Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Adapting to Change

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A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…

Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:

  • The implementation of almost all new practices as opposed to simply extending past practices
  • New organizational ways of working
  • Challenging previously held values
  • Requires gaining new knowledge and skills

And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)

I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:

Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”

That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.

So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.

And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.

(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)

Comments

  1. Kevin Prentiss says

    The music industry had very few that were willing to pro actively adapt and just a few more that were willing to reactively adapt. The rest are still focused on suing college kids (and the colleges).

    You would think that highly educated competitive capitalists would be flexible, but they are not. There are very few examples of organizations or institutions that have adapted at this stage of change.

    (This stage being technically, socially and structurally nascent.)

    For the students that do get it – from where ever they do – their advantages over their peers will be profound.

    • Kristen says

      I completely agree. Flexibility and adaptation are absolutely survival skills in the world today. Those who are unwilling (or unable?) to evolve on the fly will not be a competitive force in any capacity.

  2. Dean Groom says

    Insightful as ever Will. I was speaking with the Marist Brother Principal of my school (who is an advocate for the shift). He talked to me about how he’d seen the changes from black boards to wipe boards, how teachers used OHPs and then the photocopier. What he found hard to understand is how teachers learned basic ICTs in ‘beige’ box days … but have largely not moved beyond photocopied worksheets and power point. Today I walked around my school, on one floor I saw rooms of boys in rows with text books and teachers monitoring the movement of pens and not lips. I went down to our PBL/Classroom2.0 environment and heard noise, discussion, teachers reviewing the Diigo research that was happening and it was like being in another world. The transformation of learning occurs when teachers decide to re-think learning as your post suggests. I can’t say loudly enough the difference in learning that occurs when you give students a classroom 2.0 environment and engage them in ‘authentic’ tasks.

    • Will Richardson says

      Tom, Thanks for sharing that. You’re right. That is an amazing read. I love this part:

      Eventually, the eroding payoff of higher education created a crisis in education itself. Why should a student put herself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work to acquire academic credentials with little monetary value? These days, jobs that require only 6 or 12 months of vocational training — paranursing, carpentry, household maintenance and so on — pay nearly as much as if not more than a job that requires a master’s degree, and pay more than one requiring a Ph.D.

      So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. The prestigious universities coped by reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one — a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.

  4. Jenn says

    Will, you have explored a topic that many have thought about, but few have acted upon. As an educator, I am constantly learning about new tools to included in my classroom, and recently, it seems there are new advancements every single day. You mentioned the difference between technical change and adaptive change, or actually implementing new practices. I thought your correlation of this shift with the evolution of the music industry was fitting. The way music was created and sold originally is simply not working in this day and age. Can the same philosophy carry over to the world of education? Of course it can! Many find it hard to accept change in classrooms, and I think older generations have the “It worked for me!” mindset. Change is hard, especially when you are diving into the unknown, which may be why so many are resisting this change in education. The new learning tools (blogging, podcasts, etc) are unknown to older generations who resist them, perhaps because they need proof of their success. I agree with your statement that these changes “start at home” with one’s personal understanding. I hope that my colleagues in education continue to put forth the necessary effort in researching and studying new learning tools, so we can continue our path towards the new education model. I think as individuals come to accept the new changes on a personal level, we are gradually on our way.

  5. Will Richardson says

    Just some more thin (obvious) thinking to note on all of this. The music industry didn’t initiate the change; the musicians did. The newspaper industry is responding to the work of those in the industry. Similarly, education as an “industry” is not going to change much until the educators do.

    • Terry Elliott says

      I think you are both right and wrong here about the “industry”. I think that education as an institution could change if a large enough group wanted to reconstitute it. But that is not going to happen. The dinosaur has a second brain and it is in its butt.

      Instead education will be “irrelevant-ized’. I think that is Krugman’s point and a point I have made for years. Like a clogged artery, the body will just route around the sumbitch. The internet has provided this affordance for cheap. If you make a tool ubiquitous enough and cheap enough and useful enough, they will use it. The Internet is our new school (whatever that implies) and because of it I don’t think it really matters whether or not we have some ultimate reform of the system. At some point the school becomes a quaint like a buggy whip or the high speed dub button on your old cassette deck.

      My new motto: complexity is a bitch, get over it.

  6. Mike Arnzen says

    Great post, Will Richardson! With music, I think one of the things that will always keep the industry alive is the “live performance” (set in quotes because we all now how much of the ‘liveness’ is pre-recorded and constructed)… it’s about the ‘event’. If our classrooms can retain a similar ‘live event’ feeling to them, we’ll be fine in the ‘education industry.’ Maybe?

  7. Patrick says

    Will,

    Interesting post, but what happens when students resist the change you bring about? Recently we have had some serious student backlash against the use of social media in the classroom. While I haven’t really looked closely at how it’s being applied in the learning environments (summer project), I suspect it’s not being used in a truly transformative capacity. However, the question still has merit: students will be resistant to using social media as well as teachers because there is little definition to it. It’s not school. They cannot figure out what teacher’s want or what they have to do in order to get an “A.”

  8. Terry Elliott says

    Humans as a race have always found a way to adapt. That is a very fair statement and one backed up by evolutionary history and biology. Our many-layered brain is a physical text of this adaptation. Given this premise the question remains: how will we adapt? More specifically, how will teachers adapt to this changing environment. We can continue to game and tweak the status quo. We can strike out toward some new ‘thing’ that we cannot call ‘school’ but can claim is learning. Or we can do both: lay tracks for the new right next to the old. Or we can try a million other new new things. Nicholas Taleb says that the only certainty in these scenarios is that we cannot predict which one of these new parallel tracks will be the right one. In other words, what we as teachers need to do is to remain learners, to be bloodhounds for this new scent, and to be ready to try on and cast off many of the trails we discover before we find one that works for our learners. And then keep doing that.

    It means (to switch metaphors) that we need to value the adaptive over the institutional model. An adaptive teaching model in our current predicament most probably requires a wildly adaptable institutional model. We need a way that says the only charter a school needs is to help its students learn and to be accountable in some reasonable way for that learning. What we need is a way to make schools-of-one just as viable as schools-of-many. What we need is a world full of learning brokers or coaches or entrepreneurs or what-have-ye who can coggle together a virtual architecture of formal and informal systems to help us learn.

    I can think of two examples that exemplify this: Ravelry and Stronglifts. These are both ‘convivial’ tools in the best Illich-ian sense. The former is a knitting site that is so much more. It is a school where you can learn to knit. It is a place to teach others. It is a place to ask questions and provide answers. It is formal (the site has a structure and rules) but it is also informal (the site has as many forum on as many topics as can be imagined). My wife is a better knitter because of it. Plus, she is now much better versed in the tools of our socially networked metaverse.

    The latter, stronglifts, is a personal training website specializing in showing its participants how to get stronger. I have been reading this site from its inception where it has gone from zero to 15,000 subscribers in a year. Its owner/blogger/manager is a Belgian named Mehdi. Recently, he started doing personal training. ONe might well ask how someone can teach weight lifting over the web. He combines some old school and some new. He has a forum on his website run on good ol’ phpbb. He has a paying forum within that site for his students. In this weight lifting academy he has individual training logs for each student. I keep diet and training logs every day or nearly so and he comments daily. The most interesting part is that I make videos of myself as I lift and then upload them to YouTube. I mark them private and send a share invite to him. He watches the vids and makes suggestions. This dance of feedback and change works for me (although he is a fierce taskmaster whom I have nicknamed Torquemada).

    Root hog or die. That’s what one of my music acquaintences, Mojo Nixon says. I know that this is hard. I spent $150 on gas last week for my various vehicles. I am going to have to learn how to reduce this burden or find other work, but I am already moving towards that change on several fronts. What I am saying is that school can no longer afford to look like it does any more than I can tolerate 30% increases in transportation each year. Garmston’s suggestions in your post, Will, are all well and good, but I don’t think most folks will tolerate the consequences that flow from it. It’s like the suggestions in the new book, Brain Rules. We know what we ought, yet we do not. I do believe that as our affordances change so too will the ways out. Just like a real hog, schools will find a way, but I guarantee you that they will appear to us in ways that unexpected, new, surprising, and perhaps both better and worse than what we now have. Coomplexity is a bitch. Get over it.

  9. Jane says

    I think it is important to adapt and incorporate new technology in education. However, we must not lose sight of the importance of requiring basic educational skills and information before we add new technologies. If students cannot read well or have an information base of knowledge, they cannot use new technologies effectively. I teach in a low achieving school where the basics must be conquered first prior to the advanced technologies even though sometimes we can incorporate the technologies to teach these basics.

  10. Kyle Steves says

    Will

    I am happy to agree with your assessment that school’s must change and adapt. While many other industries have adapted, changed, or disappeared, Education has not. The system I entered as a teacher is the too similar to the system my parents entered decades ago. While change is coming it is moving too slow. In an era when people want instant results or they move on to the next panacea, how can we focus people that this is the change they need.

  11. Kyle Stevens says

    Will

    I am happy to agree with your assessment that school’s must change and adapt. While many other industries have adapted, changed, or disappeared, Education has not. The system I entered as a teacher is the too similar to the system my parents entered decades ago. While change is coming it is moving too slow. In an era when people want instant results or they move on to the next panacea, how can we focus people that this is the change they need.

    Enjoy your day,

    Kyle