Thiking out of the box

Introduction
For some years now Edward De Bono has had us "thinking laterally", while Neuro-linguistic programmers have had us "Reframing", more recently we have been encouraged to "work smarter", "continuously improve" "change our paradigm," and now its" thinking-out-of-the-box."

I think what all these phrases have in common is that they are challenging us to THINK BEFORE WE ACT - to reflect on what we do and try to be more creatively responsive to the REAL PROBLEM. I hope I can get us to think about what we are doing. I want us to take time to explore the dimensions of our boxes; their shape, color and texture before we leap into to unknown. We just might need to reinvent ourselves before we can reinvent what is around us…

Stephanie Pace Marshall, Administrator of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, Aurora, Illinois I think really makes our task clear: "We cannot change what we do until we change how we think, and we cannot change how we think until we change who we are."
I have found it possible to investigate the problems of educational design from a variety of disciplinary lenses. Moving from department to department has given me a unique opportunity to test my ideas about educational design in a multi-disciplinary environment.
My latest effort, at UW-Madison has been the creation of the School Design Research Studio in which I am dedicated to cooperatively investigating the ecology of places for learning as well as promoting collaborative processes in school planning and design.

But it has been PRACTICE, educational planning, that has required me to "think out of the box" in order to respond to real world problems of school design. Research has been, for me, a "mopping up exercise," an attempt to verify what we intuitively think we know.

I hope my presentation today will reflect some of that multidisciplinary journey and assist you in developing your own insights into your practice.

In thinking creatively about school planning and design, I want to emphasize the overarching strategy of observing the activities of learning that take place in and out of the classroom setting. It is by taking a fresh look at what kids do in schools that we might find some new ways of thinking about school design.

We also need to take the reality of educational change into account. Following a physical space standard is not always going to yield responsive design - it can only be a place to begin, and where thinking out of the box starts.

In this presentation I want to answer a few questions:
First, at the risk of over-simplication, I want to ask, where educational practice is headed? In other words, what is or are the emergent paradigms of education we should be designing for?

Second, how has the classroom changed over time to accommodate educational change?

Third, what strategies might we use to start anticipating educational change?

And, finally, what are the big trends we see in school planning that we should be aware of?

I'll finish the presentation with fourteen case studies to illustrate examples of out-of-the-box responses to 21st century educational change.

Paradigm Shifts
A very useful concept for capturing what is going on in education today is the PARADIGM. We use this metaphorically from the very technical way it was defined by Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science who in 1962 turned the philosophy of science on its head with his notion of the paradigm shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970).

The paradigm is an accepted model or pattern AND I might say for our purposes accepted PRACTICE. Normal science - or practice - actualizes the promise of the paradigm. Normal science or practice is simply what Kuhn would call a "mopping up exercise" - of solving the problems determined to be solvable according the paradigm given enough time.
Newton's theories constituted a paradigm in the natural sciences that were not overtaken until the time of Einstein. All work since Einstein in sub-particle physics is basically a mopping-up exercise - we accept the existence of sub-particles now all we have to do is identify them and study their characteristics and applying them to new technologies.
Anomalies, as Kuhn (1970) refers to them are little cracks in the paradigm that slowly overwhelm and eventually compete with the old paradigm. Kuhn distinguished between normal science and extraordinary science. In our field of educational planning and design we need to begin to move from normal practice to extraordinary practice.


Paradigms in Organizational Theory
Organizational theorists such as John Kotter of the Harvard Business School and of course many other social critics have clearly outlined many of the anomalies present in our society today (Kotter, 1996). It would be untrue to suggest that we operate in non-bureaucratic organizations, although they may be a bit flatter with all the mid-manager layoffs of the 1980s. Data is certainly distributed more widely - the Internet has seen to that - but not when data is of use to those in control like the record industry, who succeeded in controlling Napster. Leadership is the buzzword of the day, but we still need management, and we still lack leaders. These anomalies are however, certainly finding their way into the actions of our institutions and slowly wearing down old patterns of behavior.


Paradigms in Education
If we begin to focus on the ruling paradigm of education, we can as well describe the now familiar Industrial Model and the Knowledge-Age Model borrowing from Costa and Liebmann's summary (Costa and Liebmann, 1997).
Keep in mind, we are still very much in the Industrial Model of Education no matter what you read or hear. The Knowledge-age Paradigm is simply a list of anomalies playing out in education today.
For instance, we are moving from a teacher-centered classroom to a learner-centered classroom. What does this mean exactly? So some it means that learners are in charge of their own learning - they are self-directed - and teachers are master learners, learning along side students. We see individualized learning plans, but usually within a single comprehensive program aligned with a standardized assessment. An anomaly, not a paradigm shift.

For instance, we hear that students need contextualized knowledge, learn not isolated facts, but solve real world problems. Yet, students have classes taught in a problem-based learning pedagogy in 50-minute segments of time while still being required to go to math class. Again, the Industrial model is still in place.

One last example, reported in Education Week recently: "Hand-held computers are popping up in classrooms nationwide, but are they a worthy learning tool? Many critics say schools have rushed into buying the devices without having an appropriate curriculum in place. In addition, some school leaders say hand-helds too often are used to e-mail during class and to cheat on tests rather than for what they were intended." In other words, teachers see the use of PDAs as an opportunity to cheat on tests using email. Might this story be translated as the new paradigm competing with the old?

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