Cathy Davidson, Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY), recently released an updated version of her book The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux. In the book Davidson introduces us to wild innovators in higher education and provides examples of engaging ideas.

Although is an tremendous amount of takeaways and things to ponder in the book, these three quotes set the stage for a grand reimagining of what we do as educators:

We live in a time when the world’s problems are of such magnitude that no one knows the answers. Yet in universities, we are still teaching as if we know. That’s a deception. It’s dangerous, really. If you expect palpable impact, you are challenging students to admit what they don’t understand, what they don’t know, what no one knows, and to begin to test ideas that could become solutions.”

We talked a bit about wicked and messy problems in the past, but Davdison’s assertion that educators become part of the solution is important – we need to model a positive response to the intensity of wicked problems.

1. Try using “we” language helps learners engage in the problem with you, not at your behest.
2. Instead of “students”, use the term “learners”. The term students has baggage – it typically is associated with a hierarchical power schema. By using “learner” you can signal a more democratic environment. Buttress the sentiment with expressions like “I’m eager to be learning with you this semester” in lieu of “I’m eager to be teaching you this semester.” There is also the benefit of leveraging the verb effect over the identity noun. If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s sufficient to say that Christopher Bryan from Stanford studied the effect of verbs as descriptors and found that subtle linguistic cues can motivate people. For instance, calling someone a “voter” invokes identity whereas asking someone if they vote does not. Voters are more likely to register and vote than “people who vote”. He goes on to say that this linguistic cue expands beyond voting – “I run” versus “I’m a runner” and “Don’t cheat” versus “Don’t be a cheater” can influence behavior.
3. Encourage failure! Failure needs to be normalized – there is a lot of telemetry that can be learned from failing. And that telemetry informs improvement. Go down the rabbit hole of the Toasted podcast (co-hosted by Nick Fargnoli) to examine how to translate failure into learning.

In design school, this is called “iterative thinking”; as Crow puts it, “You design, you redesign, you adjust, you redesign again, you adjust—the process doesn’t stop. Like learning. There’s no end point, it’s all a process. That’s what a university is.”

Help your learners understand that there is no end-state. There are milestones (graduation), and there are different types of learning, but learning is a life-long process. As Michelle Weise states in Long Life Learning, students are going to need to train for jobs that don’t exist yet. Not only because of break-neck advances in technology, but because our life spans are increasing and our currency as productive employees will be acutely linked to how well we learn as we constantly enter new domains.

1. Ask your learners what they’ve learned. Not about a chapter or a unit or a topic. Ask them at the end of the semester what they learned about learning. What did they learn about themselves?
2. Attenuate failure often. Make mistakes in your class. Give recognition or bonus points if students catch a mistake. This engaging activity lionizes failure and encourages frank and honest conversation. I know this might sound edgy, but if we are to combat the stigma failure brings, we need to put our money where our mouth is.
3. Give students threads to pull. Maybe you don’t have time to show a video or assign a reading to students. Why not provide a list of resources students can look at if they are interested? Adding a list of resources at the end of every chapter or unit signals your desire to help students follow interesting things.

Students need new ways of integrating knowledge, including through reflection on why and what they are learning. They don’t need more “teaching to the test.” They need to be offered challenges that promote their success after graduation, when all the educational testing has stopped. This is an engaged form of student-centered pedagogy known as “active learning.” Students are encouraged to create new knowledge from the information around them and to use it to make a public, professional, or experiential contribution that has impact beyond the classroom. Students don’t just master what an expert sets out for them but, rather, learn how to become experts themselves. It’s a survival skill for the journey that is their lives.

Try widening the influence of student work. David Wiley (Lumen Learning and consummate champion of OER) talks about “disposable assignments”; that is, work that will only be seen by the instructor and rarely revisited by the learner. Might you be able to reimagine assignments to have a legacy?

1. Have a regular requirement to post on LinkedIn. Encourage students to summarize an article related to the current content. In addition to the benefit of starting a LinkedIn presence early on, students are able to show their learning and growth – and contribute to a relevant body of knowledge.
2. Adopt an open pedagogy mentality. Can your class collectively write a textbook that can be shared for future students?
3. Perhaps your learners can socially annotate with Hypothes.is (see the session recorded at FLCC). Making their learning visible and sharing it with other students gives everyone a voice in the learning and adds a layer of purpose to work.

Of course there are myriad ways to prepare students for situations they are likely to encounter – and you are probably practicing a number of them. Keep up the great work helping our learners learn. And be brave as you tread into the New Education.

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

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It’s almost that time of the year again – time to turn your attention to the next semester. The ritual of updating your course syllabus can be exciting or it can be a chore. Sure, there are technical considerations (classroom policies, due dates, overview, etc.) that demand attention and precision.

But there is something else to consider, too. The experience students have when reading your course syllabus. We’ve briefly visited this topic before when we talked about rephrasing questions to demand engagement. “What questions do you have?” gives students permission and a safe space to ask questions that benefit the whole group. Or rebranding “Office Hours” to “Student Hours” (I’ve moved away from “hours” and now offer “Student Time” – an important signal to students that I am serious about dedicating time to them).

Language matters.

And once you go down this rabbit hole, you might find that there are a lot of nitpicky, small changes that have a large return on investment for your students’ comfort. I hope that the three ideas presented below can lead to a lean-in syllabus experience for your students.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
An interesting study at Baylor University explored some of the small changes that can be made to the wording in a syllabus. The intent of the study was to align syllabus language and teaching style with self-perception.

They developed a tool that scans your syllabus and matches the sentiment of it with a brief self-perception survey. The software attempts to reconcile your beliefs with the language in your syllabus and displays the results in interactive graphs. The software will also list the most negative words and offer softer recommendations. Note that this works only when running results across the Pleasure dimension of the analysis. And if you decide to do this exercise, you might want to remove the obligatory College Policies before you submit it. The software caught a lot of words from those sections (I never paid attention to the presence of the words “attack”, “victim”, and “criminal”). I also had to tease out some of the other words that surfaced. I had words like “stress” (as in, “I can’t stress enough”) and “pain” (as in, “I’m curious about the pain-points in this class”).

If you would like to go through this exercise, click here (you need to be logged into Google). It might look confusing but the instructions are clear. Press the “PLAY” button (gray circle with white triangle) at each step.

Going through this exercise made me recognize just how important language is. Reading the study was enlightening; the appendix offers examples of revised phrasing. Phrases such as:

• What I Think about Teaching and Learning
• My Invitation To You
• How to Demonstrate your Learning
• What Book You Need
• How to Be a Part of this Class

are brilliant examples of section headings in a course syllabus that are easy to use and lend an aspirational atmosphere of enthusiasm, co-creation, and optimism.

Language matters.

DON’T OVERAWE SOMETHING

On a less serious note, I’d like to share a fun way to increase engagement in the syllabus experience for the student. In the late nineteen hundreds I spent a few summers working at a camp on Keuka Lake. Kevin Dibble, the Program Director, crafted special games for the campers once a session and these games required handouts with instructions. Hidden in the instructions were special words and the cabin who found the most words would win a special prize (even the counselors didn’t know the words, so they were able to get in on the fun).

I’ve always wanted to include that mechanic in my syllabus but it was never a high priority. Then, on November 27, the New York Times had a clue in their mini-crossword:

"What's found hidden between words in 'deli meat,', 'little monster' and 'radio range'"

It took me a minute, but “lime”, “lemon”, and “orange” are in each group of words, respectively. The answer was FRUIT. And that rekindled an interest in my intentional design of my own syllabi. Over break I’ll be channeling my inner Kevin Dibble and hiding words in plain sight.

RICKROLL YOUR STUDENTS

One last way to bring wonder into the syllabus experience. In 2014 the Independent ran a piece about a student who Rickrolled the professor. While the image below isn’t the exact paper, the idea is still captured:

Now I’m not suggesting that you Rickroll your students, but I’m not suggesting that you don’t Rickroll your students, either. But if eighties pop songs don’t do it for you, I’m sure you can find your own messages to encode.

As you are updating your syllabus this winter, share the unique, exciting, engaging techniques you are using with your colleagues.

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By Aaron Proietti

I am wired as a change agent, and I enjoy playing the game of negotiation and influence that is required to change the way organizational systems behave. Being appointed Chief Innovation Officer of a Fortune 500 company was my dream role and I achieved it in 2012 at a large multinational insurer. What I learned in my first six months in that role surprised me. I learned quickly that the path to driving meaningful change, even from the top of an organizational hierarchy, would not suddenly appear before me unobstructed. The obstacles were as mighty as ever.

Thankfully, I was paired with a career coach who understood that the path lay within me, as much as before me. Over the course of the next two-plus years, I endeavored to change myself as a leader and influencer in order to unlock the broader change potential of the organization.

My coach pushed me first to check my ego. While confidence and pride had gotten me the high-ranking position, they were not the traits I needed to be successful in the role. I had to learn to look at the organization as a large system, in which I played only a small part. Systems Thinking became the approach I would use to better understand both what was expected of me, and the strategies I should use to promote change. My coach then pushed me to redesign my leadership style by developing Design Standards. We went through an exercise of identifying new rules and behaviors that would enable me to learn faster and grow in my role.

After months of intentional work on reimagining the way I thought and led, the hard work began to pay off.

SYSTEMS THINKING

Popularized by MIT professor Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, systems thinking is an approach that rejects the notion that a leader must be an omniscient hero. Instead leaders should promote learning and harness collective intelligence to overcome obstacles to change in complex systems.

Among the most meaningful exercises I learned was to deliberately shift my attention away from myself. The approach we used was to shift focus next on others, then on the collective, and ultimately onto the broader system. This shift in attention from “I” to “You” to “We,” and ultimately to “It,” allowed me to ask (and answer) more profound questions than I’d been accustomed to.

For instance, when an employee trying to overcome an obstacle does not behave in the manner I hope they would, my first instinct is to assume I am right and to try to tell the employee in clearer terms what I expect of them (“I”). This is the confident pride that would not serve me well as a change agent in a complex organizational system. This approach does not change the system in any meaningful way, it only raises stress as I try to push “my way” on others.

A better approach is to shift my attention away from myself, and to have empathy for the employee (“You”). By better understanding their motivations and fears, I can develop new strategies to coach them through the situation as a peer rather than a boss. This approach, too, is limiting as it assumes that myself and the employee have more control over our team and environment than we may truly have.

The next level of attention focuses on the whole team to understand whether it is well-positioned to overcome obstacles. It is at this level (“We”) where I shift away from assuming I know what is right. This is instead a generative, inquiry-based approach, asking questions such as: What is my team dealing with today? What is the team’s potential? What can we do to improve the potential of the team? What strategies might we collectively employ? What can we do differently right now to test our assumptions?

Even this level of attention may not be sufficient to truly unlock the potential of the organization. Organizations contain interconnected networks and deeply held beliefs which create resistance to change. Attention must shift to the full system (“It”) in order to better understand the natural limits of myself, my employee, or my team in the broader system. This level of attention is even more inquiry-oriented than the We level, as the best questions to ask are not immediately apparent, varying based on the complexity of the system. The inquiry approach must be deeply reflective before it can be generative, utilizing questions such as: What happened? What continues to happen? Why is it happening? What is influencing the system?

In higher education, a similar example may play out as faculty try to change the behaviors of their students to improve educational outcomes. Their first instinct may be to direct the students’ actions by assuming that faculty (“I”) knows more than the students. Promoting to the next level of attention (“You”) a faculty member may try to understand what is standing in the way of a single student’s progress. Attention at the next level (“We”) begins to consider what behaviors could we shift inside of the classroom to improve educational outcomes. It’s only when attention shifts to the systems level (“It”) that we consider how broader system influences such as shifts in technology, shifts in human behavior, worsening mental health, changing economic conditions, and more, are contributing to the educational outcomes in this particular course at this particular point in time.

DESIGN STANDARDS

It is not enough to recognize all of the system influences and environmental changes around you. Leaders must meet organizations and people where they are. As the environment changes, so should you, as a leader, shift your beliefs and behavior to adapt to the new environment, intentionally designing your leadership style to achieve desired outcomes.

The effort to design and redesign leadership style is not a superficial one. It should be a deliberate effort to change yourself, not just your appearance or approach. By leveraging systems thinking, you can begin to understand the role you must play, and the leader you must become, to achieve the outcomes you desire. If the change outcome is sufficiently aspirational, or has proven elusive, that’s an indicator that what got you to this point is not what’s going to take you the rest of the way.

We all recognize that the pace of change in the world today is accelerating. Modern times demand more from us as leaders than traditional hierarchical notions of leadership can deliver. Assuming you know best in a world that is constantly changing around you is not a sustainable or scalable way to lead. Leaders must become learners who can shift rapidly when their approaches are ineffective or when new opportunities emerge.

Successful leaders design personal values systems that guide their growth. By identifying and nurturing qualities which will allow objectives to be achieved, leaders can affect the environment around them accordingly. This is a creative exercise applied to personal development. Consider the possibility set of how you might shift as a leader, and select a path to follow. Reflect along the way, and pivot when required.

Once you identify your aspirational qualities, or values, the next step is to define the rules, or design standards that will manifest the environment you’re trying to nurture. Quite simply, design standards are the rules—both written and unwritten—that you will follow to reinforce your values and achieve new outcomes.

The exercise of identifying design standards, sometimes called design principles, is to simply list the “must haves” and the “must not haves” associated with the environment you are trying to nurture. Do this, don’t do that. Say this, don’t say that. Etc.

In my corporate career, these design standards were often quips that set the tone for the environment we were trying to create, such as “Don’t wait for direction that will never come.” An educator might adopt standards such as “Teach students how to learn, not what to learn,” or “Take risks with technology solutions to improve collaboration and creativity.”

The power of this approach is unlocked only when you go through the entire process to identify the values and the corresponding design standards that you will employ. If there is any lack of clarity, you are likely to fall back upon a bad habit or entrenched norm to guide your behavior rather than the aspirational standards.

A NEW LEADER EMERGES

It wasn’t until 2014, nearly two years after my appointment as Chief Innovation Officer, that I truly felt I was well-positioned to lead the changes that were required in my role. I had abandoned any sense that I knew anything better than others, and inserted new skills related to asking great questions and setting others up for success.

I had gained a new humble confidence, far less brittle than the prideful confidence I’d once held. As my foundation, I had the same expert skill set which had led others to promote me into higher positions. As I grew as a leader, I gained awareness and appreciation of the complex systems around me. One of the values I embraced was “continuous improvement,” which motivated me to get better everyday. I pursued excellence in my work, I expanded my network, I embraced new ways of thinking.

Through Systems Thinking and developing Design Standards, I had transformed my leadership approach to become the leader I always had hoped I would become. I focused on what was needed and what was possible much more than what was expected or likely.

What’s required of you as a leader today to create the environment that will propel you and those around you to reach what’s possible tomorrow?

Aaron Proietti is a SUNY Geneseo graduate with a Masters from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Applied Mathematics. He left the corporate world in 2016 to apply his hard-earned leadership lessons to new domains, such as nonprofits, small businesses, and academia. In 2018, Aaron wrote a book on innovation called Today’s Innovator. Through his business, Today’s Innovator, Aaron now coaches leaders and teams to become strong agents of change, fully capable of responding to the rapid pace of change in the world around us. 

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