change – Sylvia Libow Martinez

January 28, 2010

‘Ideas for Change in America’ competition

I typically don’t post all the emails I get asking for placement on this blog. I guess I should be happy that people think it’s worth their time! But this one seems like it should be the exception. Here it is in whole.

Hey Sylvia,

This is Maria Tchijov, Director of Outreach at Change.org. I wanted to let you all know that we recently officially launched the second annual ‘Ideas for Change in America’ competition today, and I wanted to see if you’d be interested in posting an idea of your own. (You can see the site at www.change.org/ideas.)

As you might recall, the first Ideas for Change in America competition was launched following the presidential election, inspiring the submission of more than 7,500 ideas and 650,000 votes. The purpose of the initiative this year is to empower citizens to identify and build momentum behind the country’s best ideas for addressing the major challenges we face.

We’re currently accepting ideas in 20 issue categories, and are looking for a few top bloggers in each area to post an idea that we can feature. To participate, all we’d need you to do is post an idea of a few hundred words or less describing a policy or program you’d like to see implemented. You can see the simple submission page here: http://www.change.org/ideas/post_idea.

Voting is open to the public, and we’ll be hosting a large event in DC to announce the 10 winners of the competition in March. Most importantly, in the months following the conclusion of voting we’ll be mobilizing the growing Change.org team and our 1 million community members to heavily promote each winning idea and the people and organizations behind them.

If you have any questions at all, please let me know. And if this isn’t something you have the time to participate in but think your readers might be interested, it would be awesome if you might mention it on your blog.

Thanks for the support!

Maria

January 13, 2010March 19, 2014

Say the change you want to see

For schools embarking on a change process, one key success factor is envisioning what that change looks like and sharing the vision widely.

In many of the schools we work with, the change involves a vision of students and teachers working together to use technology tools in new ways. They envision empowered students stepping up and taking part in the effort to improve education. They see teachers who feel more comfortable about technology. They see students and teachers as co-creators of the learning environment.

But often, the stated objectives don’t match the full vision. There are unspoken wishes, hopes and desires that go along with the hard statistics. The problem is that if you don’t explore these hidden wishes, you can’t plan for them, articulate them, or share the vision. Sometimes these are harder to measure or they sound “soft”. But sometimes these unspoken outcomes are the most powerful of all. Surprisingly, you may find that they are widely shared, but people feel that they aren’t important or scientific.

You shouldn’t be embarrassed to say them out loud. It’s not silly to hope that the work you do changes children’s lives and to make that clear.

If you put those goals in writing, you can plan for them, and more importantly, figure out how to measure them.

Finding hidden objectives
One exercise that we do with schools is to “say the change you want to see.” It’s a simple visioning exercise. First, imagine that everything you hope for comes true. Now write a story for your community newspaper about “what happened.”

The beauty of this exercise is:

It has to be simple and clear. No academic citations, obtuse language, grant gobbledygook, or pages of distracting data. Using present tense and plain language creates impact. Make up quotes and anecdotes to make it come alive. Pretend you are writing for your Aunt Betty and you’ll end up capturing the heart of the project.
It uncovers unspoken wishes. Often there are outcomes that are never really articulated, but people secretly hope for. You think that teachers will use technology more, but you also hope that students will be more engaged. You write in the grant that student achievement will rise, but you hope that students will love learning and feel empowered. You purchase technology and measure its use, but secretly hope that teachers will find that spark that made them want to be teachers in the first place.

Perhaps your fantasy newspaper story starts like this.

After a year of participating in the TEAMS project, student excitement about learning is at an all time high at Fallsburg Middle School. Mary K., a seventh grade student, says, “I love learning this way, I was getting bad grades but now I love coming to school.” Parents feel the same way and see the learning as being more “real world.” Before TEAMS, only 26% of FMS parents said they felt what their children were learning in school was relevant. After only one year, this rose dramatically to 87%.

Measuring hidden objectives
So the next part of this exercise is figuring out what in your story needs to be measured and planned for. The numbers don’t have to be the actual goals, that’s not the important part. The important part is to unpack those hidden agendas and make them tangible. If some of your goals are not currently being measured, MEASURE THEM. If you don’t measure them they won’t happen and a year from now, you’ll wonder why. Do what you must NOW so you CAN write that story a year from now.

If a goal is to have happier students or more satisfied teachers, how will you know? Somebody better ask them. How will you show it? Somebody better shoot some video and collect some quotes. Plan for that now! Is one of your goals community involvement? Better ask them too! Plan some surveys both before and after the big project. If you want to say there is an improvement, you have to measure before, after, and maybe in between.

And ask what you really want to know; don’t let naysayers drain the life out of it. Some people think dry and colorless means authoritative. Don’t let it bother you when somebody rolls their eyes when you say you want to ask students if they like school better. Ask for the change you want to see.

If you don’t plan this, you won’t be able to document the real hidden hopes and dreams that bolster all the hard work and long hours. It may sound more “scientific” to collect “hard data”, but collecting targeted qualitative data can be extremely valuable.

Say the change you want to see. Ask the change you want to see. Be the change you want to see.

February 19, 2008

Creating successful change

The other day I blogged about “Gizmo High” – a teacher’s opinion piece of how technology was forced on his school to the detriment of learning. As I read some of the reaction to the story and to my blog, I realized that I wasn’t clear about what the point of my post was. I “buried the lead” as they warn beginning journalists not to do. In fact, I buried it so deep it was completely missing.

So here’s my point. Forcing technology on a school won’t work and will likely result in resistance and resentment. To match that mistake, teachers, the community, and even students can resist change simply because it’s different. There are so many ways for technology integration to go wrong, and this story simply illustrated one of them.

So where’s the magic balance? What’s the secret of success? I thought a lot about it and have a theory to throw out here in the form of a chart.

The horizontal axis represents collaboration and goes from the most authoritarian system (one person or group has complete say in what happens) to maximum consensus.
The vertical axis represents control – by which I mean steering towards a vision, sort of like having a rudder. It goes from the bottom, where there is absolutely no vision about what to do to the top where someone (or a group) has a perfectly formed vision of the future.

I’ve labeled the quadrants with what I think happens with these combinations.

Resistance, resentment (top left) – this is where Gizmo High falls. Somebody with an extreme vision forced it on everyone else. That vision was something like “the one with the most goodies wins.”
Successful change (top right) – where everyone would like to be. The perfect storm of a shared, guiding vision and just enough process and consensus building to get everyone on board as it happens.
Paralysis (bottom right) – When there is so much consensus building going on that nothing of significance ever happens, it means that the vision is missing. The engine is running but there’s no one at the rudder.
Status quo (bottom left) – There’s not even a vision of change and there are plenty of people who feel passionate about keeping things just as they are.

Successful change is more than just gaining consensus from the participants about “what they want” without first establishing a vision of change. People can’t choose a future they’ve never seen before. Many times I think technology integration is considered successful if the teachers “feel comfortable” with the technology. Often this means that they are using technology to do the same old things with new gizmos.

So where does the vision look like? I can’t tell you — that’s exactly the point. My solution wouldn’t work for you, because that’s just a recipe for a “Quadrant 1” style Gizmo High disaster. No one can come in and tell you what your vision of the future should be; you can’t follow someone else’s dream.

But you can stand on the shoulders of giants. One place I find my inspiration is by reading great thinkers about education like Dr. Seymour Papert. He painted a picture in the very early days of computers of how students could program computers, instead of computers programming children. He worked to create a programming language for children that would directly connect to math in a natural way. This language is still in use in schools around the world today and is the backbone of new ones like MicroWorlds and Scratch. His constructivist theories of how students learn are the basis of the One Laptop Per Child Initiative.

But don’t take my word for it. Read him, read others, and find your own.

Sylvia