Читать книгу NOW Classrooms Leader's Guide - Meg Ormiston - Страница 11

CHAPTER

1

The Why: Creating and Communicating a Vision for Change

When contemplating any instructional innovation, the most important question a school district can ask itself is, “Why are we doing this?” That why—an inspiring and instructional vision for innovation—needs to be at the very heart of a district’s purpose. Yet all districts wrestle not only with the best way to articulate that vision but also with the best way to communicate it to the stakeholders who will support its implementation. This chapter discusses the importance of stakeholder support and offers advice on beginning the visioning process. We begin by addressing the challenge of helping everyone in a school building adopt the growth mindset necessary for successful innovation.

Establishing Growth Mindsets

The process of building NOW classrooms begins with changing your school community’s underlying culture. As a building or district leader, you can’t simply decree that the culture must change; you need a cyclical plan that cultivates it. The plan involves:

• Creating a vision for changing classroom culture and incorporating technology

• Implementing experiments to build that vision

• Assessing the success or failure of your experiments

• Revising the initial vision accordingly

In other words, successful innovation requires you to follow a cycle of continuous improvement through ongoing testing and reflection.

This type of rapid acceleration requires a whole new approach on the part of everyone involved. Incorporating new technology in the classroom requires flexibility and adaptability. Carol Dweck (2008), a renowned Stanford professor, coined the term growth mindset. By Dweck’s definition, a person with a growth mindset believes he or she has the ability to grow, learn, and change. By contrast, a person with a fixed mindset believes he or she doesn’t have the ability to effect change. As educators, we must use a growth mindset in both our language and our actions to move forward in our improvement of learning for ourselves and our students.

Our goal in every school should be to encourage growth mindsets in everyone in order to prepare our students for an ever-changing world in which they can thrive. To that end, we believe every teacher, parent, coach, and school leader will benefit from reading Dweck’s (2008) book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. We believe that to achieve lasting change with staff and students, everyone—not only students but also stakeholders—must develop a growth mindset in order to approach the process of teaching and learning with digital tools.

Many readers, after finishing the preceding paragraph, will already be able to hear the grumbling from their staff. A fixed mindset does not marry well with the technology innovation we write about; without the belief that it’s possible to become facile with technology through practice, stakeholders will throw in the towel and quit after hitting the first bump in the road. But we suspect that with the increasing prevalence of technology in daily life, the grumbling might not be as bad as it was back in 2007, when many teachers were still struggling to adjust to email and file management.

We all understand that change is hard, period. We also know that it’s our responsibility in education to prepare students for the real world. In other words, it’s our job to prepare our students to embrace change, and that means we need to understand how to embrace it ourselves.

To prepare for an effective vision for change, school leaders need to start by building a growth mindset with all the adults in the school, from the front office to the bus drivers. The language everyone uses with other adults and students should be focused on growth mindset. Used daily, growth mindset language will help to expedite a successful technology innovation. Look for opportunities to acknowledge flexibility and adaptability versus rigidity and a desire to maintain the status quo.

One effective way to get started with this is to have the building staff read Dweck’s (2008) Mindset as a group. The book has a companion website, Mindset Works (www.mindsetworks.com), which staff can use to supplement this reading group. The Growth Mindset Coach: A Teacher’s Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve by Annie Brock and Heather Hundley (2016) is also helpful for bringing a growth mindset into the classroom itself. As you read the book together as a staff, encourage everyone to consider the ways in which a growth mindset might operate in their personal lives and with their families, not just in their jobs as educators.

It may be helpful to read this book as a staff over the summer, since during the school year it can be more difficult to initiate work around a growth mindset while also doing everything else that goes into leading a school. However, if you lay the groundwork for a growth mindset over the summer, you can continue to build on it regularly during the year. For example, you might start every learning event with one key example of growth mindset that you have seen staff or students exhibit. If you lead in this way, soon everyone will start to notice and share his or her own experiences with growth mindset, and the concept will become part of the culture.

One way to start cultivating a growth mindset in the building is to create an empty bulletin board with the word yet by itself in the middle and ask each of your teachers to set a goal for the year, with each goal focused around the idea of yet. For example, a teacher who wants to work on increasing her students’ facility with online research might define her goal as My students don’t know how to do good research online … yet. The staff then writes those goals on colored cards and posts them to the bulletin board, encouraging a very public focus on growth mindset.

Teachers can also start to introduce growth mindsets to students by asking them to create their own yet bulletin board to define their goals for the year. Soon, all staff and students will have embraced the idea that anything is possible with a growth mindset.

We know that establishing a culture of growth mindsets will not happen overnight—change takes practice, as a growth mindset itself states! But it is the right thing for the school’s culture, and the success of any innovation ultimately depends on it.

Supporting Stakeholders

To develop a complete and satisfying innovation—and to ensure that there are no roadblocks to successfully implementing it—districts should ensure that all key stakeholders have a voice when beginning to dream up any major initiative. One of the first steps to take when attempting to answer the question why is to identify those key stakeholders and to engage them in the visioning process.

Depending on the individual district, the key stakeholders who need to be involved may include school board members, administrators (including technology directors and business officials), teachers, students, parents, or community members. Some districts may already have district leadership teams, which typically include representatives from all of these stakeholder groups. If your district doesn’t—or if it does, but doesn’t include some of the key groups we’ve mentioned—be sure to invite representatives from outside to ensure a minimum of misunderstanding (or interference) later in the process.

In particular, it’s important to involve school board members from the beginning and to ensure that they’re clear about the why behind your vision. Imagine what might happen if several districts in your area purchased devices and subsequently received a lot of publicity. Members of your own board might be concerned that perhaps the district is more interested in trying to “keep up with the Joneses” by hopping on the new device bandwagon than it is with improving instruction or engaging in a learning innovation. To prevent these concerns from cropping up in your own district, and to avoid any critical miscommunications, it’s very important to involve board members from the outset. Remember: school board members are the stakeholders who represent the community by voting for or against any funding initiatives for infrastructure, devices, or other learning supports. That means that they’re the ones to whom parents and other community residents will address questions about how their money is being spent.

It’s also imperative for the district’s business officials to be involved in planning and forecasting from the beginning, as the vision may require additional implementation funds for professional development, staffing, or other infrastructure. If business officials are involved early in the process, they’ll be more likely to understand the why behind your innovation, which means that they can argue persuasively on its behalf when it comes to budgeting. This is very important in today’s economic climate, where there are many competing priorities for dwindling public resources.

Most important, however, as we’ll stress throughout the remainder of this book: it’s imperative to continue dialogue and communication well beyond these initial consultations regarding the why of your innovation. Without information or updates on the progress of implementing your vision, the support you corral early on can quickly drop off.

Developing a Vision

Now that you have the right stakeholders identified, it’s time to begin working with them to develop a vision. Here are some of the questions we’ve used in the past to guide our thinking.

• What do we want our schools to look like in the future, and how can we plan for that today?

• What does quality teaching and learning look like with technology?

• Why is it critical for our students to connect with one another beyond the walls of the classroom?

• What skills do our students need in order to be successful in the future world outside of schools?

Note that none of these questions necessarily depends on any specific devices, platforms, or other resources. At this early stage of the innovation process, we have found that it’s imperative to keep the focus on teaching and learning rather than on devices, infrastructure, and technology personnel. The nuts and bolts will come later to fill out the details of the vision. For now, the desired student outcomes are more important than any specific implementation plans. To that end, in this section, we write about some big-picture items to keep in the forefront of your thinking as you contemplate the why of your vision, including a cautionary note regarding potential counterproductive decision making, a look at essential 21st century skills—the four Cs (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2015) and the SAMR model—and how to manage the visioning process.

The Paper Police: A Cautionary Note

Real systemic change requires big thinking and a lot of focused energy. But most important, it requires a good, forward-thinking answer to the question of why—one that always centers around the idea of student learning.

We caution you to consider what might happen when the will for systemic technology change isn’t accompanied by a strong vision for transforming learning with all key stakeholders and staff members on board. Consider the following possible scenario: a district administrator representing the business office visits an elementary school to speak at a faculty meeting. During the meeting, the administrator presents colorful slides showing paper usage in the building and the total monthly overage charges on the copy machines. The cost of the paper and the overage charges are more than what the district would spend on 1:1 Chromebooks for every student.