Lexington, KY - There is a Chinese proverb that roughly goes as follows: "Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand."
This summarizes the approach being taken by the University of Kentucky College of Education as it prepares 80 public school leaders to design, implement and test innovative schooling approaches that will transform the Kentucky education landscape.
In April 2010, Kentucky was selected as one of six states by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) as having demonstrated readiness to establish an innovation lab and commit to taking transformations within schools to scale. Kentucky's innovation lab is located in the College of Education at UK.
Since July 2011, a cohort of educator teams from school districts across Kentucky have convened approximately every nine to 12 weeks to become familiar with and make plans to implement critical attributes that form a foundation for the next generation of schools. These attributes are not program strategies. Rather, they serve as a set of design principles for systems change. Grounded in a solid base of research and best practices from around the world, the attributes are:
Personalized learning - providing the tools and capacities to create and deliver customized learning based on student needs;
Anytime, anywhere learning - putting in place practices that promote learning beyond the traditional classroom and may include virtual or out-of school settings, leveraging technology;
Student voice - providing students greater say and ownership, engaging them as drivers of their own learning;
World-class knowledge and skills - ensuring students have the knowledge (what the learner knows), skills (what the learner can do) and dispositions (how the learner acts) required for success in a globally oriented world;
Performance-based assessment and performance-based learning - putting in place learning models that ensure a student has mastered a topic, using authentic tasks to assess learning; and
Comprehensive systems of learning supports - schools ensure that robust structures are in place for children that support their social, emotional, physical and cognitive needs.
The exciting part of this endeavor comes in the form of how the teams of educators are involved as architects of change in their schools.
At the February 2012 meeting of the Academy, participants will be asked to assess their own school's ability to deliver on the six critical attributes. Based on their assessment, and with the help of national experts who will be in the room, schools will develop prototype strategies for implementing one or more of the critical attributes at home. In this way, all the teams will exit the training not only with a clear picture of where the opportunities lie for being innovative in their schools, but they will also depart with numerous plausible solutions that can be shared with other school stakeholders and primed for implementation.
To learn more about the 2011-2012 Next Generation Leadership Academy, see http://bit.ly/ysyNcq.
John Nash is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is director of the university's recently established Laboratory on Design Thinking.