Changing the Way the World Learns

The Best Way to Learn is to Teach

My son, Stephen Gurney, taught me that students teaching students has great power to foster learning–and that when students teach, they learn much more than the skills or content that they’re teaching. Stephen taught bilingual English and Social Studies at Virrey Solis, a K-11 school in Bogota, Colombia. Last year, he started a school called Student Promotion of English and Kindness (SPEAK). Every Saturday, his 10th grade students traveled up to Cerro Norte, a barrio in the hills of the city, to teach the preteens in this underserved community.

By trial and error, Stephen and his team worked through the problems and challenges to start SPEAK. They learned a few lessons that apply to any peer instruction endeavor:

Structure each lesson. This included having a stated outcome, clear expectations, and a realistic time frame.
Have fun. His students used a didactic pedagogical model, planning lessons that included games and fun activities.
Don’t give up. There were a lot of bumps–and the students learned some lessons in grit as the year progressed.
The teacher has to be a coach. Stephen learned that the school worked best when he coached his students through the process.

The year was a great success and SPEAK will continue in 2019. In addition to their English test scores soaring, the student teachers grew immensely from their immersion in compassion, kindness and resolve. They forged lasting bonds with each other and their pupils. And, they created a path to opportunity for children whose lives previously were limited by their challenging environment.

Design Learning To Promote Mastery Rather Than Failure

Mike Grimshaw, Director of the Entrepreneurial Institute at California State University, Dominguez Hills, focuses on mastery as he designs and delivers his courses.

Too often, learning experiences are designed for failure, or at least to weed out those who fail. In many college courses, it is expected that students will attend class, read the textbook, complete assignments and then take an exam that a significant portion of the class will fail.

What if we turned learning design upside down and designed for mastery instead of failure? To do this, we would need to focus on students and keep their interests at the center of everything we do—to understand their needs and wants, their constraints, what motivates them, and what keeps them from succeeding.

Two instructional designers, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, in their famous book, Understanding by Design, created a framework called backward design that the O’Donnell Learn design team lives by.

When using backward design, start by determining what exactly you want your students to master. This becomes a set of big ideas and learning outcomes, which is called the course blueprint. This enables you to ensure that the entire class is on the same page and that students know what’s expected of them.

Next, rethink assessment. In order to assess for mastery, you need to focus less on summative assessment (such as making the midterm and final count for most of the grade) and more on formative assessment—frequent checkpoints that enable the learner to self-correct. Often, and depending on your course blueprint, mastery requires some sort of demonstration or transfer of learning. So, you may need to move to project-based, experiential or authentic assessments to measure attainment of mastery.

Finally, determine the learning activities that will help your learners succeed. This is where focusing on the students is critical. For example, if you ask students to demonstrate mastery, you might want to focus more on case studies and stories and less on terms and concepts. If most of your students are visual learners, it might be more effective to include a video rather than a lengthy textbook reading. Also, backward design principles show us that students learn through teaching, so using peer instruction techniques can jump start students to mastery. All of this may sound like a lot of work, and for many instructors and learning designers, a lot of change. But, it doesn’t have to happen all at once. Take a few steps today and see where it takes you tomorrow. If more learning experiences were focused on mastery, student success and retention would increase and failure rates would

Advice From Rock Start Investors

Last night, my son, Matt, and I attended the Wall Street Journal Tech Café event at Think Coffee in New York and learned about how tech investors think from three of the greatest. Here are a few nuggets on how to approach and pitch to investors…

Steve Case , uber entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, advised that you should do a little research before you approach an investor and get to know his sweet spots. Every investor has his own criteria, so for example, Steve invests in later stage start ups and generally in big ideas or platforms, rarely in products or features. His main criteria for investing in a company: people, passion and persistence.

Jay Samit , a top gun in LA, says, know your stuff! Too many entrepreneurs come to the pitch unprepared and unable to handle Jay (the typical investor in my experience), who gets impatient after about the second slide and shifts from presentation mode to Q&A. He also emphasized people—surround yourself with great people (a typical theme on this blog). He hit home for me by stating that those closest to you should invest, endorse and support you on your startup; if they don’t, there is something wrong with the picture.

Brian Cohen, the mayor of Angels, says “make the Angel fall in love with you”. Angels aren’t in it for the big win as much as to save the world, and their investment is much more emotional. Also, get them to say NO. Nobody likes to say no, so force the question and get a no (or yes) answer. Finally, be coachable. All startup investors offer much more than money; you need to be able to take their criticism and coaching.

Thank you, Brian, Jay and Steve and thanks to the Wall Street Journal—always my favorite news venue—for hosting this insightful event. It came at the perfect time for me, as I have just lined up my initial friends and family capital and am looking for angels to help me launch Café Learn (more on that later….)

Build Your Market… One Customer At A Time

I was a little futuristic back in 1990: I started O’Donnell Learn because I was convinced that technology would change education and that customers (including students, teachers and administrators) had to be front and center during this change. Well…I have had more than 20 years to perfect the practice of market development–working with customers to shape a solution AND build a cadre of loyal early adopters.

It’s a lot of fun. You build panels of users who provide insights and feedback as you develop and launch a product or offering. As a result, you end up with a solution to real, specific market needs and problems. You create messaging that resonates. AND you avoid costly mistakes.

Here are a few tips for you as you create the next generation of innovation…

Get feedback on your concept before you build the product. Make sure you get feedback from at least 20 potential customers right from the get go. You will save yourself a lot of time and money!! We use interviews to get in-depth feedback and focus groups for brainstorming (virtual are less expensive).
Listen don’t talk. It’s really better for you to get someone else to ask the questions for you. Most entrepreneurs can’t resist trying to sell when you really need to listen hard and tease out your customers’ objections.
Don’t get discouraged. The more innovative your offering, the more confusion and push back you can expect. Teachers particularly are skeptical about change. We have launched dozens of successful products. The real game changers require more than one conversation. In the first one, your customer reacts to the idea: what is exciting, and what are the red flags or obstacles. Then, in a second conversation, you can get feedback on the actual product. This two-step process yields a very high rate of customers!!
Use the right tools. Most people automatically turn to a survey. Surveys are important—they help you figure out what to focus on first and how to spend your resources. But, they are step two. You have to start with qualitative research (interviews or focus groups). By probing and listening, you shift your focus from what you think is important to what is important to your customer.
Get your customers to shape your message. A few years back, we saved a customer a lot of $$. They were praising their modular product—and this word had negative connotations for most customers. By touting a flexible design rather than modular, they turned negativity into excitement!

Market development doesn’t have to cost a lot of money—but it requires some time investment. You want to be sure that you recruit the right customers into your panel—decision makers at target accounts, not just any person who wants to talk! Relying too heavily on social networking groups/sites tends to get you a panel full of talkers that aren’t necessarily decision-makers.

Think about your target audience and do some research to gather contact information. Typically, you will need to reach out to about 10 target customers for every qualified panel participant. But, I guarantee that if you do it systematically, market development will save you from making costly mistakes and it will yield your first pipeline of customers.

Is Education Ripe For Innovation?

I am flying home from the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco. During the past few days, there was a lot of dialog about the future, and, both campus and industry thought leaders asserted that the time is now for innovation. Some of the themes that I think are very relevant for entrepreneurs…

Institutions are experimenting, especially in higher ed. While most of the startups at the conference have K12 solutions, several panels showed that experimentation is more fertile in higher ed, which lacks the bureaucratic constraints that stifle experimentation in K12. CIOs Joe Moreau from DeAnza-Foothills CC and Eric Hawley from Utah State showed that the culture and process for experimentation on college campuses is increasing. Joe commented that piloting is the way to go: “it gives us permission to fail and allows us to date before we get married.” Eric had the best quote of the conference: “What’s hot is simple. What’s not is complex.”

Focus on the teachable moment. Many of the panelists believe that the upcoming innovations are going to be all about making teachers rock stars and using technology to increase student/teacher interaction. Diana Rhoten from Amplify noted that the first wave of ed tech innovations were about faster and cheaper, and the next wave will be focused on teaching and learning.

MOOCs are escalating innovation. Every conference in education has a buzz around MOOCs (massive online open courses). Howard Lurie of EdX asserted that the open sourcing of the EdX platform (slated for June) provides institutions with a sandbox for innovation. The platform captures every keystroke and provides a window into the learning process.

Shifting roles prompt innovation. The roles of the publishers, technology players, libraries and bookstores are all shifting as the advent of new models means that lines between content, technology and services are blurred. Gerry Hanley, at Cal State, commented that the role of the publishers is shifting as MOOCs and other open education resources become prevalent. Similarly, Mike Diaz from Proquest, the library database company, described the shifting role of librarians to be more involved in helping faculty and students access course content. Others described new learning management solutions that are cloud-based and open-source and become essentially plugs for the many apps that schools are choosing to adopt.

Clearly, the time for education innovation is NOW. And, it’s up to us entrepreneurs and innovators to take advantage of the climate and imagine the future.

Keep It Simple

I recently had an entrepreneurial wake-up call!! We conducted a focus group with academic leaders and they didn’t quite “get” our business. After some probing, it turns out that they saw a need for the business, but the message was just too complicated. We were trying to do too much, and to be too many things for too many people. What a valuable reminder to Keep It Simple. Luckily, we learned this lesson before we spent a penny on designing the product!

David Pogue, New York Times tech columnist, and my former neighbor, did a great and timeless TED Talk, Simplicity Sells, several years back:

Too often, in the market development work that O’Donnell Learn does for companies, this lesson comes very late—after a product is built, and a product that has too many bells and whistles for its average user.

Many companies expand into new verticals before they have really nailed the first one. We worked with a company a few years back that had a strong line of business education products. Before they built market share in that area, they had expanded into science, social science and allied health. Guess what? They never got enough bench strength in any one area to solidify their business model.

Business model! That is what keeping it simple is all about. Use your simplicity to experiment with your business model. Figure how you are going to make money and how this will be a long-term sustainable business. Build some market share—and then you can get complicated. Or can you? David Pogue would say no, “simplicity sells”.

In the next few posts, we are going to explore the notion of building a business.

Time Flies!

In early May, I will be speaking at the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit about the opportunities and challenges that innovators and entrepreneurs face. And, one of my topics will be that time flies!! Bringing innovation into educational markets is hard work, and there is way more to do than there are hours in the day.

This past month, I have created pieces of my business plan, financial projections, a website, overviews of the company, and a concept video. I have traveled nearly half the time meeting customers, partners, advisors, investors, developers and my team. I have worn more hats than I can imagine. I haven’t managed to cross everything off my list in months. And, Carrieonfire.com has suffered from this flight of time!

Here is what I do when time is flying (and spinning out of control!):

Focus on the 2-3 critical success factors for your company today, and give yourself milestones with due dates for these priorities. For me, it’s setting up pilots and seed funding. I know what I need to accomplish and when.
Take things off your list. You can’t do everything, but it is better to delegate or postpone than to regret that you failed to complete something critical. Jim Collins, one of my favorite leadership gurus, argues that we all need a “stop-doing” list, because we have too many projects and initiatives. Isn’t that the truth!
Build a team that is GREAT and brings the expertise, skills and passion for things that aren’t your forte. If you don’t have a lot of money to hire people (most of us don’t), your team can include partners, advisors, potential and current vendors, and friends and family.
Take a day off every week. Starting a company is grueling work, and you need to get away from it or you will burn out. About 10 years ago, I learned this the hard way when I landed in the hospital and spent 3 months recovering my health. Even when I am swamped, I try to take off one day a week. And, I find time every day to clear my head. I exercise or practice yoga nearly every day, and I take walks with my dog, Luna.
Give yourself a break when you fail or fall behind. You are only human. And, you know that every successful entrepreneur encounters many pitfalls along the way. You will be a lot less stressed and more effective if you acknowledge your failure to get something done or that big SNAFU and let it go so that you can move on.

Know Who You Are

If you don’t know who you are, and why you are doing all of this, then nobody else will. And, who you are begins with your mission and values. Wow, these are important!

I learned a long time ago that values are critical to helping your team create a winning roadmap. Values provide a barometer for making important decisions. We frequently cite our values to keep everybody focused on what is important. Our values are simple:

Learning. Learning is fun. We learn from each other, from our successes and from our mistakes.
Honest and clear communication.
Innovation and creativity.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, one of the famous Harvard Business School thinkers, recently wrote a good blog post, Ten Essentials For Getting Value From Values. Much more eloquent than I ever could be, she points out that it’s not just values that count, it’s keeping them alive by creating a conversation about your values.

If values are your barometer, then your mission is your guidepost. When I think about my mission, I think: what do I really love? And what do I want to change? What will guide me and inspire me, even though every business changes frequently (especially lately, and if you want to be around next year)? My mission is as simple as my values: transform the educational experience so that people love learning.

Missions are huge! Larger than life! They need to be big enough to get you out of bed to slog away at your company day after day and year after year, even when the problems are totally stressing you out. And, they need to give you the inspiration to imagine the possibilities and do great things.

It is really good to find a community of like-minded entrepreneurs who will help you get out of the day to day weeds to work on your business and the critical path to success. I belong to Women Presidents Organization, which has over 100 chapters of 20 Presidents who help each other succeed. This month, my chapter is working on, guess what, mission and values…

Get The Right People On The Bus

I’m a fan of Jim Collins, who has spent years studying and writing about great companies; his most recent book is Great By Choice. One of his enduring principles is to get the right people on the bus, which he describes in this video:

As an entrepreneur, you are always cash-strapped, so sometimes you think it’s better to focus on hiring lower cost people. I can tell from hard-earned experience that it is critical that you surround yourself by GREAT people, and then figure out how you can afford them. A few things I have learned:

Don’t hire clones. One of you is enough. You need to surround yourself with people who think differently and who are going to challenge your thinking. It is also really important to foster diversity in your company—age, race, gender, etc.
Hire people who want a challenge and aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and dig in. In a startup, every person has to pull more than their weight. You don’t have extra support people, so you need to hire people who are willing to wash the coffee mugs, then build a bullet-proof budget, and then meet with clients. Wow, that is a rare person. It takes resilience and a zest for trying new things.
If someone isn’t working out, part quickly, and be fair about it.
Beware of the pigpen effect. Over the years, I have hired a number of people with this effect: they spend an awful lot of time working (routing around in the muck), dust is swirling, but nothing ever seems to get done. Sometimes, they are hard to spot, because they are generally hard workers—so remember point number 3 above.
Pedigree is less important than flexibility in a startup. I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs hire people with very impressive big corporate resumes who didn’t know the first thing about how to get things done in an unstructured startup environment. So, probe carefully to gauge someone’s ability to be flexible and agile.
Hire people who are smarter and better than you are. You will never go wrong by hiring people who are GREAT in areas that you are weak! One of the first things an entrepreneur learns is that nobody is competent at everything, so you need to figure out what you aren’t good at and hire people who will fill in these gaps.

Finally, it’s important to have some fun in life. I like it best when some of the folks on my team are whacky, off-beat and just plain fun. Life is too short, and when the going gets tough, the tough get off the bus for an hour and have some fun.

Get Some Sleep!

I do some of my best thinking in the early morning. Sometimes, I wake up at 3 am, and these riffs play in my head. I worry about that difficult phone call coming up, or some stressful situation. Have you noticed that these worries are never as big as they seem in the wee hours?

Sometimes, I wake up with a great idea. I learned that the best thing to do is to grab the little notebook I keep nearby and write it down. This allows me to capture that great idea or to release that worry. And, then I can go back to sleep!

Sleep is also really important for entrepreneurs. Starting a company is hard work. I am tired at the end of the day, and I need a good night of rest to prepare me for the next day.

So many of us entrepreneurs have trouble sleeping that I wanted to spend a little time on this. Here is the Mayo Clinic’s good advice, Seven Steps To Better Sleep. And, this is a fun little Inc. magazine article, 11 Ways To Sleep Better At Night, on the things that entrepreneurs need to let go in order to sleep at night.

Years ago, I learned this little meditation for sleeping. It it a little out there (in the yogic sense) but I promise it works:

Sit in a comfortable and warm place, on a mat or pillow, cross legged, with a straight spine.
Put your hands in your lap, right hand resting over the left, and make sure your shoulders and face and hands are relaxed
Breathe in through your nose deeply, in four parts, rather slowly. In your mind, as you take the four partial breaths, think SA-TA-NA-MA. Do this 4 times, so that you breathe in with 16 partial breaths.
Then you will hold the breath for 16 counts, at the same slowish pace you inhales the four-part breath, saying SA-TA-NA-MA to yourself 4x
As you exhale, say to yourself, WAHAY GURU.

The yogis tell you to do this for 3 or 6 or 11 or 31 minutes. To me, it doesn’t matter how long, just practice this for a bit each night as you are getting ready for bed, and you will sleep better!