not always a choreographed one. Certainly not a march. During my years at Blue School, there was a line in the faculty handbook that I looked for each and every year, to make sure it was still there. It always was. The line read “teachers shall be encouraged to use disciplined improvisation in their craft.“
That’s dancing.
Inspiration happens when you least expect it. An astute teacher will both look for and recognize those moments as they arise.
Innovation is the manifesting of those inspirations into experiences that better the community.
The qualifier "disciplined" in that magic Blue School phrase precludes the manic mosh pit that more traditional educators might fear innovation to be. Far from a random free-for-all, innovation recognizes that resources are valuable and energy precious. Energy and resources can be harnessed to elevate education, in each and every moment.
Teachers and administrators rarely have enough time to hatch a five year plan. They’re lucky to know what the next year will look like, on paper. As any year evolves, issues arise and changes occur, sometimes rendering the paper plan insufficient to the immediate needs of a classroom. Diligent teachers discover new experiences and new materials because they have to, or because they want to, or because they recognize that the children in their care need them to. Diligent administrators appreciate and nurture those diligent teachers, and they generate conversations around those ideas to facilitate them. They dance with them.
If it works for the kids, and it works for the teachers, it is the role of the administrators to make it work for the community.
That's leadership.
Innovation is not a five-year plan, or a one-year plan, or even a five day plan. It can be those, and it does involve planning, but sometimes it’s “Hey DJ, spin this track and let’s see who starts dancing.“ If the floor starts hopping, there ain’t no stopping. Plan on it.
If your school administration is nervous on the dance floor, let's invite them to dance with us. Even a wallflower recognizes a good beat. Let's teach them a few steps, dance with them, and watch them catch the groove.
Idle Time Is Ideal Time Nov 2023
Ours is a crowded world. Physically and conceptually, we move around people and ideas, avoiding some, colliding with others, finding both our edges and our core in the mosh pit of media, mega-corporations, and mindless consumption offered to assuage the incumbent anxieties inherent in the formula. We acclimate to the acceleration, wonder what's wrong when we have a small window of nothing-to-do, and quickly check our devices to see what we might be missing that can put our idle time to use.
Many of us have forgotten our inner worlds entirely, rising with media, resting with media, and sneaking a little media throughout a crowded day, eager to entertain and distract ourselves, perhaps hoping to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world. A few decades ago, the watercooler conversations at the office might revolve around 30-60 minutes of must-see-TV from the previous evening. Now we aren't even watching the same devices or platforms, let alone channels or content. Without cultural touchstones we wonder how we establish our identities, so we indulge in consumption, taking in content and trying on costumes in endless clickbait and fashion cycles that spin around and around and around. We believe that our choices in consumption create our character and that what we consume tells the world who we are, as if that were the goal in the first place.
How does this relate to education?
In every way possible.
Schools are crowded as well, and have been for quite some time. There are never enough days in the year to cover what 'needs' to be covered, let alone what we might 'want' to cover. History is only getting longer, science more specific, lineages of literature more lengthy. Awakening to the diversities in our culture invites more perspectives that need to be taken, more affinity groups to enhance our empathies, more technology to explore, more health classes, more wellness check-ins, more creative outlets, more ...
Truly, these are all noble endeavors. All the aforementioned content is worthy of deep and determined discussion and study. There will be no end to the volume of material we hope to pack into approximately 180 school days in a year. But to truly prepare children for tomorrow we must also teach children what it feels like to turn one's attention towards the spaces in between those disciplines, the pauses we can learn to take for ourselves, and the possibilities and power that lie within those moments of endless space.
Children thrive in open spaces. Raised in a crowded village in New York City, my 3-year-old would turn a corner, see an open sidewalk, and sprint full speed until the sidewalk ended, or a crowd blocked her path. She needed to run into that space, to see what it held, to feel the freedom that her unfettered feet might find. Space invites movement, genuine and authentic individual movement. But beyond physical exertion or mental pondering, space also opens the doors to elements beyond our bodies and minds. Space opens the doors to our wills, our capacities to enter the unknown and claim a path forward, or sideways, or backwards. Suddenly we are beyond dimension, moving and expanding from our cores, feeling our individuality in its endless evolutions. It can feel like a freefall, or a firework, or a floating through time and space that dissolves deep inner tensions and quiets endless mind chatter, allowing us to feel both our unique individuality and our collective consciousness.
We find ourselves not in what we consume, but in what we release.
Does your school integrate deliberate space, and guidance within that space, for children to experience that inner release? Do they understand that idle time is ideal time? Do they recognize that having the answer is not always the goal, but that sitting with the question, or with nothing at all, can bear far more fruit? Do your children see the adults around them engaging in practices of steady and structured space 'travel', movement that frees and fortifies their own willpower and well-being? If your school's mission involves preparing children for an unknown and ever-changing tomorrow, yet is only looking at the world around them, let's talk about making some space, for the worlds within them.
Social Entrepreneurship in Education Sep 2023
The words Yes and No are often treated as punctuation marks in our language, often followed by a period, or perhaps an exclamation point! They frequently stand alone, as one word sentences, when in fact the possibilities in them merit endless continued conversation. The word "Yes" is actually shorthand for "Yes, and..." and the word "No" an abbreviation for "Not yet..." The movement in those phrases propels possibility. Movement in language opens up opportunities for movement in life.
Entrepreneurship is essentially about that movement, about that possibility. What's possible in business? In tech? In non-profits? In Education? Entrepreneurship takes that possibility, insists on its viability, and brings forward the people and resources required to realize it.
Some may dismiss possibility as idealism, naivete, as if ideals were but frivolous daydreams. As Peter Block shares in The Answer to How is Yes, a book written for organizations at large, and one I read as an entrepreneur outside of formal education twenty years ago, "Idealism is a state of innocence that has the potential to bring together our larger purpose with our day-to-day doing." The sweet spot of innovation is at the edge of practicality, marveling at the vast horizons of hope and possibility that pull us ever closer to that edge, and ultimately beyond it. We are "fulfilling our potential to create social structures that we want to inhabit." To activate the community in our vision, we must invite all constituents: the artists along with the engineers and economists of the institution. Together we can recognize and realize the architecture and design that brings forward the potential and passions beneath the surface of any organization. In this way we become social architects, creating service-oriented schools "that meet their institutional objectives in a way that gives those involved the space to act on what matters to them."
Written somewhere in an entrepreneurial fortune cookie: "If you're not doing something, you're doing something wrong." Like water works its way through a stream, broadening its banks as it evolves toward larger byways, entrepreneurs are always in motion. Concepts emerge, get vetted, tested, pruned, and then emerge in new forms. As every bend in a river reveals new views, every iteration of an idea introduces infinite possibility. Knowing when to ride the rapids, and when to beach at the banks to check inventory and recuperate, is the wisdom of negotiating the waters of entrepreneurship.
Inventory is vital, and is far more than a number. It is as important to know who’s stocking the shelves as it is to know what’s on them. In the case of schools, the curricula must share importance with its curators. What hidden skills and talents lie beneath the surface in our staff?. How many math teachers are also aspiring business owners, or sports statisticians, or poets? How many science educators are potential patent-holders, or pastry chefs? Is there space in the learning culture at a school for the adults to share their inner magic? Are the songwriters and storytellers given the opportunity to share their gifts, and to introduce new curricula and courses? The inventories of skill sets, of passions and purpose, of ideas and inspirations are often left out of hiring practices, onboarding agendas, and even performance reviews. When people can bring their passions to their work, work becomes their passion.
Entrepreneurs are inherently flexible. These skills support strong classrooms. Projects may need to pivot mid process, units may untangle and then reweave into new fabric, lessons may leap into lands unforeseen within minutes of launch. The strongest and most flexible teachers make space for those iterations, improvisations, and innovations. They see in the children the true sparks of educational inspiration that combust with the high octane of youthful inquiry. Empowering that enthusiasm is the essence of education. To quote Peter Block "Growing up means seeing the world as it is. Really growing up means realizing that the world really may be as I see it. The world comes to me as a fact, but I decide what to conclude from there."
The best educational R&D happens in the classroom. Student feedback is visceral, and a vital inventory to the health of the course. How often is student feedback collected? Not assessed, collected. As entrepreneurs must know their markets, social entrepreneurs must know their constituents. Tastes change quickly, textbooks slowly. Too often teachers are left alone to figure out the feedback and to fold it into its next iteration, or risk running into the same resistance next year. Working together as a team can expedite that process, and alleviate the burden. Department meetings are one thing, Communities of Practice are another altogether. More on that to come...
Thoughts on Chat GPT (or any other AI in the Classroom) Feb 2023
ChatGPT is here to stay. Within a matter of years (months?) it will replace all other information acquisition apps for most of the population. It will be the digital tool that we use more than any other digital tool in our toolbelt because it is efficient, and because people are lazy ... I mean efficient, and we love efficient things.
Therefore, along the lines of Conrad Wolfram's views on computers in the classroom, we will harness this technology by embracing it. Entirely new ways of considering information will be born over the next few years thanks to ChatGPT and its kin. Once the drudgery of acquisition is removed, information is ours for the considering, and we can spend more time in conversations about that information and in applying the knowledge towards challenges in need of solution. It's the same reason professional mathematicians use calculators.
What does this look like in the classroom?
Anything we want. Discussions will have time for depth, and thereby organic evolution. No longer burdened by dubious deadlines, or redundant research, or search engine optimization, or Grammarly ads, we will more fully discover our own authentic voices in articulating what we stand for in the face of the facts at our fingertips. So many things could possibly go wrong, and will. So our first task is to anticipate as many of those as possible and work with that knowledge. And then team up to address those challenges. And thus the design process continues.
All of this said, if we are not balancing analog with digital, then we've already lost it. In other words, if Gardening, or some such earth-connecting, immersive, hands-on experience has not yet taken root in the curriculum, plant some seeds today. But that's another post...
One of my favorite tips for students is to have ChatGPT explain to them a scientific phenomena or a historical event or whatever is confusing them "as if I am ten years old." I then have them request the exact same explanation, but this time "as if I am 18 years old." The second explanation will have more complicated language, but students can reference the first explanation for a simpler text.
Know when to tech up. Innovative technologies that expedite otherwise mundane tasks free up invaluable time to apply learning towards real solutions. Conrad Wolfram's recommendations cultivate deeper reasoning and thinking than is possible without computational assistance. ChatGPT opens up deep studies into author bias, digital citizenship, the ethics of tech, and endless other applications. And what kid doesn't want to play with calculators and ChatGPT? As information becomes more freely available, and created, we must all become connoisseurs of content, sniffing out true and false and knowing when to doubt even our own senses.
Know when to tech down. Conscientious and comprehensive understanding of a tool helps us recognize when essential learnings can be facilitated, as well as when they have been short-circuited. At times in makerspaces, novelty gets mistaken for innovation, and the cool factor outshines the visceral learning. In reality, the balance sheet of the student-run snack shack, for example, reinforces math concepts better than any computer game. Put a hammer in a child's hand, and watch how fast they learn to read a ruler. The number one ingredient in a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies: computational thinking.
What my years at Blue taught me Jan 2023
Children learn best, we all learn best, when we are interested and invested in both process and outcome. A robust curriculum, one that integrates compelling challenges of our time with the tools and technology of the trades, invites students to seek and discover their best selves, their most innovative thinking, their most resilient constitutions. Holistic and integrated educational journeys move learning beyond the classroom. Applying mathematical, artistic, scientific, and cultural principles and phenomena to projects of significance elicits visceral learning. What better way to enhance the future than by reverse engineering the present?
My work in the STEAM field has revealed to me how interested and invested children can become in issues that are real, and urgent. Their learning accelerates within integrated coursework, content that expands with them as they move across classrooms, and across grades. When woven into the core curriculum of the grade, each child’s unique interpretation and application of the learning adds profound depth and dimension to the experience. By recognizing student voice in the learning process we discover how compelling, and essential, their voices are.
To achieve success in preparing the youth of today for the immensity of tomorrow, our role as educators must balance Information with Inspiration. By weaving ‘what matters’ into the content of every classroom, students hone their abilities to use their skills for positive outcomes. Children know that the future holds immense challenges. Our curriculum must face those challenges with them. An exploration into a design process presents enormous satisfaction by incorporating Biomimicry, for example, into that work. Students then generate solutions to the climate crisis that mimic the design genius of the world around them. The design process is thereby no longer an arbitrary sequence of steps but a vivid and vital experience, one that guides their development of a viable solution to a challenge, the climate crisis in this case, a solution inspired by nature.
Holding a child’s relationship with nature is essential. Connection with our environment is a connection with ourselves. Furthermore, nature thrives in the moment; its power is in its presence. Appreciation and adoration of Nature, both inside and beyond the classroom, supports humans young and old in embracing the present as the only true lever of change. Change happens now. Curriculum that ignores our planet only increases our peril.
Reckoning with our past is as crucial as researching it. We owe it to the giants on whose shoulders we stand to recognize their struggles as well as their achievements. By embracing the change they produced while appreciating the hurdles they overcame, we strengthen, as educators, our own capacities to shoulder the next generation of innovators, thinkers, darers, and dreamers. Children recognize struggle, and discover themselves in tales of triumph. I have found that the stories of history are as important to the quantitative fields as to the qualitative; in fact they are one and the same.
A true classroom is at once a fountain, a forum, and a forge:
Capturing the essence of all that flows forth from the stream of inquiry and inspiration is the challenge of the teacher.
Cultivating the discourse of ideas, theories, and hypotheses is the opportunity for the class.
Testing the fruits of those forums by hammering ideas through iteration is the responsibility of the students.
In the STEAM Lab at Blue School, the Design Process we use is simple, and was engineered to be so.
It serves many needs in the Lab. From imagining a backpack out of a t-shirt, to developing models of future technologies out of recycled materials, to prototyping solutions that remediate climate change with the inspiration of a salamander.
No matter the challenge, its one size fits all. Five steps. Rinse. Repeat. Look at that shine!
Empathize → Research → Develop → Prototype → Improve
Technically, the last step isn’t really a step, and certainly doesn’t appear solely at the end. Improvement is a practice, one the designer sustains throughout the process:
Feel like someone must have done this before? Improve your Research!
Cardboard model leaking resin all over the floor? Improve your Prototype!
Not sure why you’re doing this at all? Improve your Empathy!
All design firms, creative houses, engineering operations, product innovators, restaurant moguls … really any business or industry at all, use a creative process, or design process. Graham Wallas recorded one of the first models of a creative process in the 1926 book, The Art of Thought, choosing the 4 terms: preparation (or saturation), incubation, illumination, and verification (or implementation.) Different industries have developed different terminologies, adding a variety of steps to extract more detail and accountability from their users. But they’re all fundamentally the same.
As we look at Blue School’s STEAM Design Process, it’s worth recognizing that you are engaged in a design process of your own right now, as you read this. If you’re a teaching professional, you are perhaps engaging the Research phase, and maybe the Improvement phase, as you find connections to your craft. If you’re a parent, you may be deep in the Empathy phase as you find connections to your child’s school. Or if you’re a student you may be Developing connections to your teachers, and to your potential.
Many of our personal and individual design processes are instinctual, and automatic. If you’ve gotten this far in the article, then you’re all about growing yourself, expanding your capacities, remaining relevant and resilient. In other words: building a better you. On a basic level, we are all designers of our own selves, and follow a similar process in doing so.
Our first step, our motivation, our Empathy, emerges as we strive to thrive and come alive every day, identifying our best selves in the face of life’s ceaseless challenges. Whether the future is irresistible or the present unbearable, we recognize the need for change, in its myriad manifestations, and we act upon it.
Arguably we get lost in bad Research when we fall into doom-scrolling or we binge hours of TikTok. In those moments we must demand Development! Get out of other people’s headspaces and claim your own. What are you hoping to do? Develop that!
Ultimately we are endlessly Prototyping who we are, and (ideally) Improving on how that’s going for us throughout the process. Mindfulness helps. And naps. And other things.
So let’s dive in, and create! Let’s focus here on the first step of our design process: Empathy.
The most important step in every design process, in any field, is Empathy. You have to know your audience. From corporations to classrooms, your audience is everything. If you are making a product, for instance, and you miss your audience, you've made landfill. If you’re making a groundbreaking film, and you miss your audience, you’ve made a home-movie. If you’re making a lesson in your classroom to inspire your students to recognize injustice and transform their futures, and you miss your audience … you better pivot quickly because there’s another 43 minutes left in the period!
In the STEAM classroom we begin by making room for Empathy. We take the first 60 seconds of every class to empty our minds of all the baggage carried in: from other classrooms, from conversations in the hallways, and from the mind’s own noise. We breathe for one minute, quietly, in stillness. It’s Zen. It’s the Power of Now. It’s making space. It’s easier to meet people where they are when you are calmly and clearly where you are. As I tell my students, “This could be the best 60 seconds of your day, otherwise you’ve just wasted another minute.”
Once we’re clear, we can reconnect.
Reconnect with the Why? with the What? and with the Who?
With the Empathy.
Our upper Middle School students began last year by taking on the Stanford d.School “5 Chair Challenge.” In it, students learn to prototype quickly, using a variety of materials, focusing on designing a chair for a specific end user with a specific set of needs. We then pitched our iterations to each other, sharing how our designs met, or missed, those needs, and discovered how important Empathy truly is to the project. Missing the mark with a prototype of recycled cardboard is one thing; tanking hours of work with expensive modeling foam at a prestigious design firm would be something else entirely. Fail fast, and fail cheap, as the saying goes.
The adolescent mind, in particular, has an unmatched ability to discern a lack of Empathy in any pre-packaged lesson. “When am I ever going to need this?” is the strand of yarn that tweens love to pull to discern what exactly lies beneath the sweater of compulsory education. Let them pull it! It’s a question that rarely gets asked in the boardrooms of mathematics textbook publishers, for instance, but very often asked in the bored rooms of tedious mathematics classes across the planet. It needs to be asked. Often. And it needs to be heard. Clearly. That’s Empathy.
As a mathematics teacher before coming to Blue School, I experienced how abstractly so much of the content is shared in a standardized ecosphere. Take “Measurement”, for instance. Many of my students in the standardized public sector had never used a proper ruler. Why would they need to? Or even want to? Looking at a textbook series of lines, and then measuring them to ⅛” accuracy with a photocopy of a ruler, is as exciting as plain pasta. The unit on Fractions was equally bereft of significance or interest.
So, we began a woodworking project during our math class. One that incorporated fractions and measurements. And saws! Each student designed, measured to ⅛” accuracy, and built a miniature doll house. Of wood. To keep. For themselves. Or to give as a gift. Enter the Empathy! And, enter the enthusiasm and enjoyment! Needless to say, saws appear as requisite tools in mathematics exploration in the STEAM Lab at Blue School. And drills. And screws of varying lengths. And actual, real rulers!!!
Sometimes curiosity, if not empathy, is stoked by novelty alone, but connection is critical, to the process and/or to the product. Just because I bring the requisite Empathy to a class or unit doesn’t mean the students will absorb and embody it without proper care. Last summer I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and determined to bring it to our STEAM Biomimicry study, re-igniting my commitment to conservation and firing up my social justice engines. I was lit and ready to rock! (It’s an incredible book!!)
Alas, there was at the time no Young Adult edition, and the challenge of distilling those rivers of inspiration into a few rivulets of insight to kick off three lessons in the unit left me gulping for air mid-ford, and mid lesson. I had spent weeks immersed in Wall Kimmerer’s Empathy and it was now mine. Fully. In my mind I could braid a basket of baskets out of nothing but sweetgrass!
That Empathy wasn’t yet in the students, however, and it needed to incubate, as it had for me. My three, 15 minute pep rallies to kick off a few lessons didn’t connect as earth-movingly as had Robin’s book, in which I had bathed for several weeks straight. I wanted my students to feel what I had felt. But they hadn’t actually done what I had done. Empathy thrives with experience, so day trips to Nature will facilitate our next endeavor, as well as more craftily curated class content and connections across curricula.
When Blue School teachers consider a topic to share with children, we Empathize with who they are, in this moment, with their individual knowledge and interests, their attention spans and learning profiles, and their social connections and anxieties. Wallas' 1926 alternative term for this step speaks to that so well: Saturation. Soaking oneself in the student experience is essential to understanding how they will interpret and implement the intended instruction and inspiration.
This is not the world we grew up in. Arguably it never was. Blue School teachers recognize that, and generate curricula to empower our students to “use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world” as our Vision holds, “reimagining education for a changing world” per our Purpose.
Ours is not only a changing world, it’s now a profoundly challenging one. Today more than ever, we need to prepare our youngest generation to rise to those challenges. If modern education doesn't meet those challenges, or at least greet them honestly and courageously, we truly exacerbate them. From climates in crisis to cultures in chaos, there is no shortage of material from which we can draw urgency. From heroes in activism to innovations in technologies, there is no shortage of material from which we can draw inspiration.
It’s up to us. To connect with our children as we nourish their minds and spirits. To catch their enthusiasm and ride the waves of innovation with them. To play with the ideas that ignite their souls as we share and further discover our own.
To Empathize.
It’s part of our Process.