How to Take the First Step Towards a Local Change Coalition

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Audience: 1) changemakers working to get multiple institutions to collaborate within an ecosystem; 2) changemakers looking for a framework to redesign education to be 21st century-relevant; 3) changemakers designing processes to build cross-sector collaboration

Topic: Problems are often caused by global or national forces and trends. The work to create change, however, most often takes place at a local level. The story that follows tells about my work supporting a local community, Grand Rapids, MI, take a first step towards forming a change coalition.

Defining the Global Problem

Compared with the world for which our current preK-Gray systems were designed, we now live in a world where lifelong learning is both a reality and a necessity. In this world:

• the range of experiences, attributes, skills, and knowledge sought by learners or needed by institutions and employers is expanding;
• the range of contexts—formal and informal—in which they can be acquired is broadening;
• the technical skills and knowledge acquired are coming in smaller grain sizes (and are increasingly measurable);?
• the durable, adaptive skills and mindsets are in larger, broader grain sizes (and are increasingly measurable), and
• current institutional practices and systems are insufficient to capture this information.

These were the guiding stipulations for a recent convening of cross-sector stakeholders in the Grand Rapids, MI education ecosystem.?

Leaders from school districts, a community college, a four-year university, out-of-school learning programs, workforce, and foundations gathered to explore if and how they might act in relation to the problem framed above.?

Arriving at a Local Coalition to Tackle a (Partial, Manageable) Piece of the Problem

Conversations about redesigning education to better serve the needs of all learners often happen in national and international gatherings. The actual work of redesign, however, most often happens at the local level.?

This design sprint, convened by Steven Hodas , Executive Director of the GV NextEd Co-Lab , Philomena Mantella , the president of Grand Valley State University , and Kevin Polston , superintendent of Kentwood Public Schools , and designed and led by Steven and me, focused on what the people in the room could actually get done.?

If we look at the problem above through the lens of the Cynefin Framework (thank you David Tebo , Ottowa Area ISD), we see that it is complex: no clear single cause and effect, no right answers, many competing ideas, a need for creative and innovative approaches

Our work as conveners was to activate expertise to turn some part of the complex into the merely complicated so that the local community might assess the opportunity (and risk) involved in working together to develop a pilot solution for a piece of the problem.?

From Complex to Complicated

Capturing learning to meet the needs of present-day learners, institutions, the economy, and civic society is a scarily complicated problem. We narrowed the complicated down to four more manageable, analyzable chunks. Each chunk is sized to represent the amount of work it will take to develop a solution or solutions in that chunk. We chose to invert the triangle to emphasize that there was an opportunity to start at the bottom, in the smallest work area, to get things going. We called this the low hanging fruit strategy.?

Even as the world, the nation, and local communities explore, discuss, and test how to define what learning is needed to thrive in today’s and tomorrow’s changing world, even as pedagogy and assessment experiments launch, and new types of learner records get designed, we could pluck the easiest-to-reach apple. We could begin by building a ‘circulation system’ that could allow existing learning records, however flawed, to be controlled and shared by learners in some form of digital learning wallet.?

A First Step Towards A Learner-Centered Ecosystem

If a high school senior learns navigation and ecology at the Outdoor Discovery Center, successfully completes biology and statistics at Crossroads Alternative High School in Kentwood, and juggles a 15-hour/week job at Dominos, he should be able to send these achievements to Grand Valley State University in a simple way that lets them recruit him for their Geography Information Sciences (GIS) and Technology program.?

For this to happen, he needs control over his learning certifications, and each of the institutions involved needs to explore how they might need to do things differently for him to have this wallet in his smartphone.?

There already are versions of such wallets, so building the wallet and the technology around it isn’t the next-step problem.?

Rather, the next-step problem is building the circulation system itself and the institutional relationships and practices that would allow such a system to operate. The opportunity is to develop a local community that is learning to work together to implement a digital learning wallet. Happily (by design), anchor members of that community were in the room to assess the opportunity and the risk.?

K12 stakeholders assessed the doability (complicatedness) of the problem as a 3 on a scale of 1-5 where 5 was a Herculean effort. Higher ed folks rated it a 2, and out-of-school learning people thought it a 1. Workforce rated it a 0. Low hanging fruit won the day, and stakeholders from each of these institutional groups signed on to explore a pilot.

Why This Matters

Grand Rapids is one of the fastest growing areas in the Midwest. It’s exciting to see a local cross-sector initiative that’s exploring how to release some institutional control and autonomy to learners so more people can participate in and benefit from the region’s growth. We need many more of these local collaboration experiments if we want to simplify the complex problem described at the top. These experiments, connected to each other and learning from each other, will help us, in the language of the Cynefin framework, go from complex to complicated to clear.

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This is the first edition of Making Change. I ask you to share it with one of your changemaking co-conspirators — you know, that one person that cares as much as you do about how we make change happen. Thank you.