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EdSurge
Teachers
Are Great at Designing Classrooms. Let’s Get Them Redesigning Schools.
By Sujata Bhatt
May 22, 2019
Let’s talk about cute for a moment. How many times have you walked into
a classroom, say in one of the 88,665 or so elementary schools in the
United States, and gasped at the sheer quantity and cuteness of the
stuff on the walls?
What teachers accomplish with butcher paper, scissors, tape, staples,
and a glue gun is remarkable and worthy of a “Top Chef”-style reality
show. Meander around Pinterest for five minutes and you’ll find a
rabbit hole of teacher boards, some of which, with seven-digit
followers, live in a land of celebrity rather than teacher stats. If
you stick around longer, you’ll find pirate themes, “Harry Potter,”
thousands of bulletin board ideas and entire forests of butcher-paper
tree classrooms.
It’s clear that educator creativity is an enormously underutilized
asset. The highly decorated classroom walls are a testament to the
creative force that is strong in many teachers.
It’s clear that teachers are hungry to learn from each other and share
their creations with each other; one survey of K-8 teachers found that
67 percent used Pinterest weekly for professional purposes.
I would argue that all this decoration is a manifestation of educator
creativity in areas where teachers feel they have the freedom to be
creative: in the low- to no-stakes design of their classroom walls,
doors, and spaces.
Your curriculum may be scripted, your assessment schedule may be locked
down, your professional development may be determined by others, but at
least you can create adult community with fellow teachers and arrive at
the autonomy, mastery and purpose needed to feel fulfilled and
professional through creating and sharing your bulletin boards and
classroom doors online.
Teachers are Part of the Creative Class
Last month, according to Education Week, Randi Weingarten, President of
the American Federation of Teachers union, lamented the
“micromanagement” and “deprofessionalization of teachers” which, in
addition to low pay, is leading to nationwide educator walkouts as well
as wholesale departures from the profession itself. Teachers, lacking
agency, are, according to Weingarten, not “able to be creative [and]
take risks," at least not where it could really make a difference, in
collaborating to impact student learning.
In 2012, the nation’s other major teachers union, the National
Education Association (NEA) specifically offered a solution for the
deprofessionalization Weingarten is referencing. In a 38-page guide
titled “Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society,” the NEA
called for teachers to tap their creativity. Quoting Daniel Pink, the
NEA wrote, “In a world enriched by abundance but disrupted by the
automation and outsourcing of white-collar work, everyone must
cultivate an artistic sensibility. We may not all be Dali or Degas. But
today we must all be designers.”
The NEA was positioning teachers as part of the creative class, which,
as anyone who has spent time in classrooms knows, is an accurate
description not just of bulletin boards but also of the non-routine,
complex, unbounded, minute-by-minute data-gathering and decision-making
process that is called teaching.
It’s clear that educator creativity is an enormously underutilized
asset. The highly decorated classroom walls are a testament to the
creative force that is strong in many teachers.
How might we tap that creativity? How might we link it to a deeper
purpose, one that activates the 3.1 million strong public teacher labor
force to re-professionalize and claim collective ownership of a much
bigger creative challenge: redesigning learning equitably for the 21st
century?
School and Systems, not Classrooms, as the Unit of Change
In its guide, the NEA also posed a series of questions under the banner
of “Reflections on Creativity.” They asked educators to consider a
series of questions around creativity, all centered on infusing it into
classroom practices:
How can you model creativity and innovation skills for your students?
How can you incorporate more creativity and innovation into your lesson
plans?
How can you and your colleagues work together to improve your
pedagogical practices involving innovation and creativity?
These are powerful questions that can enable equally powerful shifts in
classroom practice—classroom by individual classroom. However, I would
argue that they have an even greater activation potential that extends
beyond the classroom. In other words, teachers should use their
creative capacities to change their schools and even districts.
As long as we look only at the classroom as the locus of change, we
will not arrive at the creative professionalization Randi Weingarten
and the NEA have been pointing toward. Each individual teacher will
bear the exhausting burden of redesigning their classroom and classroom
practices under the same constraints that currently channel creativity
into cuteness. To redesign those constraints requires a form of
collaborative action that takes schools and school systems as their
units of change.
In our work at Transcend, we bring together cohorts of district and
charter school-based design teams who activate their creativity to
rethink what learning can be in their schools. We have found when
funders and systems (i.e., school districts or charter management
organizations) make this sort of broader redesign mandate available,
educators seize the opportunity.
A teacher in our Excellent Schools New Mexico cohort described the
sense of possibility she felt when designing beyond her classroom: “It
gives you a space to feel free to imagine and to put those dreams into
something real.” This space of imagination is complex, nebulous and
unbounded, and similar to the sort of problems taken on by tech
workers, designers and consultants.
Educators recognize this, and they also clearly see gaps between the
scale at which they’ve focused in the past and the bigger challenges
they want to grow toward. They long for training that enables them to
master new skills. An educator in our Silicon Schools Fund Bay Area
cohort described wanting tips “on how to manage and organize and keep
moving forward on a project like this. I need more insights into how to
set-up and manage in the way business professionals do.”
The Right Tools for the Job
Most educators are not trained in making a case for change and sharing
the impact of their daily efforts
We have found the skills educators are acquiring to reimagine school
fall into three big buckets:
1) skills and processes that grow their capacity to design and
implement change;
2) those that grow their culture of innovation; and
3) those that grow the coalition that joins them in the work.
Design thinking processes fall under the first category of supporting
capacity; they give educators a repeatable method for identifying pain
points and moving into solutioning. Project management and agile
processes also fall into this category. Rapid learn-define-build-test
cycles of prototyping fall into the second bucket; they create a bias
towards action, and encourage data collection and analysis, which many
educators have been trained in over the past two decades of education
reform, in service of school redesign.
Coalition-building which is crucial to creating inclusive innovation
(in contrast to top-down initiatives) as well as to sustaining
innovation once it is launched requires its own set of skills,
storytelling in particular. Most educators are not trained in making a
case for change and sharing the impact of their daily efforts.
Once they learn and apply those skills, we have found that educators
quickly adapt them to their problem-solving needs. One of our
participants wrote, “We appreciated the structures you provided for us
to facilitate the innovations being designed. The empathy interviews,
prototyping and piloting and the innovation roadmap process are paving
the way to transformation in an intentional manner.”
This change in scale and expanded skill set directly lead to the
professionalism Randi Weingarten and the NEA discussed above: “This
collaborative is helping me find the passion I had when I first started
teaching and motivating me to think bigger and bolder for the future of
education,” wrote another participant. “I have not felt this hopeful
about my abilities to enact systemic change as an educator in a long
time.... In my opinion, everyone in education needs this experience!”
As these educators make clear, for a broader professionalization to
happen, teachers need to come together to apply their creativity to a
larger, more complex problem: redesigning their schools and the
constraints that architect our current, inadequate, unequal form of
schooling. In short, they must be given the opportunities to take on a
unit of change larger than individual classrooms along with the time,
space, upskilling and resources to do so.
We’ve all seen the amazing things teachers can do to improve their
classrooms. Now let’s give them a chance to transform our education
system.
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