Too often in education we think of things as black or white.  A concept that Chris Wejr’s touched on quite nicely in his recent blog post “Avoid Binary Thinking. Go To The Grey”. He concluded his post with “The grey is where we find deeper reflective dialogue that helps create real change in education”, which really stuck with me.

We often believe (mistakenly) that there are only 2 concrete and completely opposite ways to move forward.  Often these two opposites boil down the following: stay on the current road that we know or jump on a path that we’ve yet to travel.

It’s the familiar vs. the unknown.

As human beings, we all have an innate tendency to feel safe, secure, and in control of our worlds.  It’s little wonder that we are so drawn to the roads that we already know. When we do decide to take a risk and take a left turn into the woods without our gps, it can be quite scary (especially when putting our blind trust in a gps can lead us right into a lake – see “Woman follows gps; ends up in Ontario lake”).  

Lately, I’ve been doing lots of thinking on change, and why is it that we find it so hard to make a shift to something new – even when we know it’s the right shift to make.  I think one of the major reasons is that we don’t see the true landscape of the change in front us.

Rarely are we actually choosing between two concrete pathways.  Instead we are often standing in an open field with multiple landmarks way off in the distance.

For example… There is a lot of conversation right now around grades and I often hear two opposing views emerge when talking with others. Do we go grade-less or continue giving letter grades?  The problem is this is not a black and white issue. There are infinite possibilities in between these polar opposite choices. We can look to involve students more in the assessment process. We can focus on shifting our balance of formative vs. summative assessments (a concept articulated quite nicely by Nanaimo Ladysmith Public Schools in their Communicating Student Learning Guidelines).  We can focus more on curating authentic evidence of student learning.

So how do we move forward when we’re standing in this open field of possibilities?

I believe it involves living in perpetual beta (a term I recently heard from Will Richardson) and operating in the span of our control.

Perpetual beta

Perpetual beta means taking a single step, and then looking up to see if we’re heading in the direction that we intended.  Take a step, calibrate, repeat…

Too often we get in conversations that go round and round and we never get to action.  Taking smaller steps and calibrating gets us way further than hypothesizing how to make change happen in one giant leap.

Span of our control

It’s not enough to just live in perpetual beta.  We must also concentrate in operating within the span of our control.

“If only I had more resources, more time, different students, better technology, etc.”

Focusing on things that are out of the span of our control often stalls us and pushes us to stay on the current road that we are on. Concentrating our thoughts and spending our time on items we can’t control often leaves us paralyzed and defeated.

Instead, ask yourself, “what is something we can do… something that is in our control?”

The ministry has mandated curriculum, reporting guidelines and more.  But instead of worrying or focusing on that, lets focus our efforts on items that are fully in our control, such as designing relevant, real-world experiences for our students. In the end, this type of focus will actually support us in making the big overall shift in our redesigned curriculum in BC. Every small step in perpetual beta brings us closer to those significant shifts we are seeking in education today.

Living in perpetual beta and within the span of our control means we can constantly ask ourselves, “what’s one step we can take that we believe will help us move towards the learning we are truly wanting to design for our learners?”  It also means asking ourselves “what’s one thing we can stop doing that’s taking up our time and effort and is not moving us towards where we want to be?”

I invite you to take a step that’s in your control.  Reflect. And take another step that’s in your control.  This is the heart of perpetual beta.