ARPA-ED might just succeed because the education system is in a rare moment of alignment around the prospect of innovation. The issue is building consensus across party lines, bringing President Obama and Republican ex-Governor Jeb Bush together for a recent press conference in Miami. The NEA is also on board, stating that “the technology environment of today’s public schools should match the tools … of work and civic life that students will encounter after graduation.” Wind of this alignment has reached the private sector, where investors are predicting a 28% annual growth rate in the K-12 educational technology market:

There is no question that a shift is happening. Now ARPA-ED and other innovators in the education space must face the daunting challenge of imagining what that shift might look like. As Republicans, Democrats, superintendents and teachers unions all gingerly approach the notion of radical change, they each project radically different images of what that change will look like. Some envision e-schools that can deliver high-quality learning at a fraction of the current cost, others imagine teachers trained to facilitate fully customized learning experiences through technology, others just want graduates ready to compete in the global economy of the 21st century. These competing visions of the future, though often fundamentally compatible, can layer on top of innovation until it is smothered.

Whether ARPA-ED succeeds or fails will ultimately depend not on its skill at ed-tech wizardry, but on its ability to combine these visions into a unified whole. It’s a daunting challenge, especially because more people still need to be invited to the table. Parents need to be given a voice. So do kids, so do teachers on the ground, so do the 21st century industries that will be hiring after graduation. Effective innovation, especially in systems as complex as education, is less about great edtech and more about the conditions that allow it to be developed – overall it is about the ability to construct multistakeholder innovation systems.

Making Innovation Systems Work

Collective Invention’s ethnographer, Fiona Hovenden, has been working with the Stupski Foundation to study how these innovation systems are being constructed in schools and communities across the country. In every case successful innovation networks start by generating a shared vision of the future, often distilled as profiles of the future graduates that the community wants its schools to foster. These profiles can trigger a phase change: they get people to stop worrying about what everyone else will accept and start pushing for what everyone else aspires to.

Once stakeholders have been aligned, a rich and complicated conversation needs to take place. Teachers, superintendents, and entrepreneurs all need to become adroit in the use of innovation techniques that they can take back to their workplaces and classrooms. Ideas need to be visualized, prototypes need to be played with, and new relationships need to form between people and between ideas. Much of this process can and should happen online, but the most powerful components also require a physical meeting place with crowded whiteboards and a busy front door.

Future personas and innovation hubs. Both tools come from a rich history of strategic innovation that should be required reading for innovators in education.

Future Personas

In the late 70s, early creators of business software became frustrated at how teams of designers would often become divided over conflicting visions of a finished product. They found that illustrating and even play-acting a set of concrete set of user personas helped designers step back from their own opinions and come to a consensus around what was best for the end user.

But why profile graduates from the future, rather than graduates today? The answer may lie in the work of the Global Business Network (GBN), which found that articulating likely scenarios of the future had a curious affect on entrenched bureaucracies. Telling stories about likely future scenarios and asking people to plan for them makes change seem inevitable rather than apocalyptic. At Collective Invention we combine macro scenarios with the micro-stories of future personas. Thought leaders in education have already begun to combine these two tactics. Future personas are already being used effectively by the nation’s top educational grantmakers and by top-performing local innovators.

Innovation Hubs

Innovation hubs have a their own rich history, though they have generally been applied to technical rather than social challenges. At centers like XEROX PARC innovators laid the foundation for modern computing and carried around iPad prototypes 40 years ahead of schedule. More recently, innovation centers have been popping up in other social arenas. Healthcare-focused Innovation Center Denmark has proven so successful that it has opened up hubs in Silicon Valley and Shanghai. The concept of ARPA-ED springs from this lineage, and educational innovators should be sure to look across sectors for best practices in making these hubs effective.

What does success look like?

Where could this catalytic moment in education lead? It might start with a set of structured conversations about what we want the graduates of 2025 and 2050 to be able to do in the world. These conversations need to tap into our highest aspirations for our kids and for the communities that they’ll be defining. A struggling mom in LA will be able to tell her story in a place where someone’s listening, where she sees how her hopes overlap with those of her kid’s teachers, the district superintendent, legislators from both sides of the aisle. She’ll feel like the education system is actually changing, and like she and her kid are a part of that change.

Once she’s invested, she’ll plug into regular conversations about how her daughter’s education is transforming for the better. She’ll make friends not just with her daughter’s teacher, but with an entrepreneur who’s prototyping a groundbreaking education game and with a representative from the nanotech conglomerate that would like to hire her daughter when she graduates from college.

Truly groundbreaking changes in education aren’t going to come from highly-paid experts at ARPA-ED, they’re going to come out of these sorts of friendships. Our best hope may just be to build an innovation system that invites everyone to the table and to invite them to dream together.

Leaders and innovators in education need to do more than address falling test scores, crumbling facilities and a mounting teacher shortage; they need to address those problems in a world transformed by everything from advanced biotechnology to climate refugees.

Grantmakers for Education (GFE), a network of approximately 260 education funders, is working to build a common definition of innovation and to identify investments that can transform our education systems. As part of this initiative, educational innovation specialists from Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks collaborated with GFE to design and document programs that enable grantmakers to step back from their typical funding procedures and consider what innovations can leverage the most change for learners.

The team utilized expertise in user-centric design thinking. Their process centered around a set of personas designed to help funders understand the how the education system will intersect with emerging global trends.

Meet the Learners of 2025

Imagine that you are Adila Tahawi a 15-year old first generation Arab-American from Minneapolis. Your father is teacher at an underfunded university, he makes ends meet by selling lectures and tutoring online.

You are home-schooled by your mother using a mix of e-learning content and in-person tutoring. You dream of one day going to college, or somewhere rich in intellectual collaboration and innovation, and you struggle daily with anti-Muslim sentiments in your community.

What resources do you need? What kind of education system is capable of providing you with those resources? What can funders do today to ensure that those resources are in place?

Imagine that you are JP Teaero, a 17-year old climate refugee from Kiribati living at a camp in Richmond, CA. NGOs have set up a makeshift education facility in your camp, but your elders are worried about the school assimilating away your already-fragile cultural heritage.

You are interested in pursuing climate science, a skill in growing demand, but are afraid that a refugee won’t be able to become, or be respected as, a scientist. A Federal grant has made first-generation cognitive implants available in your camp, and you are unsure whether to take the risk.

What resources do you need? What kind of education system is capable of providing you with those resources? What can funders do today to ensure that those resources are in place?

The Art of the Uncertain Future

By utilizing systems thinking and scenario planning methodologies, Collective invention and Knowledgeworks were able to lead discussion on how relatively certain trends (such as the existence of climate refugees) interact with trends that have axes of uncertainty (such as the widespread availability of on-demand educational content.) The result was a sophisticated dialogue about how the nation’s top funders can meet the emerging challenges of tomorrow.

The exercise brought a stream of insights. Grantmakers focused on the “need to be more nimble and less bureaucratic,” and to “listen on the ground from many perspectives.” Looking to the future also put the need for educational innovation in sharp focus. Grantmakers discussed creating a “education innovation labs and and venture funds,” while convening “business, funders, systems engineers, product managers, students and designers in… a product development cycle.”

A New Direction for Educational Grantmakers

In the end of the exercise, grantmakers determined that they would be successful in 2025 if…

1. We have fostered public will for new kinds of learning and new learning outcomes.
2. We have advocated policy that enables new kinds of learning and new learning outcomes.
3. We have innovated funding mechanisms to enable greater choice, equity, and/or new learning models.
4. We have identified new forms of governance.
5. We have fostered personalized learning in a community context.
6. We have defined new critical skills and knowledge.
7. We have prototyped and/or scaled new models for learning.
8. We have delivered on the promise of digital media.
9. We have reimagined assessments for (and of) learning.
10. We have framed a research agenda for a new world for learning.

Two new briefs offer further insight into these efforts. Innovation in Education: Redesigning the Delivery System of Education in America documents how funders at GFE’s April 2010 member briefing used three key approaches—systems thinking, design thinking and scenario thinking—to understand what grantmakers can do to transform education systems. Learning 2025 summarizes themes from a working meeting in which a small group of funders mapped their investments in next generation learning strategies.

To read more on this subject and to watch the slide show at arnoldwasserman.com; click on the image below

Two things about this quote stand out. First, it recognizes design as a useful process beyond object-making, and second, it was published in 1999 – ten years ago. It was also ten years ago that I started teaching a course at UC Berkeley’s architecture school called, “Beyond Buildings; New Sites for Designers.” The purpose was to help students understand what habits of mind they come to know (often tacitly) through the design studio sequence of classes. Then, we looked at how those skills can be used to make things other than buildings. Over time, that work has boiled down to a list of qualities – or habits of mind – that one could arguably title “How to Think Like a Designer.”

It would be foolhardy to claim this list is absolute or even complete. It has started many conversations and some debates. We are reproducing it here in that spirit. In the following weeks there will be a post about each of these ideas. But for now, here is the whole list. Your comments and insights are welcome and will, no doubt, find their way into future posts.

Design Thinking: Ten Habits of Mind

1. Focused Creativity
2. Generous Collaboration
3. Drawing and Thinking in Pictures
4. Comfort with Ambiguity
5. Non-linear Information Processing
6. Multiple Solutions
7. Learning by Doing
8. Communicate for Understanding
9. Charrette Culture: Shaped by constraints and bounded by time
10. Curiosity is better than Judgment

Clark Kellogg is a designer and partner at Collective Invention.

I teach art in a kindergarten class every other Friday. I am an “enrichment teacher.” What that means is that I am enriched by my time with these 20 young artists. In my case, the enrichment is even greater: the classroom teacher, Ms. Wood, is my daughter, a second-year public school teacher.

These young artists are four and five years old. They are filled with spirit, wonder and unbounded enthusiasm. Our art projects are “pedagogically sound” and track with the California State Standards for kindergarten art. The state standards aren’t magic, but the children are. By smashing those two ideas together Ms. Wood and I create lesson plans. On the Friday after the presidential election my goal was to have the students discover that colors and shapes have meaning and – as artists – they create that meaning.

I’ve always flown the American flag on holidays. It bugs me that the colors and shapes of the flag seem to stand for something political instead of something patriotic. But after the election there were dozens of American flags flying in my neighborhood. That’s when I decided our Friday art class would be about the colors, shapes and meaning of flags.

The young artists in my class come in many stripes. So, I brought stripes of all colors. I made star fields with 20 stars – because there are 20 star artists in the class. On Friday we talked about the flag, about Barack Obama, about colors and shapes and about glue. Then, they each choose some stars and some stripes and made their own version of an American flag. We called them the Obama Flags and, indeed, they are filled with meaning.

After we made our flags we talked about them. Alejandro said he wanted to grow up and be the president. So does Vanessa. Then Richie said he wants to grow up and be an artist. Ms. Wood and I realized that our job is to make sure all of them keep believing it.

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