The Disruption Percentage

I’ve been thinking about the right balance of learning and performance at work. Or the balance of disruption and consistency of action, or of painfully self-aware norm-forming and happy living within established norms.

I say disruption because I think significant learning–adaptive, as opposed to technical–is disruptive. Especially at work. At some level you are re-thinking an assumption, a rule, an understanding, a belief, and while you are in between the old rule and the rule you replace it with, you are uncomfortably aware of two alternate interpretations of the world, and you can’t float along with autopilot engaged, as we all prefer.

This disruption isn’t that big a thing when you’re in school. On the one hand, you’re used to it, because you’re reforming rules constantly. On the other, you’re not that far away from your early years, when your whole existence was a messy and constantly discombobulating attempt to understand what was going on around you. And the school environment reinforces you. You’re learning things with a peer group. You’re helped by an expert who’s led people your age through the ideas you’re facing time and again. All your time is essentially set aside for you to learn, and society is happy with you doing it. But perhaps most importantly, there’s a certain philosophical remove from what you’re learning. It isn’t yet you. Whether you really get Moby Dick or Astrophysics isn’t going to deeply affect what you think about yourself and who you are and threaten whether you can pay your mortgage and send your kids to school.

Not so at work. Here learning is harder and more disruptive, because what you’re learning is a sapper’s tunnel to your identity. The rules and norms and behaviors and beliefs that are changed in workplace learning are linked to our image of ourselves as professionals, to our sense of belonging to a social group, to our belief in our power to influence people, to protecting ourselves from shame, and then through the transverse theory of the paycheck, they’re linked as well to our sense of financial and familial stability. Our workplace norms in a sense pay our mortgages, put food on the table, get us a Bosch dishwasher, etc. These thoughts are all connected in one big constellation of dark matter stars, and it’s a way we deal with living in an uncertain world.

If you start to question workplace beliefs and rules, you trigger this system. “If what I have been doing,” people will think to themselves on a certain level, “and what people around me have done for years, and what I painfully learned the hard way to do, etc., isn’t totally right, then . . . uh oh . . . I might not be able to do the new thing expected of me,, I might loose face in the workplace, I might loose influence over the world around me, I might be exposed to shame, I might not be able to pay my mortgage, I might not be able to get food, and there goes the Bosch dishwasher, etc . . .”

That’s what I mean when I say learning is disruptive, especially at work.

But of course we have to learn. To change, to adapt. As individuals, as teams, as organizations, as a society. In a world of constant flux, that is the one constant, everyone is agreed. You can either figure out a way to activate or initiate your own learning and change in some controlled and regulated system, like a prescribed burn, or you can wait and have external change, which you can’t control, wash over you like a tsunami, or wildfire.

The idea of the learning organization is basically the former–instead of thinking that we can achieve a stable state, to refer to Donald Schon’s book Beyond the Stable State, we accept that our context is always changing, and we try to find and bake in ways to help ourselves constantly and consistently learn and change. If external change obligations come along, fine, we’ll take advantage of them; if not, we won’t sit around eating pistachios, we’ll concoct our own internal change obligations.

So given that learning and change at work are disruptive and highly anxiety-provoking, how do you do that? How do you manage to do them regularly, consciously, intentionally? Clearly you can’t change everything everyone is doing or question everything everyone is believing all at once. Without some amount of consistency of behavior and expectations, the organizational identity dissolves. We don’t know why we’re here and what we’re doing. Chaos ensues.

I like Edgar Schein’s idea. The leader of the learning organization, he says, in my beloved chapter 20 of Organizational Learning, has to simultaneously assuage his team’s anxieties and prompt people to learn and change in some particular area. “We’re ok in general, but in this little bit, we need to do something differently,” she would say. We have to, that is, finesse a kind of propping up of the existing norms, while we rewrite some of them. It’s about a balance, or a percentage. We have to reinforce our status quo in, say 80% of our work, while we help people deconstruct and reform the status quo in the other 20%. It’s like a rolling blackout, but it’s not a blackout, it’s a spotlight.

But what would the right percentage of learning–the disruption percentage– be? I think the 80/20 rule probably works just as well as any other. I come at it from the opposite angle–If you take the reciprocal of work, when we’re learning full-time, in college, say, and you look at the ratio of learning to performance, you come up with something close to the 80/20 rule reversed. The average college student, say, works 10 hours a week, and has four classes, each roughly 10 hours a week, when you add up class time and homework. That’s a 20/80 work/learn rule, and we can induce from it that full-time work could be the opposite and do OK. In addition, it’s the percentage Google has seized upon in its famous workplace learning initiative.

Of course you’ll ask, percentage of what? Of time, of units worked, of number of work “categories”? I think you can use whatever metric you settle on with your team to organize what you do. It’s a rule of thumb, after all.

The point is to be humble in the breath and scope of your norm-changing initiatives, but be bold in the consistency and continuousness which which you inexorably promote them.

Being Creative Together

Have just read Min Basadur’s article “Leading others to thinking innovatively together: Creative leadership,” in The Leadership Quarterly 15 (2004). It’s interesting!

Basadur suggests that the big task before all of us in this global, fluid, disruptive age is to manage our organizations for adaptability rather than for efficiency (the traditional focus). Adaptability requires being creative together. We’re not good at being creative together, however; says he: “the attitudes, behaviors, and skills necessary for creative thinking are underdeveloped in many people” (106).

There is fortunately an easy-to-understand creativity life-cycle or process that’s made of four stages, each with its own kind of thinking, and people, it seems, orient to one of these stages by preference (111). The stages are Generating, Conceptualizing, Optimizing, and Implementing (112). (Which, I note, seem to generally correspond to the Learning Cycle and areas of brain processing; see my previous post on the topic.)

The problem is that, not knowing the different phases of creation, nor their preference for one or the other, people generally jumble all the phases together, achieve naught, and annoy each other.

Basadur describes the kind of meeting this leads to as “undisciplined discussions where facts, ideas, points of veiw, evaluations, action steps, and new problems are interjected randomly” (110). The person oriented to optimize, which calls for “rational, systematic, and orderly analysis” of a project-moving-towards-implementation, for instance, is not open to the incomplete and weird ideas unleashed by the person oriented towards generation (I have that orientation, for the record), who uses engagement with the world, emotions, empathy, and other unpredictable things to concoct “problems, opportunities, and projects that might be worth solving” (112, emphasis mine).  This of course, leads to the famous “how to kill ideas” situation, which Basadur describes as an insufficiency in the basic creativity-thinking skills of “deferring judgment, keeping an open mind, and thinking divergently” (106).

On a side note, Basadur aligns with Chris Argyris in seeing defensive reasoning as another block to creativity: people, says Basadur, “wait for others to find problems for them to solve,” (108); avoid “unsolvable” or cross-functional problems (108); desire to be seen as “practical and economical above all things,” and thereby tend to shut down strange new ideas (106); and “get mired in arguments about functional issues to protect their ‘turf’” (110)–all different ways of prioritizing political safety over productive thinking and creativity. Not good in an age of change.

The way to slash through all this is simply to help people with process.  A leader who knows the phases of creation can act as a creative “process coach” (111) making sure the group knows and honors the phase they’re in and uses and appreciates the particular cognitive skills the phase requires (106).  A good process-focused leader can even go so far as to predict the kinds of help individuals would need based on their orientation, and be prepared to supply that. Such a leader helps the strong optimizer, for instance, “discover new problems and facts.” In my own case, my creatively-oriented leader would help me (the generator) “convince others of the value of [my] ideas and push [me] to act on them” (116).

Importantly, Basadur notes that the highest-performing teams include a representative mixture of people orienting to the four phases of creation (115). But he also notes that people tend to gravitate towards people of like orientation, such that work teams and even professions tend to be made up of one dominant orientation (117). AND he notes that people report higher satisfaction in teams where they’re with birds of a feather (115). So there’s some natural resistance to be overcome: the leader has to consciously combine people with different orientations and help them work together; the diverse team “may experience more frustration initially” but “will achieve more breakthrough results as they learn to mesh their styles” (117).

There are some work-related processes that probably don’t fall under creation (maintenance of existing functions), but these seem less important now than in static environments of years past; Basadur’s model seems helpful for a wide breath of challenges we face at work, and should make up part of any workplace’s ethos. Thinking about the normal flow of creative–or cognitive–process  in the development of ideas and initiatives, and seeing our own orientation towards phases within that process seems particularly helpful.

The Box, The Trellis, and the Marketplace

We invited community members to come talk about about IT Governance and help us figure out the right way to go about it in our school. As I was listening to the conversation, it occurred to me there were two ways to look at it.

For the record, IT Governance refers to a structured process for campus-wide decision-making about IT policies and services. Like what your LMS is, or how long you should wait before your desktop computer is refreshed, or whether your department or a central unit pays for your copy of Chem Draw Ultra 12.0. When governance works, everyone knows what the campus IT policies are and how decisions are made, and everyone feels she or he can have input into the decision-making process. Even if a particular decision didn’t go your way, you at least know the reasoning behind the decision.

IT Governance as a Box

When you first hear of things like “governance” or “committees” or “organizational structures,” you might tend to think of them as restrictive, top-down organs of control. Your lizard brain throws up images perhaps of misty, star-chamber-like, inscrutable rooms and byzantine processes issuing strange unilateral edicts that are action-oriented and constraining, and focus on products, stress “implementation” and “projects,” and use mysterious jargon that makes you feel like there’s something you’re supposed to know but you don’t.  Things that seem safely removed from the more organic ebb and flow of your daily life, yet there’s a nagging anxiety in the back of your mind that the decisions might sort of pop up at the 11th hour and disrupt what you’re working on—you might discover, that is, that a new presentation software became the campus standard the night before you’re set teach using your well-tried PowerPoint deck, and it no longer works, and now you look crazy in front of your class, etc.

This dread vision is what you might call IT Governance as product-oriented instead of people-oriented. As a system that limits decision-making for efficiency’s sake to a few people, doesn’t include everyone, doesn’t allow for a lot of input, and doesn’t really seek to understand what people do on a daily basis and what their needs are. It’s not about helping people grow; on the other hand, it constrains, no matter how well-intentioned it is, as a box might. I have to admit such an image popped up in my own head at one point, but there’s another way to view IT Governance.

IT Governance as a Trellis

As part of our conversation, we looked at such other IT Governance processes as were easily available on the web. Some systems of decision-making out there are (as you might suspect) amazingly complex; some are less so. Significantly, though, many have features that do not fix the star chamber model. For example, Western Carolina University calls IT Governance an ongoing conversation, that “will occur not just within the governance meeting structure.” Salem State University’s IT Governance web site takes the time to explain the various “sources” of project ideas, which can come through formal channels or even “casual conversation between department heads” (and hopefully other people, too . . . ). The University of Texas at Austin lists the six cardinal values imbued in their governance process, and “transparency” and “communication” top the list.

A conversation? Something that allows for sharing of ideas between equals, that could happen in a formal setting, or in an informal setting? Among anyone? Emphasis on the messy beginnings of new ideas, lurking on the edges of existing projects, that might come from anywhere? Unabashed promotion of communication and transparency? This all suggests a desire to admit a constant stream of destabilizing novelty (or what I call an Information Sluice)! The opposite of the bureaucratic sublime. That’s a governance process that includes people as they are, in their actual walks of life, and invites their input. That’s a governance process that has change and growth built into it, a structure like a trellis, that allows for a plant to bloom in the new, vertical dimension. Not a black box.

IT Governance as a Marketplace

My local community is headed in this direction, too. When we talked about what we want to achieve with our IT Governance structure, the primary idea expressed was “more communication.” “We don’t know what’s going on,” “there needs to be a better way to talk to each other than email,” and “we need people who can serve as nimble liaisons negotiating agreement between areas of disciplinary knowledge and areas of technical knowledge,” were the kinds of things we said.

And we decided that to help with this communication we need a “marketplace,” or an easy way to know what everyone else is doing and see what solutions and problems other people are creating and dealing with. So that we can better build on and integrate our various local initiatives, instead of creating new, parallel, redundant, isolated projects. Such a marketplace, we thought, should be easy to search and easy to add to.

This marketplace sounds a bit like the kind of “ideation platform” or “idea stock market” I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Sounds a bit like the Internet itself, in fact, used as a metaphor of facile connectedness, of grass-roots, horizontal, non-bureaucratic engagement, with low-threshold entry requirements, applied retroactively unto the world itself, the child teaching the parent.

IT Governance as Email Fixer

Just a thought about email, which we thought was the kind of thing IT Governance could help us change. I think it’s a commonplace that our current use of email is less than satisfying, seeing that it is co-opted by everyone for every kind of communication: official institutional pronouncements, lightweight invitations to lunch, your mom to check in on you, your department to remind you about an upcoming talk, to let you know your water bill payment went through, to ask you to come to the PTA meeting that night, to share the project management charter, to ask your boss for time off, to tell you to check in for your flight, not to mention the inundation of unsolicited business-related emails, spam, etc. There’s so much crazy stuff in there opening the inbox is like our own personal version of Fibber McGee’s hall closet gag.

Email is a social problem as well as a technological problem. One where we have to talk to each other and agree on the parts to fix and try things out and adjust those things and ask ourselves to honor new conventions of behavior and give ourselves feedback on how we’re doing and so forth: pieces both mechanical and behavioral, individual and communal. Now if IT Governance can help that to be fixed (as we seem to think it can), that’s a different kind of governance. That’s not about circumscribing behavior. That’s a way to identify and heal problems that go deeper and broader than technology, that’s a meta-view on the way we live life and talk to each other, that’s about finding well-being together wherever we can, that’s about community, that’s about getting issues out into the open, that’s about being vulnerable and trusting each other, that’s the kind of thing that makes life worth living. That’s the kind of IT Governance we need.

Whither Higher Education? 16 Ideas.

Whither higher education in the global, digital, flat world of today and tomorrow? It’s the cocktail party conversation topic du jour. My pick of 16 thoughts on the subject:

1. We’ll Pay to Be Members: Education will be seen as something you pay for regularly, before and after you draw on it, like life insurance or a membership to a benevolent society or tithes to a church; although there won’t be an “after”–in the future we’ll never stop learning;
2. Disaggregated Learning Bits: The “feel” of participating in higher education will be disaggregated, with much more involvement of crowd-sourced-like components and entrepreneurial thinking (and perhaps funding), in which people in all walks of life will play equal parts (as in Jim Groom’s “proto-MOOC” which is both in and outside of a university);
3. Control to the Students: Students will have a greater role in shaping and selecting the components of their education; course catalogs will take on the dynamic feel of stock markets or some other wide-scale selection and value-confirming interface; students will be allowed to drop and add components as they feel they should; students will write components that other students use; students may even sometimes teach teachers; and that’s OK because of number 4, below;
4. More Sophisticated Learners: Students will be much more sophisticated about how learning works and more aware of their own learning (we’ll encourage this with “how to learn” structures of all kinds), so they’ll be much more thoughtful in the selection and creation of their educational components, more conscious of whether they’re learning or not, and much more demanding; they’ll move away quickly from things they don’t like; also they’ll be of every age and culture and life experience;
5. End of Bankers Hours: Hours of synchronous instruction, where it remains, will spread across the clock and will include times 16 – 32 year olds are mentally active (midnight to 4 am) as well as times the rest of us are; the work day for staff and faculty will be replaced by widely distributed work-chunks popping up throughout the calendar and clock;
6. Faculty and Staff Will Phone It In: Faculty and staff will increasingly work from home and spend minimal time on campus, and that’s good, because we’ll be able to draw on a greater variety of people, and have access to wider skills, and people will be able to live where they want (like among beautiful grasslands) and still work for schools elsewhere (like in the city); where I talk about the end of the four-year student residency below, I also mean the end of the life-long residency for many faculty and staff;
7. Work and Learning will be Similar: It will be less easy to distinguish education from work and vice-versa (and that’s good, in that we’re retraining the entire workforce to be effective in the digital, flat, global age, even as we’re training students to be similarly effective); and there’s a lot both work and formal learning can learn from each other; and people will be shifting in between each mode constantly;
8. On-sites are Brief and Intense: Residential experiences will only happen at key points–bookends, or for particular parts of a sequence, but won’t be constant throughout the learning cycle, which will let us move many more people through the campus, as through a hotel or a resort and give more access to a campus experience to more people; it’s the end of the four-year residency. But don’t worry: you can still get that community feeling from brief stints: remember summer camp?;
9. It’s About the Culture: More emphasis will be placed on creating and assessing the “culture” that supports and surrounds learning (this will complement our focus heretofore–on learning as a thing that happens in the head of the student); this means more investment in (and assessment of) faculty and staff learning and more attention to community-enriching things like faculty-student interaction studies or assessments of workplace dynamics; we’ll consciously try to craft a “learning organization” (or Argyris “Model 2″) culture in our schools and workplaces;
10. Roles Will Be Fluid: There will be less differentiation between what have been seen as fixed roles: most staff will have some greater hand in instruction; students will increasingly teach each other (through tutoring, etc); and faculty may even play student-like roles more happily; instruction will be seen as a collaborative partnership of multiple people;
11. Massive Retraining Will be the Norm: We’ll be constantly ready to retrain all staff and faculty at a moment’s notice in the various new processes and forms dictated by shifting market conditions and incessant innovation;
12. We’ll Cultivate Ideas: We’ll see our own internal creativity and ideas as perhaps the key component of long-term institutional success and we’ll build systems and cultures to support, generate, and encourage ideas, the testing of new models, entrepreneurial thinking, innovation laboratories, etc.;
13. We’ll Share with Other Schools: We always said we would, but now we really will–collaborate with other schools. In shared infrastructure (LMS, Information Systems, shared skill positions, shared risky innovation environments) and in shared academics (you offer French and we’ll offer Greek), but we’ll try to keep a wrapper of core institutional identity around the things we offer and do;
14. Feelings Will Guide Us: We’ll describe a certain kind of institutional “feeling” that should exist in the learning that happens under our auspices, and this will be the thing that we’ll use to vet new structures and courses, which are likely to be formally radical;
15. We’ll Analyze Stuff: We’ll make much more use of Learning Analytics and Corpus Linguistics sorts of real-time analyses and dashboards to better understand (in meaningful ways) how our students learn and to adjust our pedagogy in response (and we’ll share these analyses with the students themselves);
16. We’ll Archive Everything: We’ll invest significantly in the infrastructure that archives and retains (and makes analyzable) the intellectual record of the institution–and we’ll interpret this “record” broadly, to include conversations, written work, emails, course syllabi.

Pieces of an Ecology of Workplace Learning

Lately I’ve been saying that you should cultivate learning in your organization as you might manage an ecological resource, like a forest, or any other complex system of high priority (like your computer network or your budget). As if learning were a “cognitive enterprise infrastructure” or worked like a kind of water cycle. But how would you do that, and what would it be like, and how would it be different than what you do when you think of your workplace as a kind of machine that consistently produces material stuff? I am not totally sure, but here I take a guess at nine possible pieces of an ecology of workplace learning.

1. Cultivate Development, Rather Than Manage Performance. The point is not to manage people’s performances, but rather to get them to develop as much as they can, on the assumption that more highly evolved people do better things. The annual performance review that tracks behaviors against rather limited metrics and has a kind of binary output (wrong or OK) here evolves into something more like a coaching relationship in an experiential context: growth is the focus, not proscription. You look for activities that are motivating to the individual, that are a bit out of their comfort zone, yes, and you expect to support them in iterative cycles of trying things out, reflecting, adapting, and trying them out again. And you might add a variety of unheard-of supports and activities to help people think and reflect and be aware of themselves in a variety of dimensions, drawing on things from personality styles assessments to mentoring relationships to counseling-like activities, such as item 2, below. The trick is that these things, that we kinda do now in a knee-jerk way, away from work, would be more like the work.
2. Support Cognitive Development. According to the work of Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey (whom I talk about a lot), we evolve through a series of increasingly sophisticated ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us. That is, we can so develop, if given the right environment. And with this increased epistemological sophistication comes a better ability to deal with and thrive in complex environments. One such complex environment is the increasingly global, flat, multi-cultural, resource-starved, post-ideological, environmentally-challenged, a-traditional, scary world of today. To help people be effective in this kind of world requires activities that help us know differently; Kegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change coaching process is one such structure. Having done it myself, I am amazed by its ability to make you reinvent the way you think about yourself and the world in which you engage; I fairly salivate to try it with a team of colleagues in a workplace. The downside? It’s an intensive, six-month process of bi-weekly meetings, invoking much deep personal questioning; that’s a huge investment. But in an ecology of workplace learning, invest in people is what you do: no rain means no rivers means no seas means no evaporation means no rain, etc.
3. Assess Development in New Ways. In Higher Education we try to assess student learning, and it’s a challenge. But we don’t even try to assess faculty and staff learning; and the generic workplace doesn’t generally assess staff learning, either. But we should.  To promote development over production, we have see where this development is happening, individually and in teams. Of course it gets tricky: it’s easy to see your behaviors, but how do you see what’s going on behind the behaviors? Fortunately there are new kinds of tools that have potential in this regard: things like the Developmental Testing Service’s reflective judgment assessments, such as their test of managerial decision-making, which asks you to analyze complex, asymmetrical workplace problems, assesses you according to a complex scale of cognitive development rooted in Kurt Fischer’s work, and gives you (you yourself, the test taker!) rich feedback about your strengths and ways in which you can improve, data which feeds right back into the coaching relationship I mention above.
4. Represent the Learning Ecosystem. If you’re going to try to manage an ecosystem, you need some kind of a representation of it. As the water cycle has its famous circular chart with arrows and the budget has its classic representations in profit/loss statements and balance sheets, so does the learning system have something. I don’t know what it will look like, exactly; but I imagine it will be something like the famous Kellogg Logic Model, which the well-known foundation suggests you use to understand your various high-stakes interventions, and which helps you see programmatic inputs, outputs, assessments, changes. With a key difference: the effect of your ecology isn’t an output external to you, it’s an evolution of your ecology. So a learning logic model would show as its characteristic feature a looping back upon its constantly changing self.
5. Analyze How We Work; Analyze Our Culture. Part of learning is seeing yourself learn. That may be the single biggest difference between a learning organization and a producing organization: the learning organization sees itself and not just the things it makes. We will need to learn to pay attention not just to the products of our culture but to our culture, not just to the deliverable of the project, but to the way we work together on the project. For that a lot of tools exist already, like various kinds of post-activity group reflection encouraged in psychologically safe spaces, that let anyone share their experiences along the way. But new tools will help: the same sort of analytics thinking that has been transforming everything around us can help transform how we work together: social and network analyses to show us how we engage, corpus-linguistics analyses on the big data of our communications and cultural artifacts; these will help us, too, to see the patterns that make up our togetherness.
6. Assign Staff to Cultivate Learning. Of course you can’t really have a garden without a gardener. And all the network analysis and group reflection exercises you might want to use won’t be that helpful unless it’s somebody’s job to watch learning in the organization at a meta level: to gather relevant data, assess its meaning, and help the group understand where it’s going. The teacher, if you will, of the organization. This would be a new thing: we’re used to thinking of Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Executive Officers: this would be a Chief Learning Officer. Although of course it needs to be more than one person. And of course everyone has to be involved. But still the CLO might help organize it all. How much of your people resources should you put into learning, CLO and everything else thrown in? I propose 20% as a start. But I suspect it should be more, maybe up to 50%. Maybe 63%.
7. Find New Ways to Gather and Share Ideas. Which Means Liking Them. One of the most important things in your organization are the ideas in people’s minds. The business world is just beginning to learn that to be relentlessly innovative, they have to gather and tend ideas in new ways, because ideas are the seed of innovation, be these ideas from their staff, their customers, their partners, their competitors. (See my last post for more on this). Part of this idea-tending requires a real cultural change–towards the acceptance and collective cultivation of ideas–and away from the general distrust of all things new that naturally grows up in an organization designed to perform consistently. Let me say that again: we will have to learn to like each other’s ideas.  And treat them, as it were, like a community resource, like, as it were, children. Because without them growing and maturing, we’ll fail. Businesses are starting to do this by building open, inclusive, idea-participation systems called Ideation Engines or Idea Stock Markets that aim to make the ideas in the group transparent and collectively developed. But I suspect you can go a long way without a particularly unique tool (a shared spreadsheet might work as well).
8. Create Loops and Groups. In my perhaps over-simplified way of thinking, learning comes down to loops (in that feedback and reflection are crucial) and groups (in that learning is social; and in that your co-learners are as important for your learning as your own mind). So I think much of the key work of the Chief Learning Officer and her team will boil down to finding or building, and supporting, new sorts of groups in which people are desirous of learning together, and in adding “loops” to existing processes, to work reflection into the fabric of the organization.
9. Do Some Old-School Ethnography. I am continually amazed by the complexity and mystery of people and of organizations. And by the fact that all you need to do to begin seeing and unravelling (or ravelling) the mystery is to observe people and ask questions (of course taking notes and writing down the answers). This is the way anthropologists settled on coming to know things as complex and mysterious as entire alien (to them) cultures. Libraries and IT departments have recently begun seeing that ethnography helps them understand the mysterious complexities of cultures alien to them, too (their customers). And it will work for you. On a certain level you can see an ethnographically-inclined research project as a kind of mirror to the people (if its results are shared with the people it studies), a loop at a high level, that both honors people and lets them see what’s going on. I think a lot about the emphasis in the popular Reggio Emilia model on the artful documentation of what the learners are doing; an ethnographic approach to your own organization is like that.

Leaders of Learning Organizations

I recently posted on the characteristics of learning organizations, which I excerpted from chapter 20 of Edgar Schein’s lovely book Organizational Culture and Leadership, which is in general a must-read for anyone who believes in the first sentence of paragraph two of this blog post (and how could you not, really)?  In any event I now want to talk a little bit more about what Schein says in that chapter regarding the leaders of learning organizations, which is interestingly different, I think, than a lot of assumptions we make about successful leaders.

First of all, the background. Schein assumes (as many do) that organizations and people who are committed to “perpetual learning” are the ones that will be successful in an era of unpredictable change (our era, that is).  He notes a paradox–that organizational culture is normally a stabilizing force that resists change, made up of internalized assumptions about what it takes to be successful, and which individuals are understandably reluctant to revisit once they’ve worked them out. But learning, of course, requires the surfacing and adjustment of just such assumptions. Uncovering and changing these assumptions, which Schein calls “unfreezing” the culture, requires “disconfirmation, a process that is inevitably painful for many,” and that releases a lot of anxiety, the very thing the culture evolved to defend us from in the first place.

The leader of the learning organization has a sort of double responsibility to both encourage this discomfiture and pain and to be a salve–to also provide, that is, a kind of temporary stability to replace the structure previously provided by the now-obsolete cultural assumptions. As a leader, says Schein, you must be as it were half out and half in your organization (my words). Out to gather the perspective and alternatives and disrupting information, in to help people work through them. You need “the capacity to surmount your own organizational culture, to be able to perceive and think about ways of doing things that are different from what the current assumptions imply;” you need to be “somewhat marginal” and “somewhat embedded in the organization’s external environment.”

But you also must be half-embedded in your own environment, play an “anxiety-containing” role, putting people at ease, providing emotional reassurance and stability during the natural rise in anxiety that occurs when people learn, creating a space that is “psychologically safe,” where people can be temporarily vulnerable. Schein reminds us that you can’t get people to learn unless they want to; as he says: “learning and change can not be imposed on people. Their involvement and participation is needed in diagnosing what is going on, in figuring out what to do, and in the actual process of learning and change.”

A key side note is that in the world of change the leader herself may not really know what the right answers are; therefore a kind of cultivated naiveté (my phrase), or a spirit of “humble inquiry,” is needed, which allows and encourages information to come from all parts of the organization. The front-line staff member is just as important an information gathering point as is an executive, but the executive needs to be open to that.

For those that hate the touchy-feely, navel-gazing quality of self-improvement, look out. This is what you need on an individual and group level if you want to learn perpetually. Schein notes that as counseling and psychotherapy help individuals learn about themselves, learning organizations could benefit from similar kinds of activities, like group counseling, as it were, or “training and development programs that emphasize experiential learning and self-assessment.” Lots of experiments in a culture of intense self-awareness, not normally part (I suggest) of the average workplace.

On another side note, it seems to me that even in a perpetually-learning organization, we can’t be surfacing and changing all assumptions all the time; that this needs to be an iterative process; that we’d only really address at any given moment a limited sphere of assumptions that seem to be holding us back in a particular, focused area.  Otherwise it would be too chaotic even for me, which is saying something. This is why Schein makes a point of telling us it’s about surfacing and changing “some of the group’s assumptions” (emphasis mine). Not all.

So, my summary. The leader of the learning organization has to be half-out and half-in, a provocateur on one level (with a benign an holy purpose in mind of course), and a conciliator on another. She has to use the existing culture to get buy in to change the existing culture, and this in successive and continuous cycles. She must be humble and open but also visionary and determined, precipitous and calm, strong but also lovable; she must cause pain (indirectly) and slake it. She has to do for the organization what psychotherapy does for the individual–help make it a thoughtful, reflective, adaptive, aware, adjustable, learning team. Isn’t that different than the general image of leaders, on the one hand the driving, type A model of a CEO? Or on the other the imminently competent operations manager rising through the ranks to much-deserved leadership position? And it sounds challenging! But also so very fun.

 

Rethinking Professional Development: Ideas and Examples

In much of professional development, the lecture reigns as the unchallenged king of formats. As firmly as the person at the podium is established in our classrooms, s/he seems even more tenaciously present in workshops and conference sessions.

Why? Maybe because for busy workplace people creating a lecture is easier than thinking about how to engage learners actively. You only have to contend with your own behavior and thoughts, you know what you’ll say in advance, you can rehearse, and it’s over in a fixed time period. And for the attendees, showing up to hear a few ideas from the back row while writing one or two emails is easier, too, than being engaged actively. Easier and safer. Predictable. You can come late, and you can get away easily, too, if it gets uncomfortable. You just slip in and out the back. Which you couldn’t do if people were depending on your input.

Maybe it’s because we think of a workshop as a kind of exchange.  I give you money, and you give me a thing. A fact-package delivered like a cut of beef. Not an opportunity for me to cut the beef. I might actually get mad if I showed up to what I thought was going to an expert handing me pretty information chunks and instead found myself asked to participate in the creation of said information chunks with my peers, who might not even be experts and might produce knowledge I would then have to additionally evaluate, not to mention the energy it would take to negotiate meaning with these new, unpredictable people . . .

Unfortunately for professional development the more we learn about learning, the more we see the best learning involves messy things like doing and talking and sharing and hearing feedback and having assumptions we didn’t know we had challenged and feeling uncomfortable. Yet, if the goal is to help people learn, then professional developers have a kind of moral obligation to start to provide opportunities for alternative kinds of professional development that would aim for active learning. I don’t think the lecture has to go away completely (sometimes it’s ok). I just think it needs to be supplemented by a balanced breakfast of complementary formats.

So what you do if you didn’t lecture? Here are some thoughts:

• Give increased control to individual learners in order to develop intrinsic motivation, the catnip of learning (though, warning: too much choice leads to choice paralysis);
• Orient around “inquiry:” designing pathways for people to develop and follow their own questions;
• Shift the organizers’ role from conveyor of facts to that of facilitator, observer, describer, supporter of the group’s learning;
• Draw on studio or atelier models of engaged, differentiated learning, allowing people to get support tailored to their level (as happens in the art class as the teacher circulates);
• Adapt meta-cognitive models and strategies proven effective in classrooms and learning communities (thinking about thinking, “thinking protocols,” cognitive coaching, ways to make conversations fair, structures for giving appropriate feedback);
• Consider our attendees as dynamic individuals in a process of change and adapt lessons from the people-change literature around surfacing assumptions or beliefs and dealing with fears (as in the Immunity to Change process I cite so often);
• Rethink what the thing is participants are buying, and reset the buyer’s expectations. If it’s not a fact-package, what is it? Maybe something like an opportunity to engage with lively peers in a safe space, with all sorts of supports and resources not otherwise available to you, where you get access to the greatest minds, where no one is distracted, you’re challenged to be your best, you can finally think things through, etc . . . ;
• Think of professional development as collective creation of something heretofore not existing rather than communication of something heretofore available only to the experts;
• Explode the temporal confines of the events; developing more intense pre-work (figuring out who people are and what they care about) and post-work (figuring out how to scaffold the transfer from the experience back to the real world);
• Explore the motivating power of engaging real and big and complex challenges and think of the workshop as helping people work together to design discrete, actionable projects that test approaches to these challenges.

Nice thoughts, all. But are there any actual models of these ways of rethinking professional development? Yes there are, tons. (Really, there have been models forever if you look in the right places). Here are just a few fairly recent ones, chosen arbitrarily because I happen to have been involved with them, either as a creator or participant (or, in Steve’s case, because I met him at an Immunity to Change workshop):

• NERCOMP “Learning Academy.” The NorthEast partner of EDUCAUSE is sponsoring a project in which participants develop a question to guide their year-long inquiry into how to improve learning at work, are trained in the basics of the workplace learning research, have help from experts in developing and refining projects to test answers to the question, and are supported by coaches, sponsors, and regular cohort gatherings in the implementation and assessment of their projects.
• David Lewis’ “Library Construction Kit.” David, the dean of library strategic thinkers, conducts a workshop where, instead of presenting to participants his thoughts on the future of libraries (which he could do, well, and does), he challenges them, with some logistical supports like flavors of institution and research disposition, to actually design and build a library.
• Project Zero Classroom Institute. The mother of all pedagogy institutes, this week-long immersion combines traditional lectures from keynote speakers with small-group study and the development of individual, inquiry-oriented questions.
• NERLA / NMC hybrid webinar design. The New Media Consortium and the NorthEast Regional Learning Analytics group are working on a model that is half project-development and half webinar: participants enter with a learning analytics idea, are scaffolded in the development of a project around it, report on their project as part of a webinar, and leave with a plan and lots of feedback.
• Steve Friedman’s “Cooling Down” model. Steve, a leadership trainer for the Federal Government’s Western Management Development Center, is working on a post-training scaffolding model that aims to catalyze the “transfer” of learning from his training institute to the participant’s workplace: in his program, participants have regular feedback sessions where they share a challenge related to the application of their learning in the workplace and listen (without talking) to a round of associative questions from their peers. The questions stimulate a kind of in-action reflection that prompts people to see patterns in their own behavior blocking their development and make adjustments.
• Colleen Wheeler / Dave Wedaman NERCOMP 2010 event. Colleen and I led participants at our regional IT conference through a series of “fun” activities to elicit their understanding of learning environments and their sense of how valued a culture of learning was in their workplace. Participants were asked to imagine, conspire, plot their thoughts in a few creatively interactive ways; the speakers recorded, guided, gave feedback.
• Ropewalk Writer’s Retreat. A classic, week-long poetry-writing workshop, Ropewalk brings aspiring writers together in the artsy Eden of New Harmony, Indiana, and uses a series of formal readings by experts, small group critiques, and opportunities to write in the glory of nature to help people produce together, and be reflective about, poetry and prose. (I throw this model in to represent all the great examples for professional development that are out there in the arts community).
• THATCamp. A grass-roots coming together of faculty, librarians, graduate students, archivists, and technologists in an “un-conference” and hyper-local format allows participants to tackle problems, share experiences, and develop new projects in the burgeoning field of the digital humanities.

The Second Phase of Creation

When you think about doing new things, there are a few phases. Four, by my count. First comes the part where you conceive of the thing to do–call it the idea phase. In the beginning there was the word, etc. Then there’s a phase where you actually do the thing you conceived of. The doing phase, which is number three. These two phases are self-evident I think to most people, and I’m not going talk about them here, although I note they get really interesting as you peer into them (How do you actually get that idea? What is it you’re doing, when you’re doing, anyhow? Is there any thinking happening in there during that doing? Etc.)

Less obvious than these is a post-doing phase, phase four, where you reflect on how the thing went and look for ways to improve before you try it again. This phase is crucial because with it comes the feedback loop that is at the heart of all learning and improvement, and that turns your isolated action into something that can grow in meaning and value indefinitely and form associations with other things and attract people and change them and be changed by them and on and on in wondrous convolutions and permeations of beauty influencing beauty forever. Having a loop is really the only way to (eventually) achieve goodness and approach perfection, in my opinion, contrary to the semi-conscious belief of many that excellence precipitates from nothing with no precedent. That good teachers are born, not made, etc. I am not sure you can be or do absolute good; but you can improve relative to yourself, and you should focus on that.

I could talk a lot more about this reflection or feedback phase, as I love it dearly, but I won’t, because I would rather draw attention to a phase between the idea phase and the doing phase–which makes it phase two–a phase that is in my opinion the least well known, and least respected, and most suspected, but it’s important, and it’s poised for a comeback, and it’s worth thinking about.

In phase two, which is hard to name, you go from idea to endeavor. And to bridge that chasm you do a certain kind of applied abstraction, or practical dreaming, or ethical scheming. A spiritual machination, maybe. You continue the generative feeling of the creative thinking mode that started the whole thing and produced the wondrous idea you’re working with, but you begin to arc that generation towards your actual physical, local, empirically-confirmed environment with its tangible stuff and laws and real people and moods and everything.

First you start by asking my favorite kinds of questions: “OK, about this new idea. If we did this, just what would it look like?” Or, “Imagine we did this–how would it feel?” Etc. The answers usually come in little pieces that you build slowly into a larger picture that becomes clearer and clearer and more palpable and more real.

And as it becomes clearer and clearer, look out. Experience teaches me that this is the place where people start to get nervous. The idea was no threat as long as it was just a crazy idea. But now it’s growing into reality–particularly if you’re doing a good job of answering the “what would it look like” questions–and it’s starting to bump into people’s assumptions about life. It’s amazing how easily the defensive mechanisms are triggered in this regard–as soon as the slightest whiff of palpable novelty is intuited, up go the hackles. Why? Who knows–the imagined thing could change the existing power dynamic, we could be asked to do something we’re not good at, the things we think we care about might suffer, someone might say we’re incompetent, it might take more energy than we currently choose to expend, it might put us out of a job, etc.

Usually you don’t even know what is so threatening about the idea. Often the toes being stepped on are so buried in the sand that the articulated objection spurred by them seems disconnected and comes across as irrational. Did I say sometimes? It might be more than sometimes. I’m not attacking this quality of self-preservation (see Kegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change for an examination of it and a praise of it and a way to work through it), I’m just noting that this is where it comes in.

In any event, after this nervous and visceral, slightly animalistic reaction (which happens to us all, I might note, me as much as anyone), this part of phase two often salvages itself by what David Perkins calls “bracketing,” or asking people to put aside objections to just float along in the happy land of possibilities for a bit longer. This simple move is surprisingly effective–who wouldn’t ride with Willy Wonka on the boat a bit just to see what happens? It’s also akin to the magical cape of the bullfighter. “I’m not going to argue with you about that thing you think,” you’re saying. “It might be right, who knows. I’m just asking you to imagine this very interesting thing over here . . .” Wave of cape. Bracketing comes in handy: without out you can’t keep going.

Keep going, that is, to the bricolage stage, where another fun thing happens: you start to look for ways to interweave reality and your idea. Outlets to plug your idea into; bits of spare fabric in which to clothe it. You ask “What do we have lying around that might be put to use? What existing knowledge, procedures, resources, ideas, experiences?”

Here to my eternal delight we get to have a Rumpelstiltskin moment and to transform mundane things into nifty things. Nifty because they buttress your new idea. Here we find resources forgotten, ideas never hatched, people’s skills untapped, cheap back-door strategies, etc. And we see how we can put them to use. It’s as if the unappreciated constellations reform themselves into new provocative shapes right on the faded star map and right in front of our eyes. This transmutation, repurposing, reuse, resuscitation, re-constellation of old stuff is just fun–addictive really–it might even be the main reason people ever want to do new things. Why? Maybe because it means the world is generative, restorative, salvageable; that there’s eternal capacity for creativity, growth, development. That we’re not actually after all trapped, doomed, predetermined, constrained, and locked in a pit of inescapable despair. Maybe because if you can re-associate the stuff around you, it means you’re alive. I’m not sure.

Anyhow, the end of phase two is marked by another particular kind of question that I love. This is the classic “What’s the first step?” Or the “What achievable thing can we practically do, now?” Key here for me is the now part–that is, doing that accessible thing right then. There does seem to be a kind of clock ticking. And there is the sense that if you don’t act, that bracket that temporarily held back all the objections to the idea will start to loose structural integrity like Star Trek shields, and will no longer be able to fend off the glittering blob of worry pressing in through the windows and under the doors.

But I won’t follow that thought, because here we are at the end of phase two. Of course once you do something, even just the first accessible step, you’re technically in phase three, doing, which I said I wouldn’t talk about. So ends my blog post: think about this phase the next time you set about doing something new, and see if you can’t see it at play.

Soliloquy on Learning Analytics

Learning Analytics is a hot topic these days, but it also seems at the moment to some to be a kind of Google Wave: a neat concept, but with few concrete examples. I think it has a bright future, so I thought I would write about it.

Learning Analytics for me is simply analytics applied to learning: analysis of any data generated in the course of learning that can shed light on how people learn. Imagine those great data visualizations you see in the New York Times–only representing, not red states and blue states, but heretofore invisible patterns in the behaviors of learners.

It’s distinct for me from Business Analytics–the real-time analysis of data generated by organizations, designed to inform decision-making, also known as the famous “dashboard” to which all good leaders aspire. And it’s distinct from what my friend Ganesan Ravishanker and others call Academic Analytics (see his ECAR Research Bulletin on the topic): the analysis of data from the business operations of academic activities like enrollment, majors, tuition payments, faculty counts, and so on. These are wonderful and important activities; the difference in Learning Analytics is that it aims to focus on learning. Or, to make that slightly less esoteric, it aims to analyze the records of behavior occurring, and the artifacts produced, during learning.

What am I talking about?  Imagine all the things that happen when you are taking a class. Reading the syllabus. Listening and talking in the class. Reading the homework assignments. Taking notes, in class, and during reading those homework assignments. Writing paper drafts. Using particular sorts of software. Engaging in online discussions. Texting classmates. Contributing to a course backchannel in Twitter. Giving feedback and engaging in peer review. Taking surveys. Filling out evaluation forms. Posting at Rate my Professor.com. And so on. Increasingly this stuff is electronic or happens in an electronic medium, so it’s in theory collectable. If we can collect it, we can analyze it. Suddenly things that were invisible are no longer invisible. As Johann Larusson and Brandon White say in Detecting the “Point of Originality” in Student Writing:

The continuing migration of more and more teaching
materials to digital venues, and thus a machine-readable
form, has the supplementary benefit of making a student’s
day-to-day learning activities more transparent in each
stage of the teaching process.

Okay, if we collected all this stuff, what sorts of things would we see? Basically we’d see better what people thought during the evolution of the course. About the content in the course, about the ideas in the course, about conversation in the course, about assignments. We’d see their work evolve–through drafts, through feedback. We’d see their feedback evolve. We’d see how people responded to evolved feedback. We’d see the conversation evolve. In other words, we would see the way people developed over the course of the semester. And we’d be able to understand a bit better what learning is and what parts of our learning environments were most beneficial. The main way we see at all into this area now is basically through the intuition of the teachers and learners engaged in the course–their intuition informed by their own sometimes semi-conscious collection and analysis of data–which is of course a wonderfully valuable and reliable tool. Learning Analytics would just supplement it.

How about an example? Here’s one: In their “Point of Originality” work (see link above), Johann Larusson and Brandon White created a tool that uses established linguistic theories to measure the originality of student writing, and uses as its data source student blogs. In a course where students regularly blog, their tool can give a sense of when students are engaged and thoughtful about the topics discussed, in the aggregate and in the individual. A professor can use this new tool to complement his or her intuition or other assessments–and s/he can start to make connections that can help improve the learning environment. Are there patterns to the engagement? Does a particular topic excite more originality? Did the teaching method have an effect? Does originality correlate with performance on exams? Do I sense an engagement in class that corresponds to the activity in the blogs? And so on.

The above is what you might call the human perspective of Learning Analytics. There’s also a structural perspective of Learning Analytics, and it has potential too. I’m indebted to Greg Crane for this key insight (see my post from last Spring). We have collections of data from systems–be they computer systems or systems of activity–that can shed light–from a large-scale perspective–on how people define and shape learning containers (if you will) and pathways or sequences. What systems do I mean? Collections of syllabi, course descriptions, definitions of course learning objectives, reserves reading lists, records of textbooks used by courses, course catalogs, departmental or program descriptions, course prerequisites, transcripts, credit transfer agreements, and on and on: every school could generate a vast amount. It’s relatively easy to imagine these kinds of materials collected and organized, even on a national scale. Analyzing these data would start to give us a kind of linguistic understanding of the grammar of learning sequences. We could start to see how people shape learning, what subjects are considered learn-worthy (if you will), what sequences of subjects are considered appropriate, even what information resources are associated with what subjects. You could see how these structures changed over time or were different in different cultures. You might even start to conceive of a dynamic learning advising tool that could give a self-directed learner lots of options based on analysis of these large scale patterns of learning constructions.  ”Welcome, David. You’re interested in learning Economics? Based on our analysis of all world Economics courses, the first step generally consists of activities like these . . . and uses information sources like these . . . and assessments like these . . . Given your personality and past successes, we recommend activities with a strong experiential flavor . . . we’re now generating a syllabus for you. Also, based on your projected learning path, three professors have made a bid to serve as your personal guide at reasonable rates. We think you’ll like Dr. Jones. Etc.”

I’m perhaps getting a little carried away here with this Greg-Crane-inspired advising machine, which reminds me of what I think we should do and not do with knowledge derived from Learning Analytics. I don’t think the point of analyzing learning is to create a machine to replace teachers and automate assessment, or that the data collected would be used in secret to make some vast nefarious decisions about people and programs (these are two of the initial worries I think people feel when they start to think about Learning Analytics). I think the point of Learning Analytics is instead simply to give back to learners and teachers more information about how they are doing and about what is working. The ultimate arbiters for me are still the learner and the teacher–who, with Learning Analytics, will have more tools at their disposal as they try to understand how to help themselves or others learn. Learning Analytics should contribute to the kind of ongoing, imbedded, formative, transparent assessment hoped for by people everywhere.

And so ends my soliloquy. If you’re interested in learning more, look for an upcoming webinar co-hosted by the New Media Consortium and the NorthEast Regional Learning Analytics group (NERLA) to appear this Fall, take a look at my friend Malcolm Brown’s excellent ELI Brief on the topic, or review the proceedings of the Banff conference from last Spring, which had some wonderful presentations. And if you have an idea or a project in the works, consider presenting on it at the first ever NERLA Learning Analytics Symposium, January 2012 in Norwood, Massachusetts: the call for papers is open through September 26, 2011.

Thoughts about Assessment

I have been learning a humble little bit about assessment in education and thought I would jot down a few early thoughts.

The first thought is that the point of assessment is to see what people know. Or have learned. That seems fairly straight forward. How can you improve in any activity without a sense of where you are or how you’re doing? It ends up knowing where you are might be kind of key, because you can’t really start anywhere else (as Dewey points out in Experience and Education: “the organized subject-matter of . . . the specialist cannot provide the starting point”).

The second thought is that assessment shouldn’t be an isolated event. It should be part of a feedback loop. What do I mean? Well, once you know what you’ve learned you can do a couple of things–keep working on it (if you’re not there) or move on to the next thing (if you learned it). If you didn’t know where you were how would you know what to do next? I’m not sure you can learn without feedback of some kind.

“Keep working on it” might make you ask: what is this “it” and what would it mean to keep at “it?” Which brings me to point three: you probably need a goal or a direction against which to measure your progress. Knowing where you’re going seems almost as important as knowing where you are. You might set yourself your own goal, or you might adopt a goal somebody else conceived of for you, as you do when you take a course.

About this measuring your progress stuff. Ends up seeing yourself progress is a powerful learning motivator (Zull mentions this in The Art of Changing the Brain). Which brings me to another point. Seeing yourself: what’s the point of assessment if you don’t see the results? Or if when you see them so much time has elapsed that you’ve moved on to something else? So let’s make the assessment results visible and as close to instantaneous as possible. That was thought four.

Well, you’re thinking, it takes time to feed those sheets of paper into the Scantron machine, or read and write comments on each essay. True. Yet, there might also be ways to assess that don’t require elaborate and time-consuming analysis that you could use as supplements. I know of a teacher or two who assess daily, with a variety of methods, some methods as simple as asking students to indicate whether they feel they know something, want more time, or are ready to move on. That’s a simple thumb’s up or thumb’s down. The teachers can give the student more help or send them on to the next activity, as the student needs. Point five, then: have a smorgasbord of assessments, and serve something up continually.

Wait a second, if every student might choose a different activity (as in the thumb’s up exercise above), am I saying individual students might be doing different things in a given class? Well, yes. This is my thought number six. I know this sort of runs counter to the common Higher Ed classroom experience–where the whole class does the same thing at the same time. But when you think about it, clearly people are going to be at different levels. And if your assessment can show those levels, why wouldn’t you go ahead and adjust their activities as appropriate? An assessment without an adjustable curriculum seems to miss the point.

An adjustable curriculum? Sounds like a big thing, until you remember that a teacher who knows their subject and how people move through it basically is an adjustable curriculum machine. After a few years of teaching, they probably already have it mapped out. They might even share the map with the student!

Which brings me to another point. Sharing. Why not, in addition to sharing the map, and letting people see the results of their assessments, let them see into the design of those assessments?  When and where they will happen, what they’ll need to do, and how you’ll measure it?  You could even let them design and implement the assessments when they feel they needed one. Intrinsically motivated learners might even demand an assessment because they intuit the necessity of the feedback for their learning to continue (I’ve heard rumors of this happening). In any event, why be secret? It would be kind of hard to see how fast you could run the 50 yard dash if you had to guess where the course was. Here ends point seven.

The last point is a meta-point: all of these pieces fit into a cycle that repeats forever: you do something, you see how you did, and you do something else. Assessment is tied closely with learning. You almost can’t separate them.  If you did, neither would work as well. How could you learn if you didn’t see where you were? Why would you assess if the information didn’t go back to the learner? How would you know what to do next if you didn’t see how you did on the previous thing? And so on.