Tag: consultants

YOU SHOULD DO SOMETHING

I recently saw this video clip on Twitter of a young Steve Jobs talking to a room full of people.

Here’s an excerpt from the video:

How many of you are from manufacturing companies? Oh, excellent… Where are the rest of you from?

How many from consulting? Oh, that’s bad. You should do something.

No seriously, I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that… I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations… where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off… one learns a fraction of what one can… coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is… is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.

I love what Jobs says about taking responsibility for one’s recommendations and seeing a process through all the way to the end. It’s definitely apropos within the field of education. Consultants are helpful when they enter a school or district, share their point-of-view, explain how to make their recommendation work within the organization, and then stay until their implementation succeeds. Effective consultants sweat and bleed with administrators and teachers. They own what they preach.

Consultants who arrive, share a bit of what they know, and then leave aren’t inherently evil (as Jobs says), but they have no skin in the game when it comes to your organization. A consultant who becomes your partner and suffers the same scars as you is a sister or brother in the quest for improving student learning. And both of you learn an incredible amount of information together.

As always, it’s all about skin in the game.

Empower those around you, and everyone thrives

The large amount of online resources built to enhance student learning is staggering. There’s no dearth in what can be implemented. Instead, the hurdle to teachers adopting new best practices is actually trifold:

  1. Lack of time
  2. Lack of communication
  3. Lack of confidence

Time is a person’s most valuable resource. When dividing a day between eating, sleeping, being with loved ones, and earning money, it’s difficult to learn new things. Responsibilities pile up pretty quickly for adults, and this means less time to explore unfamiliar territory.

Communication has traditionally been poor throughout many schools and school districts. There are a myriad of reasons why this is. In my opinion, a major reason is because a lot of people feel more comfortable going it alone. Collaboration and transparency get the heart beating quickly–better to stay an island.

Confidence grows when you’ve had time to learn something and experience success. Some walk around with false bravado, but most of us appreciate exposure to new curriculum and technology before confidence and mastery appear.

I believe one of the best ways to enhance student learning is by giving teachers more time, better ways to communicate, and helping them gain mastery over technology (which, for me, is synonymous with curriculum) and instructional best practices so they are confident.

That sounds really nice, but how is this accomplished?

Professional development (PD) can initially be daunting and expensive, but every school district has the ability to build effective professional development sessions. Coordinators just have to start with one idea in mind: crowdsourcing.

It’s important to unpack “crowdsourcing” before moving forward. I’m using the word in the following way (my definition): “Contributing to the collective good by outsourcing work within your tribe so everyone benefits.” To crowdsource in education, you build capacity within fellow teachers who in turn create passionate edtech niches and share that passion and knowledge with everyone in their school or district.

Boom! That’s it. Instead of paying consultants to come in and blah, blah, blah about something teachers have heard over and over, pay teachers to seek out best practices, learn them, harness them, and share them with as many people as possible. The money is staying within the district and local community, and a sustainable network of motivated people can teach colleagues. (If you’re wondering about the nuts and bolts of this human infrastructure, check out what I wrote here.)

And don’t let this be forgotten: Motivated people are necessary because they continue learning. We need individuals who will learn, teach, learn again, teach, and so on because everything is in flux. The need for continual PD has never been so important, and there’s no way for one person to know everything. To create institutions of learning that actually foster learning, everyone needs to evolve. If you’re not getting stronger, you’re getting weaker. If you’re not learning new things, your knowledge base is dwindling.

Recently, my school district put the above into action. In one day we offered twenty-two 50-minute sessions taught by teachers within our school district. Attendees picked five of the sessions they thought would be the most helpful. We named the event PBVCon, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Why did a majority of teachers like it?

  1. They had time to choose their own path of learning. Autonomy is a powerful thing.
  2. They communicated with knowledgeable presenters with skin in the game, and they communicated with each other.
  3. Their levels of confidence grew. Perhaps not to an extravagant degree, but there was definitely an increase in the belief: “I can do this!”

Time, communication, and confidence. Crowdsourcing, which is just another version of the age-old technique called “jigsawing,” is the most powerful method schools and districts can adopt in order to help students.

Empower those around you, and everyone thrives.

Build up teachers by crowdsourcing

Consultants are used in many fields. Business. Politics. Sports. Education is no different–especially with the influx of devices pouring into school sites due to 1:1 deployments.

There’s nothing wrong with consultants; they’re helpful in many instances. I do believe, however, it’s important to keep two things in mind when hiring an edtech consultant:

  1. Hiring a consultant to teach a specific program may be necessary, but remember that edtech programs are in a nascent state, which means free apps may start charging, websites could go under, and better technology might be right around the corner. Paying someone to teach you something that may rise in price, disappear, or become inferior is a waste of money.

  2. Teachers within your school or district may end up being the best consultants you’ll find. As of right now, the only reason I’d pay a consultant is to help build capacity within a school district by making teachers mini-consultants. This is a form of crowdsourcing that allows school districts to continually curate the best edtech programs on the market, train teachers, and save money. We should be making edtech experts out of teachers by helping them find their niches. In this way, the overwhelming task of combing through all the available resources is made more manageable. In addition, teachers are empowered and invigorated to not only help students, but also fellow educators.

In my opinion, avoiding traditional consultants and building up teachers as experts is the most sustainable way to provide professional development and build capacity as we enter the era of the Brave New Classroom. I implore all educational leaders to look within to foster professional growth and student learning.