I realize it might be poor etiquette to clip and post nearly the whole text of the recent Google Blog entry titled “Our Googley Advice: Major in Learning,” but in light of what I am charged with helping to create lately, these skills and the messages that define them really hit home.  The highlights are my own.

At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving
skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a
matter of course. After all, that’s what most education is concerned
with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create
competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative
thought and tenacity.

… analytical reasoning.
Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a
decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk
about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

… communication skills. Marshaling and understanding the available evidence isn’t useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

… a willingness to experiment.
Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no
formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of
treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment
analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a
willingness to accept the evidence even if you don’t like it.

… team players.
Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need
to work well together and perform up to the team’s expectations.

… passion and leadership.
This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning
languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase
Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you
do.

These characteristics are not just important in our
business, but in every business, as well as in government,
philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming
generation is how to acquire them. It’s easy to educate for the
routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many
required skills will change: developers today code in something called
Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for
reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most
challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.

in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are
not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your
success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free
market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

I read that and thought of the possibilities that lay ahead for us, and the ideas we have yet to have.  I get excited at the prospect of a whole life filled with change and refinement of thought–how can we do this better?  What about what we are already doing works well and can be translated to new situations?  What should we leave behind?

Nevertheless, as we returned from BLC and came back to our realities of working within a strict system, we began to have some doubts about the differences we can make.  Looking through our notes I pulled this one from Ewan’s keynote:

All mankind is divided into three groups: those that are immovable,
those that are movable and those that move. — Benjamin
Franklin

And the coup de grace:

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing
new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down
new paths.–Walt Disney

I started thinking about this Disney quote (we watched Meet the Robinsons last night) and thinking about an opening day with staff speech.  Can you weave this into the message that you give to you staff on opening day?  Would it not move them to higher action.  Unfortunately (I should watch what I say) I don’t have that responsibility this year, but if I did, these messages would be interwoven into what I would deliver.  We always need to be moving forward, and we need to remember how to learn.

“We should see ourselves as all being in research and development.”

That line, or something strikingly close to it came from Ewan McIntosh’s keynote address last Wednesday at BLC.  It’s not the first time I had heard a speaker ask that we all focus on our own development, or transforming our classrooms into teacher-researcher laboratories, but it was the first time where I heard it as an administrator.  Oddly enough, just the semantic shift in title changes the meaning behind McIntosh’s statement for me.  In our notes, a few of us remarked about the statement, and later on in the day I took it upon myself to synthesize some of the bigger ideas we had all been having in our debriefings at dinner.  Here is what I came up with for the R and D idea:

Teachers as researchers: one of the things we all see the need for is to create a culture in our buildings where our teachers see themselves, to quote McIntosh, as “in research and development.”

1. What makes that happen in your school?
   one of the things I keep thinking about personally is the use of pilot programs that last only a few months.
   1. Screencasting: ask teachers to incorporate Eric Marcos “kids teaching kids” methods for 3 months and then have the selected teachers share their experience with other teachers in their building.
   2. Promote open collaboration between classrooms within the building and around the nation/world through getting the teachers into other rooms to observe, and through connecting our teachers with others outside the U.S.  Have them pitch their idea to the building principals, execute the plan, and have them present their product to the staff.
   3. Showing teacher work and student work off
      1. there is a theme running through a lot of the workshops here that incorporates the idea that we should promote the teachers that “get it.”
      2. Which teachers get it, and I don’t mean technologically only, but which teachers will look at something new and attack it, refine it and make it their own?  Find them and ask them to show how they do it.  Do this often.
      3. Let students show teachers how things work.  Have you heard Alan’s quote: “always bring a student to a technology conference?”  Let students show their teachers what they are actually capable of (from Eric Marcos’ presentation, and Ewan’s keynote: “-Give a button to a teacher and they ask what to do with it, give a button to a kid and they play with it and discover“
   4. District-wide PD conference
      1. We have been sitting in workshops for a day now and at some point or another we have all remarked that we have teachers doing this or doing that.  Can we pull them together and run our own “in-house” conference?
      2. The willing and able can present what they do to the rest of the staff and we go from there.
   5. School-wide or grade-wide Custom search engines
      1. we can use Google Custom Search to enable teachers to create their own search engines based on the links they already provide to the students for research.  They can still limit content to the sites they want, but it is an incredible time saver if all of the staff combines their resources into one search engine.
      2. It gives them exposure to the collaborative nature of the web.
   6. Everyone is in R and D.

I’ll be brutally honest here: I went to BLC not wanting another tool to add to my belt (although I did get a few); I wanted answers to questions from teachers who don’t see value in change.  I wanted to be able to return and say, “look, here is my magic bullet, and it’s wireless.” Truthfully, I set myself up for some disappointment, but I did walk away with several fantastic ideas worth taking action on immediately.

Among other things, I realized, thanks to a few pushes, that it’s time to get out there and share what we’re doing here.  Not that it’s earth-shattering, but we have inertia, and I think that might be valuable to some people.  We have been pushing and pulling on what we know and understand about teaching and learning there, getting a lot of feedback from our staff, and it’s time that we also looked at ourselves as researchers and developers.  What better lesson in humility than to fail in public and try again?  I think we are ready for what’s next.

Image Credit: “Comfortable Research,” from Joel Bedford (formerly J.A.L.E.X.)’s photostream

I only just announced the new authors to this blog, saying that there were another 2-3 people I wanted to have on here very much and I can already announce 2 of them, that’s how fast things go indeed.

So first you will see Geert Desager here as well as part of the authors. Geert is a Microsoft colleague who is now in charge of Trade Marketing in South-East Asia and traveling through the region pretty much all the time. Geert is also the man behind ‘Bring The Love Back’ a little movie that traveled the world itself as well.

And then I’m also very happy to say that Ewan McIntosh will write some of his travel experiences on this blog… and Ewan is probably the one who travels most of all of us. We’ve only met in real life 3 times – in Antwerp, Paris and Geneva

Great to have all these frequent traveler buddies on here. Hope you’ll enjoy ‘the ride’. Don’t forget to read these people’s own blogs as well, as they rock.