Laura K Spencer, Ed.D.

Author: Laura Spencer

Embrace Your Inefficiency

Total efficiency constrains us. We become super invested in maintaining the status quo because that is where we excel. Innovation is a threat. Change is terrifying. Being perfect at something is dangerous if it’s the only thing you can do.
“Getting Ahead by Being Inefficient”

I stumbled across this interesting article today called “Getting Ahead by Being Inefficient.” At first glance, I thought it was going to be the article I’ve been waiting my whole life for… the one that would say my scattered mind, my messy desk, my caffeine-fueled late night procrastinations, were going to propel me far in life.

And while it didn’t quite get me there, it did have an interesting point that probably touches home for a lot of my educator friends. Basically, getting really really good at something can hurt you in the long haul. Let me summarize the author’s example.

A bird evolves over time to become adept at eating a certain berry. The beak fits the berry perfectly. The talons grip the branch just right. The bird has it made. It’s perfect for the berry, and the berry is perfect for the bird. Efficiency is key!

A mammal comes along and says, “Hmm, that berry looks good. I want some.” But he doesn’t have a perfect beak or talons, so he has to adapt.. maybe he scoops up the ones that dropped to the ground, or sneaks around at night and steals some from the lower branches. Not the most efficient, but it gets the job done.

So what happens during the polar vortex when the berries are frozen or the tree is killed? The bird starves, and the mammal goes to his other food source and munches away. Efficiency kills the bird. Inefficiency saves the mammal.

Efficiency is great in an unchanging environment, but to expect an environment to remain static is unrealistic. Environments change all the time.
“Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient”

Are you seeing the teaching connection? A lot of us felt pretty confident in our teaching in the NCLB era. We had a scope and sequence laid out, an assessment that aligned pretty well with the high stakes accountability system, and a traditional report card. Teaching was, in many aspects, reminiscent of how we had been taught. The berries were luscious and we could reach them all.

But the world was changing… and changing fast… and it shook the core of our berry tree. It demanded change. It screamed for personalization. It hollered for relevance and engagement.

Our beaks weren’t enough. Our talons couldn’t stay gripped to the tree. We had to change. To adapt to the new world. And the scariest part is that this new world is ever changing. We can’t simply find a new tree. We have to be flexible and adaptable. We have to be open to new opportunities when our environment changes.

We have to be the mammal…

February 4, 2019
Learn from Failure
One of the books I received from the Next Big Idea Book Club was Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive by Bradley R Staats.

Reading it was more of an affirmation than a “ooh, I didn’t know that.” What I appreciated about Staats book was the reasoning he gave for the ideas I had already come to believe. Staats background is in behavior science, so much of his book focuses on why we are so bad at being lifelong learners, even though there are constant messages about the importance of continual learning to stay relevant in our careers and in our lives.

Staats shares a few steps in his book for becoming better at learning. They include:
- Valuing failure
- Focusing on process, not outcome, and on questions, not answers
- Making time for reflection
- Learning to be true to yourself by playing to your strengths
- Pairing specialization with variety
- Treating others as learning partners
For me, the bang for the buck was in the valuing failure section. I’ll be honest, I’m one of those people who cringes when I hear phrases like, “Failure is just a first attempt at learning” or “If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying something new.” It’s not because I have a fear of failure. It’s because I see failure as the end. Mistakes are part of process, but failure is larger. It’s the point of giving up… as long as trying is part of the process, than to me there is no failure. Just learning opportunities and trials. Therefore, I found the following quotes from Staats book enlightened me, and helped me expand my definition of failure.

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“Failure can change how we act. The discovery that a belief we had was wrong can alter how we look for new information. We become more likely to expand both the breadth and depth of our investigation: we might talk to someone different, and we might spend more time considering what has occurred. Since failure is to some degree a surprise, it makes us change our assumptions. We reflect on what happened and how to address it going forward.”

“The reason we need failure to learn is straightforward: learning requires trying new things, and sometimes new things don’t work as expected. Failure creates a powerful learning cocktail, mixing new ideas with novel information and a motivation to experiment.”

“A focus on success leads both to a fear of failure and to an inability to see the failure that occurs around us.”

Fundamental attribution error…. in considering our own failure, we often “overweight things such as luck or the difficulty of the task and underweight our ability or effort… when you assign responsibility for a failure to outside events, you negatively impact your motivation to try to learn.”

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To destigmatize failure we need to bring our struggles out into the open. Brene Brown would call this being vulnerable. And Daniel Coyle would add that vulnerability builds trust, which is what is needed to keep that learning-from-failure cycle positive. We also need to shift how we think about acting versus not acting. Staats explains, “We are averse to loss, and failure always brings the possibility of loss. Instead of considering the safety of the status quo and the risk of doing things differently, consider the risk in the status quo and the safety that comes from learning new things.”

After all, “mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all” says Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. He explains that “they are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).”
February 1, 2019
There’s a Fly in My Soup!
How many times have you found yourself trying over and over again to explain a problem, only to have the other person jump to solutions without quite hearing you? Reminds me of this Sesame Street routine.

What I love about Design Thinking is that the focus on empathy requires the designer to truly listen, observe, and immerse oneself into the problem through the lens of the user, and not the lens of the designer. It requires us to hear about the issue with the fly in the soup.

This hit home for me Saturday at #DesignCamp. I attended Ellen Deutscher’s (@Lndeutsch) “Nurturing Design Thinking Mindsets through Play and Improv” session. I told her I was attending because improv gives me anxiety and I needed to step outside my comfort zone.

Ellen is a wizard at leading people through collaborative experiences that build active listening and risk taking so I knew I was in good hands. At one point, after an activity, she asked if anyone wanted to share how that experience made them feel. She said, “Be mindful of your process. If you don’t like it, why force your students?”
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How can a concept so seemingly simple not actually be so? Why do we, as educators, keep forcing processes on students that would make us cringe? Timed tests, novel selection by Lexile level, five-paragraph essays…

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that education tends to search for the middle ground, the average, and solve accordingly. Instead of being mindful of what makes us unique, it’s easier to solve for the middle.

The Air Force learned the flaw in this approach when they discovered that their cockpit, designed based on average measurements of hundreds of pilots, actually fit none of their pilots, resulting in many crashes … on one particularly rough day, 17 plane crashes!

Average doesn’t work in cockpits, and it doesn’t work in education. Randy Scherer (@RandellScherer) reiterated this in his “Design for Extreme Users” session. Randy explains how extreme users (or “radical people!”) lead us to “deep insights about why our designs sort-of, kind-of work.” When we set aside the concept of average, we can make a huge difference in the lives of students.

When we set aside the concept of average, we can be mindful of our processes. We can design education not for the average, but for every user. And when we do that, then we can truly take care of the fly in the soup.
January 29, 2019
It’s All About the Soft Skills

Read an article today called, “Teens Rate Soft Skills More Vital Than Hard Skills.” The author, Dian Schaffhauser, opened by discussing how teens incorrectly rate the soft skills of self-confidence, communication, leadership and teamwork as more critical than hard skills:

Could we be over-promoting the importance of soft skills to young people at the expense of helping them understand the relevance of other, “harder” skills? According to a recent survey, just over half of teens (52 percent) said they believe have a good understanding of the skills they need to be successful after high school. Yet, what they ranked at the top of the list were all soft skills: self-confidence, communication, leadership and teamwork. The skills that ranked least important were computer expertise, writing, typing and math.
By Dian Schaffhauser . 01/07/19

I find it interesting the author assumes the teens are wrong in weighing ‘soft’ skills over ‘hard’ skills.

Soft Skills Matter

One of the soft skills at the top of the teen list is communication. By its nature, communication requires solid understanding of rhetoric, language, etc. which is much more robust than the five paragraph essay we teach in schools. Likewise, without self-confidence, leadership, or teamwork, what use are your math skills unless someone hires you to sit in a closet and solve equations all day?

Quite honestly, I’m baffled that typing is called out as a hard skill at all, given the influx of touch screens, Siri/Alexa, and mobile devices which require dexterous thumbs over home key placement. Likewise, I’m sure many teens don’t see computer expertise as something “else” for them because technology is ubiquitous in their lives. And let’s be real, when they are in classrooms that relegate technology to internet searches, or a PowerPoint presentation, why would we expect them to see “computer expertise” as a needed hard skill?

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner isn’t looking for computer expertise, but he is looking for digital fluency, which requires proficiency in designing presentations, manipulating spreadsheets and navigating social media. At a conference in April, he urged schools to focus on four core skills: critical reasoning, creative problem solving, collaboration and basic digital fluency (Article: “Forget coding. It’s the soft skills, stupid. And that’s what schools should be teaching.”)

Schaffhauser’s article goes on to share other data points from the survey about access to STEM learning, but it’s non-congruent with both the article title and its opening declaration so I’m not sure what purpose those data points provide. 64% of students said they didn’t believe they were involved in any STEM programs. So are we to be surprised when only 33% of students express interest in STEM fields? And honestly, how are they supposed to know what career options are out there, and what hard and soft skills are required, if less than half of the teens are getting any instruction in career path opportunities?

The Real Skills

Is the author implying that hard skills are the path to STEM, and that teens valuing soft skills are going to prevent them from success in those fields? Seth Godin, American author and former dot com business executive would argue, against that. He believes that soft skills, which he’d rather call real skills, are what matters most. In fact, he calls them real because even if you’ve got the hard skills, “you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down, or program a computer to do.” Seth knows that real skills can’t replace the hard skills, but what they do is amplify it, give it meaning and value, and add to the success of an organization.

In Gallup’s 21st Century Skills and the Workplace Survey (2013), a majority of respondents agreed that most of the skills they’ve used in their current job were developed outside of school. So maybe instead of dismissing these teens as being incorrect in their assumptions that soft skills matter more than hard skills, we should take some notes.

January 10, 2019
Book Read: Design for Strengths

“‘You can have all the right answers, but it doesn’t matter if you are answering the wrong question.’ The willingness to circle back and challenge the central question and continue to ask it in a better way – and potentially abandon the current exploration – that is the hallmark of Design Thinking.” – John K. Coyle in Design for Strengths

In education, there is a lot of talk about students discovering their passions, their strengths, their interests, and then building upon those through personalized learning opportunities. What does that truly look like? Although Coyle’s book is not specific to education, there are so many nuggets of wisdom that we can apply to our school culture.

“Skill gaps are easy – you work at them until you master them. Gravity problems – you accept them, quit solving for them, and then design around them.”

“Step Zero: Acceptance. You can’t solve a problem you are not willing to have.”

“Just because you ‘accept’ something does not mean you agree with it or submit that it is ‘OK.’ It simply means you accept that it is.”

“Most companies hire for diversity of talent, experience, and background – and then they waste it… more often than not, they ask each team member to do the same set of tasks in the very same way… they ignore the unique capabilities and contributions that individuals bring and, in so doing, waste all that unique talent they recruited in the first place.”

“The ‘one size fits all’ fair approach to work task distribution is a recipe for an unengaged team.”

“When all the team members have a reasonably good working knowledge of each other’s strengths, they will – on their own (with a nudge of encouragement from leadership) – start to self-organize for their strengths.”

In all honesty, I probably have Post-Its on every other page in this book and could have put so many quotes in this post. It’d be a great book study for teacher groups looking to better understand ways in which to develop personalized, strengths-based environments for both students and staff.

Design for Strengths

December 19, 2018
Exploring Agency & Personalization
For the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside our county office’s Assessment, Accountability, and Evaluation Unit, as well as some of our teachers, to better understand the principles of agency and personalization. As these are key elements of our district’s vision and mission, it is important to be able to articulate what those principles are, how they manifest in an elementary school classroom, and what impact they have on student learning.

To dive deeper in to these principles, I have been meeting with three teacher hubs to further explore the principles of agency and personalization. Hubs consist of a grade level team at a school site that meet weekly around this topic. By participating in a cycle of Plan, Do, Study, Act, teachers dig in to better understand how the principle they are focused on is developed in, and impacts, their students.
For example, a hub studying student agency might ask:

What is agency? What impact does it have on DMUSD students? What do we want to accomplish?

What common activities will we engage students in to increase agency?

How will we communicate the work, results, and resources to stakeholders?

How will we measure agency?

Each teacher hub meets weekly for approximately 6-8 weeks. During these meetings, teachers discuss articles read on the topic, ideate methods to bring these principles to life in the classroom, and after prototyping those ideas with students, time is spent reflecting and refining the idea. This cycle is repeated as many times as needed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the principle.

This is an example of our initial ideation as to ways we personalize in an elementary classroom.

In January, the three hubs will convene together to share their findings with each other. Their findings will be documented and passed along to new hubs. The new hubs will then analyze the findings of the group and expand on it within their own time together as a hub cycle.

This is part of a developmental evaluation approach, which is much like the R&D process private sector product development teams use. It allows us to provide feedback about how a major systems change is unfolding; generate evidence for how an innovation may need to change or adapt before taken to scale; and then spreading the resulting ideas/knowledge to have a broader impact.

The idea is that, as the hubs expand, we will reach consensus as to what these principles mean for our students and can then provide districtwide professional learning so that all students, and all teachers, have a common vision and plan moving forward. It’s been an amazing experience to join these teachers on a learning journey. I’m excited to see the results.
December 15, 2018