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You
are here: Organic Education: Update 2005
by Hugh Osborn
America's Challenge
We are inundated daily with stories about the serious problems our nation faces. "This is not a test," it is a real emergency, says Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat. The emergency he refers to is America's inability to compete against India and China in the Brain Game, the essential 21st century battle to create and leverage innovative thinkers. But there are other current or upcoming emergencies in energy, climate change, demographics and, of course, terrorism.Our educational system must turn out the innovators, scientists and leaders that we need if we are to solve our problems. Yet only 30% of American 4th graders can read at a proficient level. And performance gets worse as students get older. Clearly we must fix our schools if we are going to secure our future.
But here's the rub. Politicians, educators and business leaders have been trying to improve our schools for decades, with few results to show for their efforts. The latest commission reports from business, political and academic leaders sound exactly the same as those written ten, twenty or thirty years ago. In fact millions of dollars could be saved by simply putting new dates on the old reports.
What is going on here? Why can't we improve our schools?
We can. But first we must understand the problem: we have a fundamental system incompatibility. Our schools work on 19th century principles and simply cannot function effectively in the 21st century. Perfecting their obsolescence will not make them less obsolete: we need an entirely new paradigm. Fortunately, the 21st century provides exactly that. The tremendous forces of innovation buffeting the world, if effectively channeled, have more than enough power to transform our education system into exactly the vibrant tool we need.
Understanding the Future
In 1961, two organization theorists named Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker studied innovation in industry. They found that there are two opposing ways of organizing productive activity: mechanistic (like a machine) and organic (like an organism). Organic systems are vibrant and innovate well; mechanistic systems are gray and rarely innovate at all.For a variety of historical and political reasons, American schools are highly mechanistic. This means they are organized like 19th century factories, with hierarchical, or vertical, command-and-control structures, little flexibility and virtually no openness to innovation. Many individual teachers are innovative but the system as a whole does not reward or reorganize around this innovation. Many classes are age-based cohorts with little personalization. learning is largely rote and highly mechanistic. And the computers we have placed in schools are too often used for mechanistic drill-and-kill, not 21st century problem solving.
If there is one word that describes the 21st century, it is "organic" (in the organizational sense not the crunchy granola sense). Organic systems are highly innovative and flexible; they are far less hierarchical than mechanistic systems and are thus referred to as horizontal or "flat." The market system and democracy are organic systems, and America is the Enlightenment's great organic experiment. Information technology when used appropriately tends to make systems more organic, a process described brilliantly by Friedman in "The World is Flat" (he calls organic agents "flatteners"). Organic systems engage, empower and connect people.
The transformation of our educational system must be coordinated among three organizational levels: (1) the classroom, where students and teachers interact, (2) the district, where schools are managed and (3) the state/national level, where policy is set and "industry" values are determined.
The organic education scenario described here is a serious high-level plan for educational transformation. But it also is a radical new perspective that explains many fundamental conundrums in American education. Why is ADD so rampant? How to we reduce dropouts? Is extending the school day a good idea? Why hasn't technology led to innovation in American schools? Why do so many commission reports come to nothing? What's right and wrong with No Child Left Behind? Will money solve the problem? All these questions and many more are answered at a deep level when one shifts from a 19th century to a 21st century perspective. Why? Many seemingly intractable educational problems are simply artifacts of using an inappropriate model.
Bright IDEA: Seeing the Future in the Breakdown of the Broccoli Brain
We transform the system by replacing a failing, mechanistic approach at each of our three organizational levels with an innovative, organic force. The most important and difficult of these is the teacher/student interaction: how do we convert this essential relationship to one that radically boosts educational effectiveness?To do this successfully, we must first expand the definition of educational effectiveness. Schools today are laboring mightily to reach one-dimensional, low level academic standards. We add two fundamental goals that are necessary for real 21st century learning: engagement which, as Friedman points out, is necessary for true lifelong learning, and innovation, which the corporate sector rightly demands as an educational outcome.
The organic force that we use at the classroom level is the small organic working group. Focus on this model began in the 1980's when corporations started the conversion from the 1950's vertical organization to the 21st century horizontal approach (this change, along with the personal computers that helped initiate it, led to the longest period of high productivity growth in the American economy's history). The organic small group can be seen in the highly collaborative global work teams today, special ops in the military, multi-gamer teams and, most naturally, in the imaginative play groups that kids spontaneously create. In them, people collaborate within roles, informally educate each other, leverage conceptual and information tools, and inextricably interweave productive work, play and learning. These groups engage, empower and connect people, releasing imagination and initiative—the organic formula.
Margaret Gayle, a principal at 21st Century Solutions, put these principles into practice as co-designer, along with Valorie Hargett, of Bright IDEA 1, a K-2 project in North Carolina1. Bright IDEA 1 retrained 30 teachers over three years to use organic principles with 935 K-2 Title I children in North Carolina. The results were spectacular. Where nationally normed tests were applied, students doubled the academic performance of their peers and the achievement gap between ethnic groups was nearly eliminated. Students also showed strong outcomes in innovation skills, which were explicitly taught and measured. And this was done with no test prep, tutoring, extra hours or special selection of students or teachers.
Perhaps most important, students and teachers were wildly enthusiastic about learning and teaching. Truancy disappeared, as did attention problems. Teacher job satisfaction skyrocketed.
Bright IDEA students exhibited a characteristic that any parent will see as remarkable. Nearly all children, as parents know, have a broccoli stomach that fills up quickly at dinner but is unconnected to their dessert stomach, which can be empty and ready for ice cream no matter how much is in the broccoli stomach. Likewise, children have a "broccoli brain," which is the brain they use (or don't use) at school. It is unconnected to their identity, which is why they reply with "I don't remember" or a shrug when asked how school was. The broccoli brain can, unfortunately, grow to contain hard work, organization, and society itself, so that the student develops antagonistic attitudes toward all of these. Gamers, who are highly horizontal thinkers, despise all things broccoli, which is why any whiff of educational content will instantly kill a video game in the marketplace.
Bright IDEA students, however, never develop a broccoli brain; they see learning and school as absolutely integral to who they are and think about problems from school when they are at home. Parents report that students at home enthusiastically talk about their work in school without prompting.
The breakdown of the broccoli brain leads to a totally different kind of student. Bright IDEA students show strong self-motivation, self-organization and self-discipline and plenty of imagination and initiative. They internalize a metacognitive vocabulary of learning—skills like listening with empathy, thinking flexibly, solving problems, persisting, metacognition (even kindergartners use these words)—and enthusiastically identify these concepts in other people and apply them to their own learning. They thus develop a sense of control over and responsibility for their own learning.
But, in addition to advanced growth in learning, Bright IDEA students are superb citizens. They routinely help each other out and are a very tight-knit group. They learn complex social skills like teamwork from an early age. If this mindset is maintained, the incidence of social problems like dropping out, violence and truancy should be greatly reduced in this population.
What's the catch? Bright IDEA requires very hard work on the part of teachers. Going through the transition from vertical to horizontal thinking can be confusing and disorienting, although anyone who works hard enough should be able to do it. Bright IDEA training was the equivalent of getting an MA in terms of workload. Teachers did not get additional compensation when they completed the course, as they would after receiving an MA. But, with the right leadership-- all principals are required to take the entire Bright IDEA training program-- teachers will stick it out until they can use horizontal methods and see the remarkable results.
(Bright IDEA was not picked up by the national or education press. Thus researchers have not heard about it and there are no studies being done on teachers', students' or parents' experiences or attitudes. This is a huge loss for the country given the historic results the project achieved and the importance of understanding its methods and results.)
Bright IDEA solves one of the biggest conundrums in American education. It starts with a core concept from the progressive movement—that humans are born with powerful learning drives—yet achieves the stellar academic results that traditionalists seek. The chasm between these two groups has divided the world of education in America for a hundred years. Its solution shows the power of the organic model (as well as, of course, the brilliance of Bright IDEA's designers).
So the magic organic force in the classroom is the highly productive, small organic team seen in many facets of life. The extraordinary achievement of Bright IDEA is to import this instrument of 21st century success into the classroom. But Bright IDEA is an extraordinary achievement on another front, one that will allow us to invent the future as we address the second level of the education system, the local district.
Inventing the Future
Once they complete the conversion from vertical to horizontal thinking, Bright IDEA teachers have a sophisticated learning model that allows them to integrate all kinds of experiences into the classroom. Thus they become Rosetta Stones that can translate from vertical, 19th century requirements to horizontal, 21st century learning. This sets Bright IDEA teachers up as platforms for new organic innovations in the classroom.And there are many of these innovations waiting to flow into the classroom. Information technology has created hundreds of tools in the last few decades that are highly applicable to schools yet have been unable to penetrate the impermeable mechanistic barrier to innovation. We call this the Organic Toolbox. Its contents include video games, online communities, academic simulations and analytical systems, various educational tools from the Internet, customer relationship management and other administrative software. These and many others, including traditional media techniques underutilized in education, provide an extremely powerful set of tools.
But how can these complex tools and the Rosetta Stone factor be integrated into a solution for the problem of district grayness? Who will do the complex development to create a vibrant school culture from organic tools? And how can the resulting horizontal form of education be widely scaled?
These questions point to a new and vital change agent that will start the vertical to horizontal transformation: the organic learning environment (OLE). This is a virtual/actual environment created by organic publishers that combines the functions of:
· An online community. The thousands of students and teachers in an OLE will be connected in many different ways.
· Teachers' colleges. Bright IDEA teachers go through the course load equivalent of an MA in education. This can be scaled up to tens of thousands of teachers.
· A game developer/publisher. This function will need to include the conversion and integration of analytical tools from research.
· An educational publisher. The OLE publisher will have to develop all kinds of educational materials, collaborating with teachers and experts.
· A CRM system. Complex software will be required to track thousands of students.
· An open source community. Much of the value of the OLE, as in Bright IDEA, will be generated by teachers and students. They will use tools built into the environment to extend it.A discussion of the work done so far on this design is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is worth looking at a few of the key characteristics of a projected OLE design several years hence:
· Actual and virtual. OLE's will be designed to encompass schools, traditional classrooms, small programs like gifted groups, full and partial home schooling, museum exhibits, camps and other environments. They will be used to support traditional classroom structures plus many others, most of which we can't imagine yet. This extraordinary flexibility is a characteristic of organic systems.
• Active, group learning. OLE learning experiences will follow the small organic group model (although most learning time is individual), using multi-person simulations and games as culminating exercises. Assessments can be built into these activities so that assessment is far more natural than the current standardized tests.
• Modular, integrative. Subjects will be broken into two- to six-week modules, each with a primary theme or topic. These will be integrated into broad subjects though knowledge maps and other techniques. This knowledge will be persistent and available to the student throughout their life.
• Multiple roles. The two current roles (student and teacher) will refract into multiple roles, including student peer, peer expert, student aide, junior teacher, master teacher, OLE teacher, expert, and fan.
• Trophy rooms. Most courses will have work products that can be displayed, proudly, by each student. These can be placed in virtual rooms where the student's fans—relatives and friends—can experience them after automatic email notification. Some "trophies" could be interactive, so that the student could play a game with, for example, their grandparents.
• Lifelong, content-based learning by teachers. Teachers today do not get enough content-based learning in their subject areas. The OLE will provide a community full of resources that will encourage ongoing content learning and deep engagement in the teacher's subject area.
• Standards-based. OLE activities will cover state standards by following a superset strategy encompassing a wide range of standards (hopefully 21st century standards). However, much of the work done by students will follow academic topics of interest they have chosen once the standards are met.These environments may seem futuristic, but they can be built from existing technologies in other industries. They are the only realistic way to scale effective, organic education; efficiencies of scale should keep the cost per student in a range acceptable to schools. Thus the magic organic force at the district level is the innovative, competitive Silicon Valley corporation and the organic power of a vibrant culture.
The National Level
This combination of a highly effective initial product and a rapid innovation pathway is extremely potent. It gives us the three essential ingredients for one of the most powerful organic phenomena of all time: the killer app snowball. The archetype for this is the VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet) snowball that started in 1979. Here, with the VisiCalc example, are the three elements:
1. Pain that the market feels and needs to relieve. In the VisiCalc example, the pain was the extraordinary difficulty of doing budgets with paper and a calculator. This difficulty kept middle managers up all night during budget season.
2. An initial solution that is quantitatively better than and qualitatively different from the current method. This was, of course, VisiCalc with an Apple IIe or, later, an IBM PC.
3. An innovation pathway that will allow the initial solution to very rapidly improve over time. This is the innovation potential of the personal computer and networking.
When you have these three ingredients, you can start a loop in which early customers provide revenue, feedback and word of success. As the product goes through upgrades its performance/price differential compared to the old paradigm solution increases rapidly. This makes the case for the product or service increasingly compelling. Eventually, no one can resist the full paradigm shift.In organic education, the three factors are:
1. Pain. No Child Left Behind has created significant pain that can be relieved by organic approaches like Bright IDEA.
2. An initial solution. The educational model behind Bright IDEA is clearly the initial solution. Its threefold increase in educational effectiveness indicates that a new paradigm is involved.
3. An innovative pathway. The Organic Toolbox provides years of innovation to expand and amplify the success of the model behind Bright IDEA to the greater improvement mentioned above.Thus the ingredients are in place for a killer app snowball. However, starting this snowball is far more complex in organic education than in the VisiCalc example and it is clear that funders of early OLE's may have to have some patience.
Once the snowball is started, however, it becomes an astonishingly powerful force. If it is managed right, it can spread the organic education paradigm very rapidly, despite the extremely innovation-resistant, mechanistic nature of the educational system. The most traditional, gray school district will eventually give way when the snowball has grown, the new model for education has been publicized and is very accessible, and parents in the community are pushing hard for the conversion of their schools to this 21st century model. State legislators will have to reduce red tape in response to schools' success or organic publishers will simply focus on the states that will do this in order to compete in the 21st century. This is an irresistible "pull" phenomenon, where systems, even gray systems, change because their constituents are positively motivated to move to a better model and are not doing so because they have been told to by school administrators and state and federal department of education.
An absolutely vital point is that organic techniques allow us to start the snowball with a small group of dedicated people and funding comparable to the budget to create one textbook. This is radically different from the billions of dollars and acts of congress required to implement the mechanistic recommendations of the various education commissions over the years. And the probability of a successful transformation is far higher with organic methods.
This organic transformation and the highly effective schools it would create are our children's birthright. The most powerful, fair, wealthy, innovative – and organic – country in history should have the most natural and effective education system possible, using the technology and techniques we pioneered. America should strive to be the world leader in education, spreading enlightenment to all corners of the globe. We should have done this over the last couple of decades on its own merits. Now, however, we have no choice. We are in a race to develop truly innovative education based on 21st century principles. We could easily lose this race before we even realize we are in it. It's time to wake up before we, as a nation, are left behind.
Project Bright Idea was conducted by the American Association of Gifted Children at Duke University (AAGC) and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction from 2001 to 2004. Primary designers were Margaret Gayle (Executive Director of the AAGC) and Valorie Hargett, State Consultant for Academically or Intellectually Gifted Programs in North Carolina. Bright IDEA 2 was funded by the US Dept of Education for $2.5 million and extends Bright IDEA 1 methods to 5000 study students and 5000 control students.
Read more about Bright IDEA on this website: Project Bright IDEA 1: Interest Development Early Abilities: A Model K-2 Nurturing Program - 2001-2004
Hugh Osborn is an e-learning and web strategy consultant. He was COO of US operations for the Swiss e-learning company Viviance in 2001-2002 and before that a partner at marchFIRST, a large Internet strategy and development firm, where he worked on content strategies for a K-12 rich media presentation system and consulted on technology strategy for an online math publisher from 1996-2001. In the early 1990's, Hugh was Direct of the New Media Group at WNET, where his team created several multimedia programs including "Nature: The Virtual Serengeti" and "Stephen Jay Gould: On Evolution." He oversaw the development of wNetStation, an award-winning site that focused on original web content, and he produced and co-designed "Beyond Einstein," a ground-breaking multimedia physics project. Hugh also developed "Windows on the World," a consumer educational CD-ROM project on stamp collecting for Philips, and was a consultant on the seminal multiple media program "The Voyage of the Mimi." Hugh started his educational media career in the late 1970's at WICAT, an early pioneer in computer-based learning.
Contact Hugh at hosborn@optonline.net
Copyright © 2005 by HughOsborn. All rights reserved.
Posted with permission of the author
September 2005 by
New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org
info@newhorizons.orgFor permission to redistribute, please contact the author.