Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

#1 of 60: Are schools human-centered…? 🤔🤔

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Welcome to Day #1 of the #60DayChallenge! See this post if you need to be brought up to speed! 

First….a few housekeeping items before we dive in…🏚

  • Feel free to invite others to the group! Please share this link with them!
  • Leave comments below, AND also post relevant content to the group at any time! Let’s model sharing, collaboration and effective discourse around the challenging issues we face in transforming our schools (and ultimately our mental models).
  • Each of the daily provocations will (generally) follow the same format:
  • ❓Provocation
  • 🧠 Mindset 
  • 💡 Area (learning, leadership, longview, longevity or any others that emerge over the next weeks)
  • 💎 Resource
  • 📣 Call to action

OK…let’s dive in…🌊🌊🌊

—–

K12 education…we’ve got an over reliance on jargon!

personalized learning, agency, social emotional learning, critical thinking, authentic assessment, ugh……💁

Ah…and now some more jargon I’m seeing more and more of… human-centered learning.

How’s that different from student-centered or learner-centered? Let’s dig the distinction out of KnowledgeWorks latest (excellent) whitepaper: Envisioning Human-Centered Learning Systems.

“It is a systemic shift that aligns educational structures, policies, practices and learning experiences around the flourishing and well-being of the people involved in education – including students, teachers, administrators, families and community members.” pg. 3

I bolded the words that particularly resonated with me…

First, I love the outcomes…. “Flourishing” and “well being” of all the stakeholders. “Human-centered” expands beyond “school,” to include everyone. Moonshot! 🌜 (Rabbit hole 🐰 for future posts…. Flourishing, positive psychology, humanistic psychology…)

Second, when we’re talking about change in education, we’re really talking about changing systems — systems of “structures, policies, practices and learning experiences” that are tightly intertwined and wrapped in mental models and belief systems (seemingly permanently) emblazoned onto the brains of us, “the humans” operating behind the systems.

If we want to change the systems, the highest leverage actions we can take are to change (our) mindsets 🧠  in coordination with the “structures, policies, practices and learning experiences.” To change anything else is (and has been) merely tinkering.

—–

❓ Provocation:

How does the framing of “human-centered” above resonate with you?

What are some of the current structures, policies, practices and learning experiences you would change to make schooling more “human-centered” for all? And think about the mindsets 🧠 that ultimately need to accompany any transformation. (Ooo…there’s another piece of jargon….so many rabbit holes.🐰🐰🐰)

💎 Resource:

Envisioning Human-Centered Learning Systems  Whitepaper from KnowledgeWorks

🧠 Mindset:

Human-centered learning

💡 Area:

Learning

📣 Head on over to the Facebook page, drop your thoughts in the comments, and let’s see where this goes.

Connect with Randy on Twitter, the TLTalkRadio podcast, and the Shift Your Paradigm podcast!

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Randy Ziegenfuss
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