Sponsored by IBM and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)
Brought to you by the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit (www.reinventingeducation.org) project.
Brought to you by the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit (www.reinventingeducation.org) project.
Shake Your Kaleidoscope and Find Innovations
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter, rkanter@hbs.edu.
How often does an unproven idea by an unknown person make the front page?
My friend Cindy Laba was surprised and pleased that her new idea for education made front page headlines in the Boston Globe recently. Laba, a former charter school leader, is the architect of a new concept - to help low-income public school students compete for entry to elite private and public high schools and succeed at mastering their academic rigor. Her dream is called Beacon Academy, a school that offers an extra 14 months of education between eighth and ninth grades. It will enroll its first batch of students in July, with the approval of the Boston School Committee.
This column isn't about Laba's idea, promising as it might be. It's about why Beacon Academy made headlines. The idea was deemed worthy of front page treatment because it leaps beyond conventional assumptions. It opens up possibilities that have been blocked by traditional structures and practices.
Consider how this idea turns conventional wisdom on its head:
- In conventional wisdom, spending an extra year in school is a punishment for failure to make the grade. In the Beacon Academy vision, spending an extra year in school is a reward for demonstrating high potential, an investment in the students with the greatest potential, and an opportunity for them to transform their lives.
- In conventional wisdom, if urban kids plan to leave the public schools, they are potential drop-outs. In the Beacon Academy vision, if urban kids plan to leave the public schools, they might be heading for something even better.
Kaleidoscopes work the way our brains do when we dream, or when we have creative breakthroughs. A kaleidoscope is a device for seeing patterns. In a kaleidoscope, fragments of colored glass form a pattern, but the pattern isn't fixed. If you shake it, twist it, change angle, or change perspective, exactly the same fragments form an entirely different pattern. Often it's not reality that's fixed, it's our perspective on reality. Creativity and innovation come when we can shake up our thinking and challenge conventional patterns. We need to treat our minds like the kaleidoscopes they are, and constantly ask both "Why?" and "Why not?"
Kaleidoscope thinking is an essential step on a journey of innovation, change, and transformation toward higher achievement.
I know there are many creative thinkers in education, and many ideas out there that I could have mentioned instead of the example I chose. But we need even more kaleidoscope thinkers who can move ideas forward despite the vast complexities of large K-12 public school systems, which sometimes make the pattern seemed cemented into place forever.
The length of the school day and summers off? Wasn't that originally a response to an agrarian society of family farms? Yet the pattern has been locked into place well into the Industrial Age and the Information Age, and it's now conventional wisdom. After-school programs such as Citizen Schools, a growing national network, have shaken the kaleidoscope and come up with apprenticeships for middle school students that happen to take place after school but are woven into teachers' educational plans.
The uniformity of class periods and time allotted to subjects? In many school districts, that seems an administrative necessity. Yet the Cincinnati public schools, in partnership with IBM, came up with a method for flexible scheduling in high schools based on student learning needs, using software IBM invented to handle this. That's another twist of the kaleidoscope.
Leaders concerned about improving K-12 public education need to spend more time turning conventional wisdom upside down. They need to shake up their thinking. Challenge assumptions. Question the status quo. Imagine how things could be, rather than feeling stuck in what they are.
Maybe you're not looking for something radical. But minds can become closed to even modest changes if you allow people to remain locked into one pattern, with all the attendant rules and orthodoxies. Assumptions that are taken-for-granted-for-years can feel like they were handed down on stone tablets by a deity, making it sacrilegious to question them. But the structures and systems and practices comprising public education are human creations and, thus, humans can change them. They are clearly not the only way or even the best way. But people will resist the smallest of changes if their minds never explore different patterns.
Kaleidoscope thinking requires permission to ask dumb questions or brainstorm silly possibilities. Every new idea that works starts out as someone's silly thought - silly only because it was previously unthinkable. (I imagine people standing around in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, taunting the Wright Brothers that their idea will never fly.) Kaleidoscope thinking benefits from new experiences, outside the current work environment, that stimulate new questions. It's hard to get kaleidoscopes moving and shaking in closed, confining systems. So get out those kaleidoscopes and twist them a few times every day. You don't make headlines - or win hearts and minds for innovation and change - unless you think differently and dream big.
--Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds a chaired professorship at Harvard Business School and is author or co-author of 16 books, including her latest bestseller, Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End, recently published by Crown. She received the Academy of Management's Distinguished Career Award in 2001 for her scholarly contributions to management and will receive her 22nd honorary doctoral degree from a university in England this summer.
© Copyright 2005 by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. All rights reserved.
