Our Agility in Responding to Constant Change

My View

I was talking with someone who works for my nephew, owner of an internet design and marketing company. Both men are in their 20s. The company has been hugely successful, and we were discussing the company’s future, where it’s headed and what’s next.

As I listened to Stephen talk about his world of work, I was struck by his thinking. The entire conversation was about the constant changes within the internet that affect their business. He calmly and without fear revealed what was an obvious flexibility and agility in thinking about the company’s future. Change is a normal, everyday part of what they do. It’s a constant, daily factor.

Then I thought about our son, who works for a company that is constantly redesigning and improving the spinal implants surgeons use in hospital operating rooms. His need to learn about the next device or procedure is constant and intense. He must be flexible in his responses to the various surgeons he serves and agile in his own abilities and knowledge. Change is a constant, daily factor.

I am not sure we think in this way as employees of our public schools. We complain about change that is barely change at all.

Limits of Complacency

Public schools, by design, are institutions built to last — to withstand whatever outside pressures or changes might occur. And we’ve stayed the same, with a “that’s the way it’s always been” mindset, for far too long. There’s no way anyone can believe that the system that prepared my parents in the 1950s and me in the ’70s and my kids in the ’90s should remain the same forever, is there?

And yet the classroom lessons I observe today are not substantially different from those I observed as a student. Some of that is important and necessary, such as teaching our youngest students how to read. But some of it just isn’t.

We’re safe in our school community. We take care of our students, respond to our families and are responsible to our taxpayers. We work incredibly hard and do our best to connect with our students and to teach well. Those of us working in the system probably like the system. We’ve been successful here. I like it here. Yet I believe our own complacency is limiting us and therefore limiting our students’ learning.

If we can become more of a learning organization, one in which we are all learning from each other and sharing ideas, lessons and risks that we’ve taken, we will model the very system our students are likely to work within. We’ll teach our students that it’s OK to take a risk, to be vulnerable and try something new or hard, to fail and to begin again.

We will teach them, through the learning experiences that we provide, how to be flexible and agile thinkers who expect to collaborate, communicate and change. We are already doing this at times, in some classrooms and in some lessons. I believe we must figure out what those things are that we most value about learning and then do those things more widely.

Rethinking Priorities

Public school systems need to be the biggest part of cultivating curiosity, creativity, civic responsibility, collaboration, problem solving and communication — not a place where we do those things from time to time, when we have time. We need to rethink our priorities and goals for all students and refuse to allow “the way it’s always been” to be an answer for why we do anything.

Just before this school year commenced, the leadership team in my district — board members and administrators — spent a full day evaluating what we believe about learning and what we think our mission, our purpose for existing, should be. It was a day of deep thought, collaboration and communication.

I expect we will continue the work of determining how our local schools can focus our incredible resources — teachers, employees and students — on innovative instructional practices that change our learning environments to give our students a more contemporary learning experience, preparing them for their future.