Iterate E-Book

Justin Reich

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 385

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Innovate and implement new, effective ways of teaching in your school In Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools, veteran educator, MIT professor, and incorrigible innovator Justin Reich delivers an insightful bridge between contemporary educational research and classroom teaching, showing you how to leverage the cycle of experiment and experience to create a compelling and engaging learning environment. In the book, you'll learn how to employ a process of continuous improvement and tinkering to develop exciting new programs, activities, processes, and designs. The author draws on over two decades of experience with educators, education researchers, and school leaders to explain how to apply the latest advances in the academic literature to your school, classroom, or online/hybrid course. You'll also find: * Complimentary access to two popular courses archived at the MIT Open Learning Library: Launching Innovation in Schools and Design Thinking for Leading and Learning * Insights grounded in extensive scholarly experience in design and innovation from Prof. Reich and the MIT Teaching Systems Lab * Strategies for combining the most effective evidence-based teaching methods with the flexibility and creativity displayed by schools during the COVID-19 pandemic An invaluable strategic playbook for innovative teaching, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools is perfect for PK-12 school and district leaders, teacher leaders, and educators.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COVER

PRAISE FOR

ITERATE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE SECRET TO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENTintroduction

PART I: THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING?

CHANGING THE COMPLEX, FINE‐GRAINED WORK OF TEACHING

TEACHERS PRIMARILY CHANGE THEIR PEDAGOGY IN RESPONSE TO OTHER TEACHERS

THREE PHASES TO THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING

WHAT'S MISSING FROM THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING

LEADERSHIP AND THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING

NOTES

CHAPTER 2: SPINNING THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING

CREATING MORE OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPERIMENTATION

MAKING TEAM LEARNING RICHER: LOOKING AT STUDENT WORK AND INSTRUCTIONAL ROUNDS

INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING: RAMPING UP PLANNING THROUGH PEER‐TO‐PEER LEARNING

ROWING IN THE SAME DIRECTION: CREATING COMMON INSTRUCTIONAL LANGUAGE AND A SHARED VISION

NOTES

PART II: DESIGN THINKING FOR LEADING AND LEARNING

CHAPTER 3: WHAT IS DESIGN THINKING?

FROM WATERFALLS TO SPRINTS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF DESIGN

GETTING STARTED WITH DESIGN THINKING FOR LEADING AND LEARNING

SIX PHASES OF DESIGN THINKING FOR LEADING AND LEARNING

CONCLUSION

NOTES

CHAPTER 4: GETTING STARTED WITH DESIGN

DISCOVER

FOCUS

IMAGINE

PROTOTYPE

TRY

REFLECT AND SHARE

CONCLUSION

NOTES

PART III: THE COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION CYCLE

CHAPTER 5: WHAT IS THE COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION CYCLE?

FOUR PHASES OF THE COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION CYCLE

BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER AROUND IDEAS THEY CARE ABOUT

REFINING A VISION AND GETTING TO WORK

WORKING TOGETHER THROUGH UPS AND DOWNS

MEASURING PROGRESS AND ADJUSTING

CONCLUSION

NOTES

CHAPTER 6: TOOLS AND STRATEGIES FOR THE COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION CYCLE

ACTIVITIES FOR BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER AROUND IDEAS THEY CARE ABOUT

ACTIVITIES FOR REFINING A VISION AND GETTING TO WORK

ACTIVITIES FOR WORKING TOGETHER THROUGH UPS AND DOWNS

ACTIVITIES FOR MEASURING PROGRESS AND ADJUSTING

FROM LAUNCHING TO SUSTAINING INNOVATION IN SCHOOLS

CONCLUSION: CYCLES, ENDINGS, AND BEGINNINGS

BALANCING COHERENCE AND INNOVATION

WHEN CYCLES END

FINAL THOUGHTS: INCLUSION AND JOY

NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

Guide

COVER

PRAISE FOR ITERATE

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE SECRET TO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

BEGIN READING

CONCLUSION: CYCLES, ENDINGS, AND BEGINNINGS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

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PRAISE FOR ITERATE

“There are lots of books out there talking about ‘change’ in education. However, Justin has written one of the few, if not the only one, that talks honestly about the negatives of ‘top‐down’ change being done ‘to’ teachers and students, and points the way to ‘bottom‐up’ change done ‘with’ teachers, students, and their families.”

—Larry Ferlazzo, high school educator, author, and EducationWeek teacher advice columnist

“I wish I had a red telephone in my office that I could pick up any time I wanted to talk with Justin Reich about the beautiful, sticky, and crucial work of helping schools evolve. This book will now sit on my desk and play the role of that phone. Iterate is packed with thoughtful perspectives, real stories, and actionable approaches for how we can create the conditions for positive change in schools. And it's all shared in a crisp conversational tone with vibrant illustrations. I never have to call Justin again!”

—Sam Seidel, co‐author of Hip Hop Genius 2.0 and Creative Hustle and K12 Lab Director of Strategy + Research at the Stanford School

“Perhaps the greatest praise I can give a new book is this: I want to give this to all my educator friends and colleagues. There is so much in this book that ‘works’! I found myself repeatedly saying, ‘Yes! Yes! I agree with that! Yes, that makes so much sense!’ Here's one: ‘If we want students to try new ideas, teachers must do so, too.’ Or this one, ‘Design as flare and focus,’ or, even more powerful: the idea of having more adults in schools who still teach part‐time. And the best, ‘only teachers can change teaching and learning.’ There are so many invaluable nuggets of wisdom and truth in this book. Better still, most of it is available for free through Creative Commons. Reich has given the field an important and exciting new resource.”

—Linda Nathan, lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and founding head of Boston Arts Academy

“Justin Reich stands out as one of the most brilliant minds in education reform. In his latest book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools, he masterfully combines his extensive academic research and vast experience as an educator to create an immensely useful resource for guiding change in schools. This book offers an invaluable blend of concepts, strategies, and tools that empower school leaders and individuals to understand and effectively design innovation within educational communities.”

—Tom Daccord, co‐founder of EdTechTeacher

“In Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools, Reich masterfully synthesizes decades of research and practice into a powerful set of strategies that help spark change in education. Acknowledging that schools are complex systems that operate on many levels, the three practical and ready‐to‐implement approaches shared in this book demonstrate how to engage all stakeholders in collaborative experimentation that works!”

—Tom Driscoll, CEO of EdTechTeacher

“In The Magic School Bus, Ms. Frizzle gives her students some great advice: ‘Take chances, make mistakes, get messy.’ In his timely new book Iterate, Justin Reich gives similar advice for classroom teachers and school leaders, providing useful examples and practical tips on how to innovate at all levels of the school ecosystem by continually experimenting with new approaches and making changes based on the results, over and over again.”

—Mitch Resnick, professor at MIT; director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab; and developer of the Scratch creative computing community

“Iterate is more than a guide—it's an irresistible call to action for educators, leading toward innovation and systemic transformation. Reich, with his impressive wisdom drawn from profound involvement in educational reform, weaves compelling narratives that make this book a captivating journey. Rich in research‐based practices, this work is not merely about reading cover to cover, but about learning, applying, and iterating upon the myriad lessons and practical strategies it imparts. An essential compass in the pursuit of educational metamorphosis, Iterate masterfully turns insights into action.”

—Eric Klopfer, professor at MIT and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program

“Reich by no means underestimates the challenges and complexity of promoting innovation in schools and what it can require of teachers and school leaders. But this is a hope inspiring, energizing book that will be immensely helpful for all educators who are trying to roll up their sleeves and get on with exploring, prototyping, trying, reflecting—and iterating on—the kinds of locally responsive improvements to teaching and learning that all students need and deserve. Reich deftly and coherently steers the reader through a plethora of ideas—some well‐known and some his own—that can be tried out on Monday within a single classroom or used to inform large‐scale, systemic change.”

—Liz Dawes Duraisingh, co‐director and principal investigator at Project Zero; lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education; and author of Inquiry‐Driven Innovation: A Practical Guide to Supporting School‐Based Change

“Justin Reich has written a gem of a book. Iterate is a how‐to manual for climbing out of that rut and rediscovering the creative processes that reside in all of us. It should be on every educator's bookshelf.”

—Sam Wineburg, Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, Stanford University and founder of the Stanford History Education Group

“This is a book for every educator, community member, family member, and policymaker interested in learning more about the work they do to improve it. Drawing from his rich and robust experiences as well as transdisciplinary perspectives on designing and improving teaching, Reich has produced a powerful book that innovates as it educates.”

—H. Richard Milner IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Education; immediate‐past president, American Educational Research Association; and author of The Race Card

“Intuitively we know that teachers are the driving force of change and administrators need to create the conditions for this to happen, but rarely is that articulated, much less given a road map.”

—Melanie Ching, director of Community & Engagement at What School Could Be

ITERATE

THE SECRET TO INNOVATION IN SCHOOLS

JUSTIN REICH

Copyright © 2024 by Justin Reich, Ed.D. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119913504 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781119913528 (ePub)

ISBN 9781119913511 (ePDF)

Cover Design and Illustration: © Haley McDevitt

To my father, who shared his love of tinkering with me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All of the ideas in this book emerge from partnerships over 20 years of teaching and work in schools.

Through the entrepreneurial vision of Tom Daccord, I had the chance to work with schools across the world on implementing new technologies. This work was vital to developing the ideas for the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning. With Richard Murnane, John Willett, and Bob Wolf, I led a research project in the 2000s on social media tools in schools, with generous funding from the Hewlett Foundation. That work provided an incredible opportunity to do close observations and interviews with dozens of teachers and schools. My colleagues throughout the years at EdTechTeacher contributed to these ideas with their hard‐won insights and through conversations over Tom's many, many birthdays.

The material on the Collaborative Innovation Cycle emerged from a collaboration with Peter Senge at MIT's Sloan School of Management to develop an online course for MITx, Launching Innovation in Schools. Elizabeth Huttner was the captain of our online course ship and an invaluable colleague for many years. Elizabeth along with Alyssa Napier and Blake Sims were my co‐authors and co‐leads for a second MITx course, Design Thinking for Leading and Learning. Many of the activities and exercises in this book were developed by them, and nearly all of the materials from our online courses are available (and reused and remixed here) under a Creative Commons license. Microsoft generously funded the development of these courses.

An incredible cadre of educators, some of whom you will meet in this book, generously volunteered their time for interviews and opened their classrooms for my research and courses. All of them, too many to list, have my deepest gratitude for their time and wisdom.

Rachel Slama helped develop and direct the MIT Teaching Systems Lab for five years, and I'm grateful for her leadership that allowed me the time and space to work on this project. The students, staff, and researchers in the TSL have my gratitude for keeping our research on the right track while I've been writing, and I'm especially grateful to my colleagues who read and commented on early drafts of the book. Garrett Beazley makes everything we do look and sound great.

Alyssa Napier has been an incredible thought partner and editor in turning all of this source material into a book, and when I needed a break she spilled all of the tea. Sunnye Collins' developmental edits sharpened the prose throughout the book and spared you from a surfeit of unnecessarily‐included adverbs and long subordinate clauses that lengthened many sentences without sufficiently offering all that much additional insight beyond the information provided by the subject and predicate. Amy Fandrei championed this project at Wiley.

I'm always grateful to the ladies in my house for good times and big adventures, but in this case, I am compelled to leave the final thanks to Haley McDevitt, whose incredible illustrations will delight you in the pages ahead.

INTRODUCTION: THE SECRET TO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

MY BEST TEACHING EVER: WILDERNESS MEDICINE

I started my education career in an unusual place: I taught wilderness medicine.

During college I worked as an EMT on an ambulance, I taught lifeguarding at the college pool, and I helped run the Blue Ridge Mountain Rescue Group in Virginia. After graduation, I worked for a vocational school in Conway, New Hampshire, called Stonehearth Outdoor Learning Opportunities, or SOLO. They offered multi‐day Wilderness First Aid courses to folks working and playing in the outdoors. I taught Navy SEALs, college outdoor program leaders, doctors heading to remote missions across the world, Outward Bound and National Outdoor Leadership School staff, camp counselors, and all kinds of outdoor enthusiasts.

These wilderness medicine classes were incredibly fun to teach, and students loved them. It took me many more years of studying education to understand just how well they were designed. Our students had widely varied education backgrounds—I taught high school graduates alongside practicing physicians—but they all came with a high level of motivation to learn the material: they didn't want to die in the woods! We taught a unit on sprains and fractures: we'd do a lecture on the basic anatomy of bones and muscles and a second lecture on principles of improvising a splint. Then we'd demonstrate how to make a splint out of stuff folks carried in a typical hiking pack, and we'd have people practice inside. Finally, we'd go outside and have a few students pretend to have a broken leg, complete with screams, fake blood, and bruises from stage makeup. The rest of the class would break into groups, assess the scene, treat the injury, and carry the “patients” to safety. Through a combination of direct instruction and practice, students graduated from our short courses with the confidence and know‐how to tackle the inevitable misfortunes that happen outdoors.

For two years, I taught this same Wilderness First Aid course over 100 times. Every class had a unit on bone fractures and splinting. I led the lesson myself dozens of times, and I watched my fellow instructors lead the lesson dozens of times as well. Every time I taught the class I would try something just a little different. I'd introduce the topic with a new story. I'd draw a schematic of bone and muscle a little differently. I'd try different materials for demonstrating an improvised splint. I'd tell the same joke that kept folks alert at slightly different points in the lesson sequence. I'd remember the questions that came up at the end of previous lessons and work the answers into a new lecture for the next lesson. I'd tweak the instructions to the students pretending to be patients for the simulations.

After each lesson, I'd reflect on how well I held students' attention, and what questions they asked or didn't. I talked with colleagues about what they observed and how they could do things differently. Perhaps most importantly, during the outdoor training scenarios I walked from group to group and looked at their improvised splints and offered feedback. Right there, on the fake‐injured leg of some now‐smiling student was the evidence of student learning and my teaching. Was that a splint that would be comfortable? Would it hold a leg straight and stable during a treacherous walk down a wet trail? If one group did something wrong, maybe that was their fault. But if several groups did something wrong, then that was my fault, and I needed to revisit and improve my instruction.

Every lesson was an experiment, and over many iterations my teaching improved. Students would sometimes tell me that I was the best teacher they had ever had. I tried to be gracious, but I knew that these compliments were not the result of any natural gift that I had for teaching. I had one big advantage over all the other teachers I was “competing” against for the best‐teacher‐in‐your‐life prize: I had a lot of practice.

If you are an elementary school teacher, at some point during the year you might teach a lesson on how to write a sentence. You might teach that lesson, once per year, in October, and then not again until the following October. If you stay in the classroom for 25 years until you earn your pension, then you will have taught that lesson only 25 times over the course of an entire career.

As a wilderness medicine instructor teaching short courses, it might take me only a few months to teach my splinting lesson 25 times. In a year, I would teach lessons on splinting, tourniquets, or CPR more often than many school teachers would teach any of their lessons over the course of an entire career. As long as I introduced some deliberate experiment, some intentional variation, every time I taught a class, then I could rapidly improve my teaching. I've learned a lot about instruction in the decades since, but those lessons are still probably the best teaching I've done in my life.

CREATING TIME AND SPACE FOR ITERATION

A civics education organization called me recently to discuss their new year‐long middle school curriculum, which they were getting ready to pilot. Their plan was to launch the pilot in a few schools in the fall, gather end‐of‐year data, and refine the course in the summer before a full release the following year. I tried to explain that they might find many of the problems and pain points following that plan but they were severely restricting their opportunities to fix those issues. Teaching is magnificently complex, and excellent instruction requires accounting for prior knowledge, optimal sequencing, engagement, repetition, pacing, analogies, and a zillion other bits of art and science. The plan to pilot this new curriculum left no room for iteration, and instead put all the organization's eggs in a one‐year basket.

To be sure, the alternatives I suggested were more complicated. Could they find schools with semester‐long courses, where the same teacher could teach the whole class (or key selections) once in the fall and then again in the spring? Could they find student clubs that might run through lessons in advance of the full launch? Could they rearrange the order of some units in schools: maybe one instructor teaches units A/B/C/D, and another teaches B/A/D/C, and after each unit, the teachers get together to share notes to let colleagues build on their learned experience? (Or, even crazier, one teacher leads unit A, the other leads unit B, and then they switch classrooms for the next marking period and teach the same unit again to different students!) But without incorporating more cycles of iteration, the opportunities to find problems, test improvements, and refine new ideas would be much more limited.

In a world where schools increasingly need to respond rapidly to emergencies of all kinds—pandemics, climate‐related disasters, political upheavals, refugee movements, and so on—they can no longer afford to have improvement cycles on the scale of one‐year courses or five‐year strategic plans. However, changing quickly merely for the sake of changing quickly isn't useful either. To improve teaching and learning and to respond effectively to the changing needs of schooling, teachers and school leaders need to develop the ability to experiment, learn from their experiments, and reflect on how to move forward as a team. Teachers need more opportunities to learn, practice, and grow like I did at SOLO, where every time a lesson flopped, I knew I would soon have a chance to try it again.

ITERATIVE IMPROVEMENT AT MIT

Twenty‐five years later, I'm now a professor at MIT, where I run a lab called the Teaching Systems Lab. Our mission is to design, implement, and research the future of teacher learning. We teach students on campus and from universities across Boston, we offer online courses across the world, and we create digital clinical simulations where participants can rehearse for and reflect on difficult moments in teaching. I work with a fabulous interdisciplinary team of teacher educators, instructional designers, software developers, postdoctoral researchers, and students of all ages.

One mantra in our lab is that the quality of any product that we offer—an undergraduate class, a grant proposal, a technology platform, an online course, a professional development workshop—usually depends more than anything else on how many cycles of iteration go into the design of that product. If we spend a long time planning, or worse, dithering, and then pull together one draft of something before a deadline, it's rarely great. Our best work occurs when we get a prototype of whatever we are working on in front of people as soon as possible, get feedback, improve the product, and continue this cycle of design, evaluation, and improvement as many times as possible.

One of my favorite ways to express this philosophy comes from Benjamin Erwin's book on teaching with Lego Mindstorms: “Building a robot that works involves building a robot that doesn't work and then figuring out what is wrong with it.” To build instruction that works, we first build instruction that doesn't quite work, and then we fix it.1

In my time at MIT, I've also had terrific opportunities to collaborate with and learn from computer scientists, entrepreneurs, mechanical engineers, aeronautic experts, and many other folks with unique insights into the art and science of design. They have generously shared their insights with me throughout the years, and I'm excited to pass their wisdom along to you in this book.

THREE CYCLES FOR ITERATIVE IMPROVEMENT

Drawing on my own experiences, my colleagues at MIT, and the  incredible work of collaborating educators and designers, this book teaches how to focus on iteration in your work to improve education. With your students, colleagues, families, and other partners, you'll find new ways to bring short cycles of design into the long arc of your teaching year. As you bring this spirit of experimentation to your work, your own teaching will get better faster, and your school community will get better faster, and you'll have more fun doing this important work.

In the pages ahead, I offer three complementary approaches to iterative improvement: the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning, Design Thinking for Leading and Learning, and the Collaborative Innovation Cycle. In the spirit of good modeling, this is a book on iteration with three iterative approaches to design and improvement!

Schools are complex systems that operate on multiple levels: individuals, classrooms, and teacher teams (like departments, grade‐level teams, or professional learning communities), schools, and districts or networks.

We begin our innovation journey right in the middle, where teachers collaborate and learn from one another. It turns out that this is the most dynamic, exciting, and important space for teacher learning and instructional improvement. As we will see, teacher leadership, sharing, and networking are all indispensable to school improvement. So, the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning gets us started right in the mix of this vital work.

The second section of the book zooms into smaller units, like classrooms, libraries, registrar offices, and other places, where individuals and small teams try to improve parts of school. When I was tinkering with my wilderness medicine classes, I was just winging it; trying new things out to make things run more smoothly and keep things interesting for me. But from my colleagues at MIT and educators around the world, I've learned quite a bit about design thinking, a systematic approach to innovation and continuous improvement through cycles of exploration, imagination, prototyping, and testing. Design Thinking for Leading and Learning is one flavor of this approach, developed for teachers and school leaders to be nimble and effective at trying out new approaches to teaching, learning, and living together in schools.

In the third part of the book, we explore the Collaborative Innovation Cycle, and we pan out to examine how bigger entities, like schools and districts, can change and improve together. If the first two cycles of the book provide new tools for individuals and teams to get better faster, this final section of the book will help all those teams coordinate and pull their oars in the same direction.

For each cycle, there are two chapters. The first chapter in each pair is an overview that guides you through the key ideas in each iterative improvement framework, and the second chapter provides hands‐on activities for you to try with colleagues. You can read the book from front to back, or you can flip through and look for the approach that seems best aligned with your current challenges. Hopefully, you'll try exercises from all three innovation cycles, and you can discover which one (or ones) work best for you and your colleagues for your particular role and context.

To introduce myself, let me tell you a little bit about the different phases of my career in education, and how I came to study and refine these three iterative approaches to innovation and improvement.

THE CYCLE OF EXPERIMENT AND PEER LEARNING

Part I introduces the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning, which describes the processes by which teachers experiment, learn, share, and grow. This model was my answer to a puzzle that plagued me in my first decade working with schools: Why do some schools get better very quickly, and others seem to be more stuck?

I started my classroom teaching career in 2003. When I applied for the job, the department head asked me if I could teach ninth‐grade world history. I told him that I never had before, but I promised to study up and be ready to teach the class by Labor Day. Then he told me that their ninth‐grade World History class was part of a special technology pilot program, where each classroom had a cart of wireless laptops in the corner of the room. They were blue and orange clamshell MacBooks—an iconic form factor from the early 2000s—and the school had an intranet program called First Class that did most of the things that Google Suite for Education does today from the cloud: messaging, collaborative documents, shared folders, and so forth. He asked if I could teach with these computers each day. I promised him that I could, though honestly, if he had told me there was a cart of bananas in the back corner of the class that I needed to use in class each day, I would have promised him that I could teach with those too. I really needed a job. (Traveling all over the country teaching wilderness medicine is fun, but not great for long‐term relationships.)

So, starting in 2003, I wasn't the very first, but I was certainly among the vanguard of US teachers with the opportunity to teach in a 1‐to‐1 laptop classroom, and I loved it. It was in the early era of the Internet, when museums, governments, and archives were rapidly digitizing their collections, and it was a transformational opportunity for history teachers. When I was a seventh‐grade student, my US History class had a primary source reader with 20 documents from the Mayflower Compact to the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and that was pretty much it for what we read in class. Fast forward to 2003, and my Internet‐connected class had millions and millions of sources that we could access on nearly any topic imaginable.

I had the very good fortune to teach with an entrepreneurial colleague, Tom Daccord, who also taught in the technology‐enabled classroom and realized that we were discovering teaching approaches that could benefit many other educators. So, we founded a side‐hustle consultancy called EdTechTeacher that worked with schools and districts to integrate technology in service of student‐centered learning. In the summers and after I left classroom teaching, I visited schools across the country and around the world, teaching workshops, observing classes, co‐teaching lessons, and working with school leadership teams.

Along the way, I enrolled in a doctoral program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I studied how schools adopted new technologies and how those new tools led to instructional improvements. As part of my research, I interviewed dozens of educators and school leaders, and I visited yet more schools—public, private, religious, and charter—in every corner of the country. I found many schools that purchased technology, and few where instruction really seemed to be systematically improving.

Many educators could describe to me the feeling of having new tech seemingly fall from the sky: smartboards that appeared in classrooms or laptop carts that suddenly rolled down hallways. In my hometown of Arlington, Massachusetts, one winter it didn't really snow, and the plowing budget got rolled into tablet computers. It precipitated iPads instead of snow.

Typically, these windfalls came with very little training (and nearly all of it about technical features, not meaningful pedagogy), leadership teams didn't offer much by way of mission or direction (“try it out!”), and teachers didn't receive additional time for planning, collaborating, or otherwise figuring out what to do with the new technology. In a handful of classrooms, teachers came up with some amazing new ideas, but in many places, not much happened. Smartboards became very expensive whiteboards; tablets became expensive notebooks, and school carried on as it had before. This somewhat bleak picture describes most of the schools that I studied and visited, but not all.

The Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning emerged from trying to describe how teachers learned, changed, and improved in those few schools where new technologies really led to better teaching across departments, grade‐level teams, and whole school buildings. In those schools, teachers conducted instructional experiments, reflected on what they learned, and shared their new lessons, strategies, and practices with their colleagues. Teacher‐led peer‐to‐peer learning was the lynchpin of iterative improvement. This posed a bit of a problem for my consultancy and the school leaders who hired us: only people inside classrooms could authentically lead the teaching experiments and the peer‐to‐peer learning that led to instructional improvement. But over time, I realized that while school leaders couldn't lead this vital process—much like teachers can't really do the learning for their students—they could create the conditions where experimentation and peer‐to‐peer learning can thrive. So, the Cycle of Experiment and Peer Learning is both a description of how meaningful instructional change actually happens in schools and a prescription for how school leaders can make this process of iterative improvement more efficient, more effective, and more joyful for educators.

DESIGN THINKING FOR LEADING AND LEARNING

After I finished my doctorate, it took me a few twists and turns to find myself as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where we have a small program that lets our undergraduate students (and some wonderful young future educators from Wellesley College) earn a certification to become secondary teachers in math and science. To continue my professional learning work with educators, I started a lab called the Teaching Systems Lab where we aspire to design, implement, and research the future of teacher learning. We work primarily on two problems: creating better online learning for educators and creating more opportunities for teachers to practice.

One bizarre feature of teacher education and teacher in‐service learning is that we rarely practice teaching. When teachers learn, they listen to people talk about teaching, and they discuss teaching, but they very rarely *do* teaching. Sometimes teachers have a chance to practice the preparation parts of teaching—designing lesson plans and activities and so forth—but a vital part of teaching is the improvisational interactions between teachers and students. Teachers almost never have the chance to practice these crucial interactions. So, a big part of the work in my lab is developing practice spaces: learning environments—inspired by games and simulations—where teachers can rehearse for and reflect on important decisions in teaching. I work with a terrific team of software developers, instructional designers, teacher educators, and measurement experts to build tools that provide the foundation for a more “practiceful” future for teacher education.

MIT is a wonderful place to learn about design. Across the whole university, I'm surrounded by engineers creating new inventions, scientists creating new processes, business school educators creating entrepreneurs, and digital humanists creating the future of the arts. Across our very different disciplines, we have a shared approach to human‐centered design: the process of understanding people's real‐world challenges and building new tools and practices to help solve those problems. Human‐centered design takes place in iterative cycles of discovering, prototyping, testing, refining, and sharing.

In 2014, Microsoft gave my lab a grant to develop online courses for a new platform called MITx, and they asked us to make one of those courses about design thinking in schools. I worked with a talented team of educators to refine everything I had learned about design at MIT into a toolkit that would be useful for K–12 educators: Design Thinking for Leading and Learning. Our approach had two “Ls,” leading and learning, because we envisioned two uses for design thinking in schools. First, classroom educators can use design thinking with their students for learning to help them develop the mindset for innovation, design, and change that my colleagues at MIT use every day to invent better futures. Second, educators can turn those same processes inward, and they can use design thinking to lead instructional change and improvement in schools. Design Thinking for Leading and Learning focuses on how teams can design, evaluate, and refine new instructional practices and routines to improve teaching and learning in schools.

There are two chapters in this book that describe the framework of Design Thinking for Leading and Learning and offer practical ideas for putting those ideas to use in your school or context. I also have some additional online resources to help you here. All of the materials from that online course—short documentary videos, explainers, activities, and more—are available at the MIT Open Learning Library (go to openlearninglibrary.mit.edu and search for “Design Thinking for Leading and Learning” or go direct to https://openlearninglibrary.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITx+11.155x+1T2019/about). I also have two online “workbooks” that provide complete walkthroughs of design thinking activities: a “starter” exercise about designing a morning routine or party for a friend, and then an exercise for leading school‐based learning design. Those workbook chapters are available as free downloads for you and your colleagues at www.wiley.com/go/iterate). For those readers who like a systematic overview of new things, you can read the book chapters first, and for those who like to jump right into the work, you might skip ahead to the activities in those workbooks.

THE COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION CYCLE

The Collaborative Innovation Cycle emerged from my many years of work with school leadership teams. Originally, EdTechTeacher focused on professional learning for teachers, but over time we realized that we could have a more powerful impact on schools if we also worked with school leaders. When Tom Daccord and I worked with schools, he'd run workshops about technology for teacher leaders, and I'd have a meeting with principals, deans, department heads, IT staff, and other administrators.

When schools make big investments in curriculum, technology, professional learning, or anything else, there are usually two ways that it can go. Sometimes dictates come down from on high, and teachers are told they need to adapt and change. “We've bought a bunch of computers,” say the leaders, “and you all need to figure it out.” Those kinds of initiatives often feel like something done to teachers, and they often are not well received. Even when the initiative involves things that could really help, it is very easy for innovation in schools to be perceived by teachers as “just one more thing.”

When I worked with school leaders, one of my main tasks was helping them set up new initiatives as something done with teachers, rather than to them. We'd identify ways to figure out what felt most important and most urgent to rank‐and‐file faculty, and then plan technology initiatives that were aimed at addressing those pressing challenges. In this framing, the new technology isn't just one more thing to do, but potentially a powerful tool for solving the problems that teachers care most about.

As I will remind you throughout this book, good design is always about balancing tensions. On the one hand, improving schools involves the very granular work of individual teachers trying new practices in their classrooms, and innovation in an advanced high school Mandarin class will look quite different from new reading instruction in a second‐grade classroom. However, if every teacher in a school or district pursues their own innovation agenda, the results are too diffuse to benefit everyone. When faculty agree on areas for shared focus, the sum of many classroom experiments is greater than the whole. The Collaborative Innovation Cycle is a set of ideas and practices to help school leaders iteratively guide their communities toward these shared focal areas.

Many of the ideas for the Collaborative Innovation Cycle were developed first for an online course that I taught with Peter Senge called Launching Innovation in Schools. The free courseware for that course is also available at the MIT Open Learning Library. You can go to openlearninglibrary.mit.edu and search for “Launching Innovation in Schools” or https://openlearninglibrary.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITx+11.154x+3T2018/about.

THREE PRINCIPLES FOR ITERATION

In our work together in the pages ahead, I ask you to make three big shifts in your thinking about how you can make teaching and learning better in your school, college, or workplace.

THINK IN CYCLES AND SPIRALS

First, when we imagine the future of our work, think about cycles and spirals instead of straight lines and linear narratives. School boards have five‐year strategic plans with beginnings, middles, and ends; teachers have pacing guides that go from September to June. Linear narratives shape all kinds of thinking in education, and we will reimagine those straight lines as spirals of improvement, with many iterative cycles of launching, evaluation, and tinkering. When we approach problems with linear thinking, we put finding problems at the beginning, developing solutions in the middle, and evaluation at the end. But often, we learn from developing solutions and evaluating them that we misunderstood the real problems when we started. Spirals of improvement let us regularly return to the framing of our problems as we design and test new solutions.

ACT IN SHORT DESIGN CYCLES

Second, let's make those design cycles as short as we can. The arc of school is so long: units take weeks, classes take months, schools take years, the system spans over a decade. It's incredibly hard to get better at something if you try it once in September and you don't get another shot at it until the next September. In one of our Teaching Systems Lab workshops, a novice teacher once said to us, “I used to think about whether I had a good lesson, now I'm thinking about whether I had a good minute of teaching.” Let's bring a bias to action to our work, and find more places in our educational work where we can try small things more quickly.

IMPROVE IN COMMUNITY

Third, let's invite lots of people to join those design cycles with us. School buildings are so strange in that we build walls such that each adult is in their own room alone. Learning alone is hard! Improving alone is hard! Instead of imagining the improvement of teaching as the solitary quest of individuals, think of improved teaching as a community endeavor. Students, colleagues, family members, and communities can all be involved in helping us implement short spirals of design, evaluation, and improvement. Be particularly attentive to how marginalized folks in our communities—families who have recently arrived in the United States, students who experience discrimination, folks who think and learn differently—can be powerful allies in creating better learning environments.

Lines to spirals, long schools to short cycles, individual improvement to community partnerships. When you figure out how to make iteration central to your teaching, you'll improve faster, your community will benefit from your improvements, and you'll find that teaching is more fun and more energizing. Hopefully, you'll become someone's best teacher ever. Let's get started.

A note on illustrations: All of the beautiful images, comics, and illustrations in this book are available for reuse and remixing under a Creative Commons CC:BY license, which means you can use them if you attribute them to the brilliant illustrator Haley McDevitt. We're hoping that as you finish the book, you'll decide to share what you've learned with your colleagues and students. If you develop slides, worksheets, or other resources for sharing and teaching, feel free to use the images, which you can find in a folder at haleymcdevitt.com/iterate.

Note

1.

Benjamin Erwin,

Creative Projects with Lego Mindstorms

(Addison‐Wesley Professional, 2001).