St. Luke's Center For Leadership

If you had the choice, what would YOU want to learn about?

That’s one way to frame the question being put to our students this week as we get ready for Friday’s experiment with a day of “UnSchool.”  It’s an important one to consider in the context of today’s changing world – new opportunities, new disciplines, new ideas, and new challenges are opening up to us more rapidly than we can properly assimilate them in many ways.  NAIS President Pat Bassett argues that more change has occurred to the traditional model of education in the last 10 years than in the previous thousand.

How do we prepare students for jobs that don’t exist right now?  How do we equip them with the tools to navigate oceans of information, of “content,” of more facts and figures than any one person could ever hope to master in one lifetime? Continue Reading

It’s happening: UnSchool is going to be a reality.

I wrote about it earlier this year, setting it down as a crazy idea that would be really cool to pull off but that would need a lot of things to fall into place first.  Well, they have!  A colleague mentioned to me last week that they thought bringing the unconference model to our weekly faculty meetings was one of the two or three best things that has happened this school year.  There’s no question in my mind that the success of those couple of mornings really paved the way for us to consider devoting an entire morning to… whatever our students and teachers decide we want to!

Here’s our schedule for the morning:

8:00-8:05 Attendance Check-in with Advisory

8:05-8:45 Organizational meeting in the Dining Commons (ground rules, session proposals)

8:45-9:25 Session I

9:25-9:45 Re-Group in the Dining Commons (sharing, more session proposals)

9:45-10:25 Session II

10:25-10:45 Re-Group in the Dining Commons (sharing, final proposals)

10:45 11:25 Session III

11:25-11:55 Conclusion – Dining Commons

We recognize that this is a grand experiment of a great idea in theory that may prove horribly unworkable in practice, so we also built in a safeguard to the day:  a “Reset” button.  If it becomes clear that good things are not happening (rowdy behavior, everyone hanging out instead of going to sessions, etc.), we’re prepared to announce over the intercom that the UnSchool day is over and it’s time to get back to “regular” school, and report to our regular classes.

I think the reset idea has given us some peace of mind as we teachers and administrators contemplated the experiment, but what has given me even more peace of mind are the awesome ideas I’m hearing kids propose since we first announced the idea.  More to come on that tomorrow… stay tuned for details!

Well, we did it.

The first annual St. Luke’s Rube Goldberg competition took place last Friday, and after an amazing journey of invention and adaptation, teamwork and and ingenuity, the final product turned out even better than we had hoped.  And I’m just talking about the judging and organizing!

The competitors themselves?  Sooooo impressive.  Over a dozen teams actually crossed the finish line, out of an initial registration field of 32 teams, and the machines that made their way onto the AC floor that day were truly phenomenal.  From 5th graders to parents, families to homerooms, chemical reactions to human interactions, the sheer variety of creativity on display made for an extremely fun kickoff to Spring Weekend.  We crowned a winner, yes, but every single team distinguished themselves in the process!

I’ve already heard from many students, teachers, and parents eagerly seeking confirmation that we’ll be doing this again next year.  You bet we will.

There are times during the school year when I have to sit back, take a deep breath, and let an enormous smile of gratitude and amazement shine forth as I contemplate what an amazing school community I belong to.  Consider the following forms of learning on display this week:

Open-ended goal, with a rigidly structured solution:

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Last week’s Lunch & Lead series brought us a visit by Craig Steinke, of Sterling Investment Partners.  Craig might best be described as a “turnaround artist,” someone brought in to act as or advise the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of a company in order to help it grow, or sometimes arrest a decline.  His challenge to our students:  Imagine being a CEO.

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How talented are you (or your teammates)?  How much does it matter?

Turns out, the answer to the second question is far more important than the first, and most often answered incorrectly.  At least, that’s the conclusion of Charlie Pellerin, and he has made it his business to study such things.   Why, you might ask?

Charlie was the former director of astrophysics for NASA, and thus the man who got the call when it was discovered that the Hubble Space telescope, launched after an investment of 15 years and $3billion… simply didn’t work.  This was unfathomable in an organization such as NASA, which employed the most brilliant technical minds available.  How could they possibly have gotten it so wrong, so clearly, when their job is to get it right to the most minute level of precision imaginable?

Charlie found that it really came down to an issue of leadership – specifically, to the type of climate and social context leaders create for their team members to operate in.  When leaders focus on individual abilities, rather than how those individuals interact with one another, they’re focusing on the wrong factors.  In his research, ability determines only about 10% of success;  social context determines 70 to 80%, by contrast.

So remember Charlie’s story, and pay attention to your teamwork more than your talent!

Do you think of yourself as a brand?

You should, says our last Lunch & Lead visitor, Nancy DeViney.  It was a particularly valuable message coming from someone who is a 37-year veteran of IBM, which at $69 billion is the second most valuable brand in the world.  So what constitutes your own personal brand, and how do you go about consciously developing it?

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Science Department chair Mike Mitchell and I made a guest appearance on the blog of St. Luke’s Head of School Mark Davis, as part of the kickoff to the first annual Rube Goldberg Challenge:

With at least a dozen teams signed up to compete so far, it looks like we’re going to have a great time on Friday April 27th – hope you’ll join us!