In “A Field Manual For a Whole New Education“, (FM) Goldberg and Somerville follow up on “A Whole New Engineer” (WNE, see my reflection) to present a more concrete plan for effecting institutional change. They propose the creation of an “innovation incubator” within one’s institution and a structured series of sprints to reflect on values, envision possibilities, design a restructured education, and plan implementation.
I will focus on the heart of the new content which is the change effectuation process. FM improves upon a weak spot in “A Whole New Engineer” by explicitly making the institutional change process open-ended and focusing more on the co-design aspects instead of simply how to build support for innovation. The most compelling insight from the book was the “ego distraction” of faculty on the institutional change team via beginning with desired values and affect of the educational setting. In Goldberg’s telling, professors are most attached to the curricular content but not the manner of delivery and structure around the content. By allowing professors to begin with the intended outcomes of student learning, the proposed ‘rebooting’ sprint structure avoids or minimizes conflict over curricular space to recast the focus on the joy of learning and creating.
The proposed sprint structure for educational change generally follows best practices for collaborative design in starting with values, user personas, and intended outcomes, proceeding to ideation, compressing to a cohesive solution, and then forming a plan for implementation. However, there is one aspect of the proposal which appears to me to be unjustified. Within the final sprint intended to ‘negotiate change’ and turn it into a concrete plan, the authors suggest reducing the size of the design team to a “negotiation team with two kinds of members, those who are concerned primarily with the risks of changing and those concerned with the risks of not changing” (178) so that the concerns of each are acknowledged and addressed. From my outside position not having worked on this specific kind of institutional change team, I am skeptical of what appears to be an explicit factionalization approach. There are many kinds of possible change within the curriculum content, structure, manner of delivery, institutional values, business model of education, or pattern of student engagement. Each team member may have different positions for or against the current state, or among a variety of new possible proposals. Even if the members adopt a perspective of negotiating “from interest” (creating mutual value) rather than “from position” (zero-sum negotiation), the framing is still adversarial rather than strictly collaborative. It seems unnecessary to create a ‘negotiation subteam’ and have members with explicit pro- or anti-change roles because it would then suffer from concomitant adversarial role-playing. Instead, all team members should evaluate proposals against the design goals, which are the student learning outcomes. Compare this to “A Generative-Evaluative Design Meeting Style” which does not have any adversarial framing. In terms of space devoted, this was a minor element of the proposal, but stood out as contrary to the spirit of collaborative design.
The other half of the change process is the creation of an innovation incubator or “respectful structured space for innovation”. The incubator encompasses the community interested in educational change, the physical space where they meet to discuss ideas, the model classes and pilot programs, and their shared conceptual vocabulary. The incubator as a long-running entity balances the proposed fixed-length sprint structure as a nexus for continuous improvement. The authors present the trade-offs of establishing this incubator before versus alongside the sprint process: a longer preparatory period helps to grow deeper roots of cultural change, but the structured sprints channel energy for innovation within an institution into concrete action. The description of this incubator was well-founded.
Having covered the major new content about change effectuation from Chapters 6-7, I will briefly summarize the remainder: Chapters 1-2 were mostly repeated content from WNE, with stronger emphasis on the need for “unleashing” student autonomy and motivation and sparking joy. Chapters 3-4 described a few valuable perspective or mindset shifts for educational change management, such as: seeking nuanced and balanced understanding of competing goals to avoid over-correction (“co-contraries”), adopting Dweck’s growth mindset, choosing incremental experiments to learn about new possibilities (“little bets”), and focusing on human advantages over machines such as emotion, intentionality, and comprehensive instead of narrow understanding. Chapter 5 covered the importance of attentively listening for the sake of understanding the other instead of listening merely in preparation to say one’s piece.
What was missing? The “Field Manual” would have benefited from many more field reports, particularly about attempts of educational innovation at a wider variety of institutions, and less cursory introduction of concepts that were described in depth in WNE. The authors briefly touched on alternative cost structures to higher education such as work-study, but did not introduce detailed proposals. Integrating joy, affect, and student “unleashing” into higher education is an admirable goal, but without progress on reducing costs, academia risks becoming more of a hindrance than a facilitator to learning, particularly in the rapidly evolving world of software.
Overall, FM is worth reading for Chapters 6 and 7 on change effectuation, and the rest is skimmable for someone who has already read WNE. Together, WNE and FM present a vision and an implementation plan for a new kind of human-centered education, but do not adequately grapple with the challenges of cost or speed of change required to stay technically relevant.
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