The Real-World Inspires
Don’t you just love it when something you advocate a lot is affirmed by someone else? Well, I do! Anyway, yesterday during the keynote lunch panel discussion at the Excelin Ed National Summit on Education 2022 entitled “A 21st-Century Education: Critical Skills for Every Student’s Success” the rest of the attendees at Table 18 kept looking over at me and kept saying things like, “you say that all the time.” And, yes, that was true! I have known one of the keynote panelists, Hadi Partovi, for a long time. Hadi is CEO of the education nonprofit Code.org. I have always known Hadi to be very insightful as what our scholars need to know when continuing the learning journey after high school. Notice I call it a “learning journey” because no matter whether a scholar chooses enrollment, employment, or enlistment, they will be continuing on a learning journey. I am approaching the six decade mark and I am still on an incredible learning journey. In fact, I am not so sure I haven’t learned more in the last year than at any point in my life. How cool is that?
Back to Hadi because some of his comments are the focus here. He said:
- “If kids are excited to learn something, they will go learn it.” – I am thinking TikTok here. I am pretty sure none of our students took a TikTok course in their school.
- “Don’t worry about the order in which we schedule scholars to learn things; more importantly, we need to be inspiring students to go learn.” – Personally, I always advocate that how students are learning is at least as important, if not more important than what they are learning. Learning howto learn is the most important thing we can do in the world today.
- “Relevance and inspiration go together!” – Who knew? Every scholar in every school in the world! They might not say it, although they do, when they say things like, “Why do I need to know this?” If that Hand in the Back of The Room can’t be answered there will be NO inspiration to learn. Trust me, I know because I was that student with his hand up in the back of the room almost six decades ago now.
Bottom-line: we must remember that the real-world inspires. Our students are the expert in their own life in context, no one else is. Our kids are learning in a complex social environment. Our students will inherit the future and we need to do everything we can to have them ready to learn and have the creative designs to solve the future issues.
Flirting With Technology
I’ve already done several posts reflecting on my learning from the SMART Factory League 2022 Summit, but I just spent a couple of hours during my flight home studying my notes. That study yielded another seven topics for reflection, further study, and a blog post being written. Something that we discuss this week while in Hamburg, Germany was the fact that we are always flirting with technology. There is always some new device, application, updated application, or increase capability for us to “flirt” with. I loved that way of putting it – “flirting.” Because flirting is not committing. Interestingly, the manufacturing industry and education have the same issue here: we flirt too much without making sure what we are flirting with meets our needs, is usable by our stakeholders, or even adds more burden than value. Therefore, we discussed that when flirting with technology there must be a great deal of experimentation.
This flirtation cannot be a speed date! I see this so many times, where someone in a school likes a particular technology, so that becomes the next thing. Probably the biggest areas I hear this in education are with learning management systems. I hear things like “I’m not sure who picked this, but it really isn’t that useful.” We talked a lot about the stakeholder gaps while discussing change management this week. Clearly there are stakeholder gaps in my example here. I get the fact that there needed to be some quick decisions made during the heat of the global pandemic, but we mustn’t forget the experimentation component to flirting with technology.
This experimentation must include using a model like the Vantage Point Model©. The experimentation must include stakeholder representation from the organization related to philosophy, culture, policy, strategy, tactics, logistics, and tasks. I teach this model in all leadership development work I do. I truly believe and have witnessed it to be true that if all seven stakeholder groups are represented, change has a great chance of success. Additionally, I have seen failure, particularly in the area of technology, when the stakeholders involved with tactics, logistics, or tasks are not included in the experimentation.
The list of seemingly necessary IT capabilities continues to grow, and IT spending continues to consume an increasing percentage of their budgets. No one person, committee, or department should be left to make, often by default, the choices that determine the impact of IT on your organization’s business strategy. Beware of chasing elusive benefits (eg. Information to anyone, anytime, anywhere). Choose goals for technology/digitization that match the strategy of your organization. You cannot do it all at once – do it in sprints. We need to consider how our technology can help give us a centralized global perspective, but also maintain individualization on a regional and local level. Involving all stakeholders is again important to the experimentation here.
Bottom-line: Flirting With Technology = Great Deal of Experimentation.
SMART Global Reflections
I love traveling internationally and connecting with people from all over the world. As I fly the last leg of my trip home this evening I am reflecting on how blessed I was to be in Hamburg, Germany 🇩🇪 for the SMART Factory League 2022 Summit. Industry and manufacturing leaders from around the world came together to discuss current issues and promising practices. It was so great to be with Anna Beklemisheva, from Greece 🇬🇷, who is the GIA event manager. The last time I saw Anna in person was in Berlin back in 2018, pre global pandemic. I love working with Anna and will always make myself available to chair and speak at events for her. Every time I am with Anna I learn so much.
It was great to see individuals in person that I had connected with back in 2018. One big difference that we all noted in the discussions from 2018 to 2022 were how people centric the discussions have become. It seems to be a global issue with no industry exempt from having a talent shortage. They were kidding me that in 2018 I kept wanting to talk education and talent with only limited interest. Now in 2022, every speaker and every panel discussion ended up discussing the workforce. And, I loved it when they all agreed that we must be thinking about talent development down into the younger ages/grades of education. This is a passion of mine. We need to be thinking exposure, exploration, and experience much earlier.
It is so critical to have these global interactions and learn from each other. One leader from Poland 🇵🇱 discussed that we are setting ourselves up for failure if we believe that schools and teachers can keep up with changes in technology and other industrial advances to be able to teach effectively. He believes industry needs to step up and provide teachers. I have been advocating for years now that we need to be thinking about do we best put people who have actually done the things they are teaching in front of our scholars. We already do this in many of our career and technical education programs and I believe this is a way to increase our teaching in a relevant context and putting great teachers in front of students every minute of the day. Keep in mind that if we are creative about this a person might only teach one hour a day and be in their industry career the other part of the day. Or it could be someone who has retired from business or industry. This would take some logistical work and partnering between industries and schools, but I believe it could be done.
I am coming home excited that the world is thinking about how we become more people centric. We need to do a better job of talent mapping and development for our young scholars as well as our current employees.
Remember To Care First
I’ve got a good friend that always says, “if your the smartest person in the room, you need different people in the room.” I always reply that I want to be the dumbest person in the room.” I believe we are saying the same thing – we want to be surrounded by creative and innovative people who have expertise in the space we are working in. in Simple Truth #35: “People Don’t Care How Much You Know Until They Know How Much You Care” in Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways To Be A Servant Leader and Build Trust, Making Common Sense Common Practice, Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley, Randy reminds us, “Demonstrating care and concern for others is the quickest and easiest way to build trust” (p. 93). And, don’t forget, it must be genuine care and concern.
I was reminded of this during an elementary teacher focus group I was conducting this week as part of a strategic planning process I am facilitating for a school corporation. The teachers were very clear about the fact that their principal, “I’m supported”; “Family first, Kelli [principal] really does practice this”; “We are checked in on, Kelli cares about us”; and, “Open door policy, Kelli is accessible.” It was clear these teachers respect their principal. These we’re all great reminders that caring must come first.
Are You Invisible?
Clayton M. Christensen said, “There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.” Ever since having the opportunity to meet Dr. Christensen at Harvard, I’ve been a fan of this quote because I have always advocated for teaching our scholars in ways that there is no single answer. If we want to make school work look like real work it can’t all be single right answers, because our real-life problems don’t have single right answers. I was reminded of this yesterday in a meeting when someone said, “All of these answers could be right.” Therefore, how we frame the problem is crucial.
I’ve come to believe there are very few absolute right or wrong answers when it comes to decision making. There are only the best choices given the circumstances. There are good and bad decisions based on our core values, beliefs, and morals. But, again, there are very few absolute right or wrong answers when it comes to decision making. Sometimes, this keeps people from making decisions – even ones that will affect our lives. This causes us to be invisible and miss out on creating our own story. Thus why we need to be teaching our young scholars how to be decision makers in a world of no single right answers.
How do we do this for our scholars and ourselves? Here is a pretty basic four step approach:
- Frame the problem or choice to make
- Consider all the possible choices/solutions. Consider a pro/con approach
- Do the research
- Make a decision
As adults we worry we’ll make a decision that will be judged by others as “the wrong one”. I believe this fear was developed in us because our curiosity for learning is thwarted because our main goal in school was to find the “right answers” to achieve an A on the exam. By not making decisions, stepping into our strengths, knowledge, or confidence, we, and our students, become invisible.
Linked Lives
You all know I am a very reflective person. Holidays always seem to become days of reflection for me. On this Fourth if July holiday I am reflecting about my son growing up, our relationship changing from dad and lad to dad and man, and whether my dad knew how great a job he did for prepping me for life and how much I appreciated it. Circumstances have allowed me to get to be at my son’s house in Madisonville, Kentucky near where he is interning for Cal-Maine Foods, every weekend for the past five weekends in a row. Dream come true, because I love spending time with the boy, now man. I make a point of saying, man now, because he is just that. And what’s more the father-son links are now converting to an adult relationship and I am loving every minute of it. Everyone who knows me knows how close Heath and I are. I’m always in a funk for a couple of days after spending time with him.
Last weekend I had the chance to meet my son’s boss and have a great conversation. In the course of the conversation he gave me one of the greatest compliments a dad could hear. He said that he could tell how close Heath and I were and that I had not left raising him and giving him the experiences necessary to succeed in life to anyone else. He said, “All the responsibility you gave him and the modeling you did for him on the farm growing up has prepared him for this moment and his life’s work (I just teared up repeating that). I quickly deferred much of the credit to Hope, my wife and Heath’s mother, but then was very thankful that he recognized that. When Heath was born, I made a commitment that I was going to spend every moment I could with him – and I did. I had watched other people leave much of this responsibility to grandparents or hired people and I just wasn’t going to do that. I know some very wealthy and allegedly successful people who never really got to know their kids. Sad! I am so blessed to have taken Heath on so many FFA trips with me and all the time we spent working side-by-side here on the farm. Some said it was too early to have him in Washington D.C. at six months old or out helping me with horses and livestock from the time he could walk, but the research would now suggest I was on to something. My goal was to have had him in all 50 states by the time he graduated high school. We did not quite make that goal but have made it to 46 and Canada twice. This year is his senior year in college, so I have a year to get him to Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, and Alaska before he graduates from college.
Please do not take this post as a criticism of others’ parenting because it is not meant to be. It is meant to highlight the concept of “linked lives” introduced in Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential, Fulfilling Society’s Promise by Dr. Dana Suskind. All members of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) were given the opportunity to receive a copy of the book. So glad I got my copy! I am reading the book right now and have been inspired, as a policymaker and education leader, to want to shepherd and cheerlead the concepts introduced in the book. For example, I was recently told that some schools no longer allow their agriculture teachers to take their own children on trips. This would have seriously limited my time with Heath. At a time when teachers a seriously exploring alternative career options, shouldn’t we be finding (exploring) ways to help our teachers stay linked to their own children? In the book Dr. Suskind said, “The lives of children and parents are intertwined” (p. 139). As a policy-maker I recommit to doing all I can to create environments where parents can be all they can be. I hear parents say they appreciated the extra quality time that they had during the pandemic. Let’s learn from this and find creative/flexible ways to help.
Also, we need to think both quantity and quality. More time with our kids is great, period. So that is a start, but quality of that time really thinking about brain development is also critical. I think back to my own upbringing by two of the greatest parents of all times. I was linked to their lives. Dr. Suskind also said, “The experiences we have in childhood, as mediated by our parents, will be reflected in much of what happens years later” (p. 139). At my mom’s passing I blogged about our link in Leadership Lessons From My Mom and I am reflecting on my dad this morning and all he did to prepare me for all the moments I have been blessed with; including raising an incredible lad turned man. My dad passed away when I was 25. My hope on this holiday morning is that he knew the great job he had done at linking our lives.
Learning From Action Not Abstraction
As a person who has lived six decades now, the world feels like a more perilous place. I don’t really think the modern world is any more dangerous than it was fifty or sixty years ago. I do, however, believe we are in a much more risk averse world today. I think a lot about whether this risk aversion is inhibiting children’s development of autonomy, competence, confidence, and resilience. Growing up on a farm I had many opportunities to test observations, to experiment and tinker, to fail and bounce back. Nothing was treated like a major risk, and I was not prevented from learning how to judge the truly dangerous, from the simply unfamiliar. Please know I am not in any way suggesting putting our children in harms way. I just worry we we are ensconcing children in a life of abstraction rather than action. I guess the old agriculture teacher in me will always believe in “learning by doing.” “Doing” always comes with some inherent risk. Riding a bike carries the inherent risk of falling off. Thank goodness we have not made it illegal to ride a bike.
Case in point; yesterday my son was telling about things he had done as a kid growing up on our farm and his girlfriend was amazed. She asked if I knew he was doing all that. Well, yes and no. Was he doing anything bad? No! Case in point: having been in North Carolina during the recent gas shortage, I saw firsthand all the stupid ways some people were hoarding gas. I can guarantee you my son understands why you don’t put gas in a trash bag lined trash can with no lid. Enough said! And, yes I did see that done. Somehow, last evening, the subject of putting pennies on a railroad track came up. My son’s girlfriend had never heard of doing that. What? She then went on to talk about having some of those pennies you get flattened in a machine at vacation destinations. What? That’s no souvenir. I’m not going to say whether we did or did not smash pennies on a railroad track last night, but those would be a souvenir she would never forget making. Besides just plain being fun, we need to let children grapple with a little bit of healthy risk. Doing so can help teach motor skills, develop confidence, and get our young scholars acquainted with the use of tools and some of the basic principles of science. Let’s add some action to all the abstraction.
The Second Generation
Everyone should feel satisfied and proud of the career they want to pursue. Our goal has always been for our son to make peace with his post-secondary education and career goals and, first and foremost, make himself proud. There has been quite a lot of research done studying the impact parents have on their children’s educational and career goals. I am really glad and proud of the work I have done in the policy arena to have career exploration be something that happens much earlier than the end of high school. Our young scholars need to be preparing for the next chapter of life—whether that’s higher education, industry training, directly into the workforce or another path much earlier. I also believe that parents have an influence, either positive or negative, on this. I began reflecting on this yesterday when standing outside my son’s summer internship at Cal-Maine Foods. I could not go in for bio-security reasons, but I was so proud that there stood two generations of Animal Science majors at two different universities – Purdue University and Murray State University. Check out our picture and here is the tweet I did in the moment:
I asked Heath if he ever felt any pressure from me to be an animal science major. He answered an emphatic “no.” He did say that I had set an example because of how proud I was of having gone to Purdue and received degrees in both Animal Science and Agricultural Education. He also knows the story well of how I ended up being an agriculture science teacher and working in education my entire career. If you don’t know that story, click here. Heath also talked about all the experiences growing up on a working farm gave him. Home is where thinking ahead, dreaming big and setting goals can become normalized activities and allow all those skills to be available to our children when they come to the forks in the road. The earlier the conversations start, the better prepared they’ll be to make the best choice when that moment arrives. It’s not about applying pressure, but about being a model of making life choices that match passions and purpose.
Where Do We Put The First Brick?
During our final session of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) 2022 Legislative Conference, Scott Palmer of the Education Counsel, told the story that his grandfather said he could build a bridge if someone told him where to place the first brick. Then, he asked the panel he was moderating to tell where they would place the first brick as we continue recovery from COVID and redesign education. For me, this is about stopping the throwing of bricks at each other. Let’s have the difficult conversations and get it figured out for our scholars.
We all need to be rethinking what the opportunity to learn means. My first metaphorical brick, however, is that we need to find every child. Now, in our 514th day of the Global Pandemic, we have many students that have become anonymous. We need to find every child and make sure we are giving them the opportunity to learn. Then we need to take an integrated systems approach to:
- integrate all outside experiences the scholars have.
- we need to rethink the time and place of learning.
- we need to consider the time and place of learning.
- we need to consider the different paradigms for opportunities to learn.
- we need to provide critical experiences for all our students.
- we need to take into account the ecology of a young person’s experiences;
- all the adults that students experience and interact with.
- the other students in their lives.
- the extracurricular and other activities outside the traditional school day.
I continue to say that school is no longer just a place. We need to shift the system to meet the needs of every kid, not have the kids shift to meet the needs of the system.
I’ll leave you with this thought: Whatever we want to be true for our students has to be true for their teachers, including experiencing safety, belonging, and purpose in the community of school.
Always In A State Of Becoming
This week I had the opportunity to go to Disney’s EPCOT. I’ve always been inspired by the creative and imaginative of Walt Disney. I was here for ExcelinEd’s 2021 National Summit On Education. As you can imagine, because of the inspiration of the location, there were lots of quotes and references from Walt Disney. One from EPCOT, which stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, was that Walt Disney wanted to build a community of tomorrow that “would never be completed.” His vision was to have a place for demonstrating and introduce new ideas and systems. What was really jumping out at me was this idea of “always in a state of becoming.” Just like Disney’s vision of EPCOT never being completed, we personally are always in a state of becoming as well as everything around us. This includes education. As the world, society, and what we know from science about how children develop and we learn, our work is never completed. Thus with every day comes the opportunity for becoming – becoming even more incredible than yesterday!
I love this idea of “becoming.” It is so much more liberating than “improving” or “changing.” Those two things signal there being a deficiency. “Becoming” signals growth, adaptation, and evolution. Think about it: every moment we are becoming something– something else. Our intellect is constantly evolving and changing because of the different impressions, and different visual/audio/spatial stimuli that we have each and every day.
While philosopher Parmenides spoke of “being” and Heraclitus’ philosophy was about “becoming,” we are not sure if Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus, or Heraclitus to Parmenides. This rivalry had a profound influence on Plato. As Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” There is always a state of flux.
We’re never the same person. Every moment our molecules, atoms, and cells change in our body. Who we were yesterday isn’t the same person are today. Therefore we need to embrace that we and everything around us is always “becoming.”
Byron's Babbles 
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