It’s Time To Design for Resilience

What a year the last six weeks have been. Or four weeks. Or nine, depending on where you live. I don’t think I’m alone in saying it’s been a hard, long sprint to move school off-campus. 

I am exhausted. I bet you are too.

As a leader, I worry about the teachers I work with and I worry about the students we serve. They are also exhausted, and they have been asked to make a huge shift in the way we do things, to make that shift almost immediately, without agency or process, while experiencing trauma and crisis in their personal lives as well. 

I can’t write this post without acknowledging that. 

I started the shift in “how we do school” by consuming everything I could on schools and COVID-19, and then I realized I couldn’t deal with it any more. The webinars and conference calls were too much, and there was too much to do.

And yet. There are now new routines, new comforts, a bit of space to think. I find that our work as a school, though we’re still navigating a crisis of historical scale, is changing. I wanted to put some language to it. 

The framework I’m sharing is imperfect, and builds on the contributions of others. (My collaborators at Leadership+Design - Carla Silver, Ryan Burke, and Tara Jahn; my team at Charles Wright Academy (CWA), where I am the Associate Head of School for Strategy; and folks on Twitter like Ian Symmonds, Christian Talbot, and Grant Lichtman all influenced these ideas). I am responding to what I have read, as well as my own experience.

In the midst of this, I was asked to lead a class over Zoom for Philly-area school leaders, and I shared this model while it was still forming. It seemed to resonate with those leaders, so I built it out a bit more. When I shared it on Twitter, I got even more good ideas. (Twitter is good like that.)

What is it we’re going through, where are we now, and what’s next for those of us who work in schools?

This is the model I believe is true for now:

Phase I. Triage

Triage was a blur. At first, we were discussing whether we would run international trips to Asia, then whether we would run international trips anywhere, then whether there would be trips. We watched schools in Seattle, just twenty miles to the north, announce plans to close. It was time to plan. 

I know there are some farsighted schools that had a remote learning plan in place, ready to go, before COVID-19 was on the horizon. I commend their leadership, and the resilient systems they demonstrate. That was not our school: I’m pretty sure we started our Google doc with a straight copy and paste from the remote learning plan at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School. We borrowed more ideas from other schools, and then we worked to make it our own.

Triage was not about immediately implementing best practice, and I have to admit I was a little irritated when I started hearing voices from the edu consulting space encouraging us to seize this opportunity to reimagine education. I honor the intent, but I was worried about my wife’s job and my children’s safety and how to teach teachers to use Zoom and how to make sure every kid had a laptop and also people were getting sick and dying. 

It was a reminder that apart from the enthusiasms of the Silicon Valley/TED-industrial complex, “disruption” is usually a word with negative connotations. 

I was focused on how to get it done. This phase was triage.

Our concerns were logistical, like:

• What is the central place where parents can find information?

• What is our remote learning plan?

• How do we let parents and students know about it?

• How do we train everyone to log in?

• Does every student have a computer and Internet access?

• What should our schedule be? 

• Should we use Zoom or Google Hangouts or something else?

• Are teachers consistent in posting homework in the same place?

• What is our communications plan?

• Is everyone healthy and what do we need to do to help them stay healthy?

• How are our students and their families coping emotionally and/or financially, and what support do they need right now?

A few weeks later, we’ve had time to develop and publish our Remote Learning Plan, and we’ve given at least one survey to everyone in our community. The remote learning schedule is on version two because we learned a lot from the feedback we solicited on day six. Communications have moved through multiple rhythms and we feel good enough about what we’re doing that we can promote it in our marketing. We iterated quickly - always important, but especially in the midst of disruption. I am proud of our team.

CWA is out of triage, but that may not be true for all people or all days. Some people are still in triage; some part of others may remain there, simply due to the experience of being ripped away from each other.

LEARN ABOUT DESIGN FOR RESILIENCE SCHOOL COHORTS

Phase 2. Adaptation

We’re on-line. We’ve figured out Zoom, for the most part, though annotations still sometimes get the best of us. We have a schedule, and kids show up. Parents know to log in for a Monday Zoom chat and look for the Thursday newsletter.

For the most part, my colleagues at Charles Wright Academy have moved on to adaptation. In other words, we’re doing this, but how do we do “this” well? 

There is so much about teaching that I learned through hard experience in a physical classroom. My students do better when I greet them by name at the door. When one student is noisy, it’s better to move near them than to raise my voice. I’m well versed in how seating can change dynamics, depending on the environment that serves learning on that day.

All of that is out the (figurative, digital) door now. Some of what’s now so clearly irrelevant was simply bad practice, but some good teaching practice is now simply not useful. 

All of our teachers are now first year teachers. And that involves loss and grief for people who have worked hard to become good at their profession, and now must begin again, without the ease of saying to ourselves, “of course it’s hard, it’s your first year teaching.” 

In many ways, we are re-learning how to be a school.

Like many, we are deeply indebted to the leadership of Global Online Academy in supporting the process of adaptation. I have been a longtime fan of that crew of creative thinkers, who are just as relevant to on-campus learning as on-line. But at this moment, they are indispensable. GOA quickly scaled up a course on “Designing for Online Learning,” and just about everyone at our school registered. 

Only very few of our teachers really took it. They couldn’t deal with it yet. We were still in triage. 

Six weeks in, it is time to revisit those ideas. We’ve registered all of our teachers in grades 3-12 in a CWA-only cohort of this course, and our teachers are facilitating their peers in disciplinary cohorts. If you are working on pedagogical adaptation, I highly recommend a GOA collaboration.

Of course, the information is still a fire hose, and we’re still drinking from it. We’re still in crisis, and some are still in triage. I won’t pretend it’s easy. But it’s possible. I am inspired by the thirst teachers have to get better, to re-learn, even when times are so hard. My colleagues are awesome.

With this space of adaptation, I am willing to admit that this horrible set of circumstances just may be a chance to rethink education after all. And while I would never in a million years choose the circumstances we are in, I am optimistic that we will return with a deeper pedagogical toolbox from which to work.

When disruption happens, it forces the adoption of new practices - some will work superbly, and some won’t. But whatever has the potential to work will now have a chance to get better because the old ways of doing things aren’t an option. We can’t give up on them. We have to iterate until something new comes out of it.

In our current phase of adaptation, our concerns are pedagogical. We’re asking:

• What should be taught synchronously, and what asynchronously?

• How do we make our synchronous time human and relational?

• What kinds of assessments are meaningful and authentic? What kinds of assessments work on-line?

• How do we manage a virtual classroom well?

• How do we build classroom culture on-line?

• How do we include all voices in on-line courses?

• What does “student-centered” look like in a synchronous context? 

• How do we serve all students when they’re in homes with widely divergent resources?

• How do we navigate these shifts in approach with students and families who also may be operating under old assumptions about what teaching and learning looks like?

• How do we deliver our mission in a very different model? In our specific case, what does “active, joyful learning,” the mantra of our mission, mean in a remote learning context?

LEARN ABOUT DESIGN FOR RESILIENCE SCHOOL COHORTS

Phase III. Resilience

Dear Reader: we are not close to the end of this thing. When CWA announced campus closure, it was for three weeks; the next day, the governor made it six. We hoped to be back in late April, or maybe mid-May. Now the Class of 2020 will end their senior year on-line.

What about next year? And how do we use the summer to get better at this? 

My school has not had much time to plan for what’s next. But we are beginning to acknowledge it is there.

How do we build a school that is ready for an ongoing, persistent threat of coronavirus, a threat that will retreat and re-emerge in unknown phases that cannot be scheduled on a school calendar?

Doing so requires a new approach: it’s time to design for resilience. That’s the challenge - and the opportunity - ahead of us. A better school experience than the crisis remote learning many of us are still doing. And, I hope, returning to campus as a better school. 

Resilience is characterized by systems questions, like:

• What did we learn from the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous learning time that should be applied to on-campus learning? 

• How can we build teacher capacity continuously, rather than seeing it as a discrete event?

• How will we ensure equitable access to technology and tools?

• What legacy costs now look like unaffordable luxuries?

• How can this crisis strengthen, rather than weaken, our commitments to equity and justice?

• How should we group students (and will the traditional unit of “1 class, 1 teacher” continue to make sense?)

• Is our school’s mission and vision challenged, tempered, shattered, or affirmed? How does this affirm or deepen our understanding of “what school is for”?

• Perhaps most of all: how will we build the cultural muscle to adapt and change?

How We Might Move Forward

This challenge will require us to work across silos, constructing a matrix akin to Alex Osterwalder’s Mission Model Canvas, to help us see the many components of school systems that may need to be reinvented. What boxes and columns would populate a potential “School Model Canvas”? 

Resilient schools will need to consider:

• Equity and Justice: How will we ensure that everyone benefits from, is included in, and co-creates the new models?

• Pedagogy: How do we build a broader pedagogical toolkit that applies to on-campus, off-campus, and remote learning? What shared language do we need to develop as educators?

• Technology: What models will enable us to transition quickly and seamlessly?

• Culture: What rituals and practices will connect us to each other, our purpose, and our humanity whether on or off campus?

• Time: How do we build flexibility into our calendars for transitions between on- and off-campus learning? How do we use precious on-campus time to build relationships more intensively and intentionally? What schedules best serve remote learning? What does that say about schedules when we’re on campus?

• People and Talent: How can we build flexibility and transparency into employment contracts? How can we define remote learning roles for our employees whose work is often connected specifically to the on-campus experience, so that everyone is able to contribute and feel purpose?

• Value Proposition: Can we articulate a remote learning value proposition as a differentiator?

• Tuition and Pricing: How do we justify or rethink our tuition model when we are teaching kids off-campus? 

Another approach, suggested by my CWA colleague (and L+D UnMastered course instructor) Joe Romano, would be to pull from the design levers suggested by School Retool: space, event, schedule, finance, process, role, ritual, incentive, and communication.

Any path forward should be informed by a design mindset: human-centered, creative, willing to drop old assumptions, prizing the generation of multiple options, being willing to drop what doesn’t work or make it better until it does.

Process will be key, and I don’t think any one article can frame out what it might look like. Leadership+Design is offering a new “Strategic Sprint” to help teams work through these interconnected issues at an accelerated pace. I predict the L+D toolkit will be powerful to schools designing for resilience, because it offers the leadership training and the design process for schools to put this mindset in action. The L+D Remote Collaboration Training will also be a way to build those human skills among teams trying to wrestle with hard issues while also working remotely.

Finally, since this article was still published, many leaders have contacted me to ask how they can help their schools design for resilience next year. In response, Leadership+Design is building a small cohort of four or five schools to design for resilience together, in a facilitated design process, in the first part of the summer. If you’re interested in getting information about that program, click here. I’ve also written a follow-up article on how you might do this: read “10 Principles for Designing the 2020-2021 school year.”

LEARN ABOUT DESIGN FOR RESILIENCE SCHOOL COHORTS

Postscript: Beyond Resilience

The statistician George Box once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Any model that tries to make sense of the current craziness will be reductive and incomplete to some degree. My hope is that this one is useful for educators and leaders as they seek a path forward.

I anticipate we’ll find the model is, to some degree, recursive. If we are able to return to campus, but then forced to close again, we’ll find ourselves returning to a state of triage - in some ways leaving it more efficiently, one hopes, but also perhaps more painfully, as old feelings return. The more resilient we can become in the interim, the less painful this should be.

But even resilience does not mean our work is done. The educator and futurist Christian Talbot of Basecamp suggests that the future is antifragility - building school communities that actually get strengthened through crisis, each setback compounding their advantage.

I also like Jason Coady’s term “re-orientation” to describe our work in a post-vaccine, post-COVID environment. We will learn valuable lessons in this crisis. There are parts of school we will be forced to reinvent and iterate on to make them viable. We will have to rethink pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. When we have a chance to breathe, we also have a chance to take stock. Much of what we’re creating will make us better as schools, even if we return to campus forever. 

This experience comes at an interesting time for me personally, as I will be returning to full-time consulting with Leadership+Design. I think our creative team is perfectly suited to help schools navigate this strange time and ambiguous environment. The team at Charles Wright Academy will keep planning for resilience; as a consultant, I look forward to helping other schools do the same. The students deserve it.

Whether we are working in schools or working with schools, this is our task: to nurturing and challenging our students in the midst of this crisis, supporting and sustaining our colleagues as we do some, and bringing them back to schools that are better than before.