Paige Burton’s interview with Bo Adams
2/10/16
Bo Adams is the Chief Learning and Innovation Officer and the Executive Director of the Mt. Vernon Institute for Innovation at Mt. Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta, GA. He co-founded the Center for Teaching at Westminster School, is an edu-blogger at It’s About Learning, and he serves on the board of directors at MODA.
How have your previous jobs and experiences prepared you for your role at Mt. Vernon?
My current job is two-fold; I am the Chief Learning and Innovation Officer and the Executive Director of the Mt. Vernon Institute for Innovation. The job that I had immediately before this was at Unboundary, which is a transformation design studio and that is a group of people that are relationship builders, designers, and strategists that help big organizations like Coca Cola, IBM, and FedEx figure out who they are and who they want to be and help close the gap between the two. It helped me to learn to help a whole group of people move in a common direction, with a common language, and a shared understanding. This was a huge factor in my work at Mt.Vernon. I was also a middle school principal for 10 years and before that I was a curriculum director and before that I was a classroom teacher. In 2006 I cofounded the Center for Teaching in Atlanta, which is a consortium of independent and public schools doing action research work together. All of those things aided my current role, but I have been very purposeful in creating my own jobs and roles. A huge factor was in 2003 when I was a principal and all of the talk began in education about transformation and 21st century learning, and I realized that I had a huge responsibility to be at the leading edge of that and this when I started to wake up at 3:30 and do research and writing in the morning. I have maintained this and I practice it, so I have been both intentional and blessed to be consistently putting myself at the intersection of research and practice. This helps me be an entrepreneurial innovator because I am in a constant start up and beta mode, plus I am insatiably curious.
How would you describe the culture of Mt. Vernon?
It is very much an entrepreneurial culture. The first line of our mission statement is that we are a school of inquiry, innovation, and impact, and I think that first sentence really drives our culture. We also have a set of norms: start with questions, share the well, have fun. We certainly live that part of our culture and being a design thinking school and growing to be a national leader in that front has certainly influenced our culture. We are a fun and interesting blend of educator, designer, and entrepreneur. So one of the things that frustrated me in the past was that it was the norm to have three years of committees about something in order to think about all of the worst-case scenarios. So by the time a decision is made the topic seems almost irrelevant.We are a ship it culture at Mt.Vernon.
Do your teachers feel they can take risks and be innovative themselves or does that come from the top?
Most innovative places are three tiers – tier one is altering something current, tier two is doing or creating something new and tier three is what if our industry disappears what will we do. So, for example, there is a group at Coca Cola who works on what they will do if people stop drinking soft drinks. It is very cutting edge and so I think we have it both ways here, the faculty feel empowered to take risks, we even have a mistake of the year award. It also happens through leadership, and for example, we are exploring badging and micro credentialing for students and faculty. I don’t feel that this would have happened organically had there not been some engineering of this and presentation to faculty. I still think the human side of innovation, especially in education, is that people want to do well and so we do mitigate some of our risks, bit I think by in large people feel supported in their risk taking.
What do you look for when you are looking for a new teacher?
So much of our work is helping to set the conditions where students can be agents of change, so I am really looking for people who have been exploring that area. It is a different prospect when someone comes in who has been teaching for 15 years and they say they are a math teacher and when someone else comes in who has been teaching for 15 years and says I try to avoid being a teacher and help facilitate learning. I am more drawn to people who are about interdisciplinary learning and who don’t feel bound to a subject area. I am also looking for someone who exercises their innovator’s DNA – they are questioners, experimenters, and associative thinkers. I want to hear that they have been actually trying the work, not just reading about it. I want the triers, even if they have failed miserably.
Mt. Vernon went through a major transformation what brought that about and how did it progress?
Brett, the head of school, was a major factor in this when they realized that the school as it was functioning was probably not sustainable based on the current landscape and market place changes that were happening. Brett was able to clearly define a new vision and rewrite the mission. His declaration of here is what we are going to be allowed people to decide if this was a ship they wanted to ride on or not. I think that is beautiful because I think most schools are trying to be all things to all people because they love children and so they tend to not be clear. I think this is why we end up with pockets of schools within a school, which I think is very unhealthy. Which is another reason why that Unboundary work was so helpful, their job was to help organizations figure out who they are and where they want to go and I was able to help do that here.
What metrics do you use to measure the success of your program?
Academically, we administer a mix of achievement tests, real–world comparative measures, and performance tasks. We also take anecdotal notes from families and we listen to the vibes of the market place. Our up swell of admissions, and those who come to learn from us and the success of our students are all signs of success. We hear from colleges that our students are very able to write, be successful, and tell their story.
Do you have students that are learning disabled?
We have a very wide range of abilities, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work here. Some independent schools skim only off the top, I like that we have a broader range of students. We use a push in model, so we have learning coaches that go into the classrooms to meet the needs of the students.
Describe your professional development as you went through the transition and now.
We use a multi-prong approach – we certainly model and encourage people doing their own curiosity-based learning and so that might be people reading, workshops, or twitter chats. You can earn credit through a variety of avenues not offered through us. We also send the bees out to collect pollen and when they come back, we are very intentional about having them make honey with that by sharing and cascading that knowledge out to others. We are also strategic about where we send the bees, so it is not scattered. We also offer grants for summer work, last year we gave 40,000 in grants for faculty to do curriculum work or professional development for growth. We also offer maker nights once a month because we are integrating this more into our program. We work on infusing this into everything we do.
Initially to train the teachers in design thinking, we used a push in approach. We would have a trained person work with them and help them to build muscle just like a personal trainer would do. Now, we offer workshops in the summer and teachers can register to be a participant or be a coach and so when people teach something they really learn it. It builds confidence in using it in the classroom.
How did you get people to start using DT, did you require it at first?
No we did not require it, but we provided the necessary professional development and coaches that would help the teachers build confidence in their design thinking skills. The coaches helped them develop a plan, and then went in and taught with them, so they could see it happen, before they had to try it on their own. We also built a nucleus of people who were willing to try and then as they started using design thinking, we celebrated their successes and what was happening in their classrooms. More teachers and students wanted to be a part of it as they saw the excitement around it. What an organization celebrates it propagates. So I think that was a huge part of it.
Tell me about your research and design teams – how do they function and what is their purpose?
R&D are vertical teams in a subject area, but we reframed it just by renaming it so that it can be more than a vertical team. They meet once a month for two hours –looking at learning outcomes, assessments, and other issues within their area. Once a quarter, we “collide” subject areas together so they can devise new strategies to integrate and include more design thinking and maker engineering. The once a month group is not a decision making group – but a smaller group then comes from that to make the decisions.
Is their research internal or external?
It is both. They do learning outside of the school in an area that is of interest or need. They then take that information and research its application and integration into the school
What is the largest contributor to innovation at Mt. Vernon?
I would have to say design thinking. It is the methodology for innovating for sure.
What are the benefits of having so much community input?
People who are not practicing educators think about it for their children, but in no other realm. They are not researching educational changes. So it causes a two-way communication about how the work place changes can inform the educational shifts we need to make. The other thing it does is send back to the work place, this is what school is doing and becoming now and you need to be aware of this and be a part of this venture. It also helps us find potential experts, board members, and parents that can help and be a part of what we are doing. One of the things that we do is we bring in experts from the community to give feedback to the students about their projects. It is very different when a real expert comes in to give feedback about students’ work. We encourage them to give hard and honest feedback. Our students then have a very different cognitive level of understanding about their subject area and how to learn from feedback.
What are the best mistakes you made that ended up really helping you?
One is when I learned about the fundamental attribution error, that was a huge learning curve for me. I was committing this quite a bit and I have intentionally tried to stop doing this. Also, before Carol Dweck, I did not really know how malleable the brain is. I was a believer of the IQ and did not understand how much our brains can grow, so I certainly as a teacher did not have as open of a mind about students potential as I should have had.
On a personal note, on my first job as a teacher I was being evaluated one day and I overslept. I never oversleep. I showed up with two minutes left of my class and the three men there to observe me. Afterwards, I was sure I was going to be fired, but they met with me and said there is nothing we can say that will make you feel any worse than you already feel about what happened. But Bo we want you to remember this, because one day you will be an administrator and you will have to think about how to handle your faculty in situations like this. They were so generous to me and taught me an incredible lesson also. It has served me well and is probably the best mistake I made.
Thank you so much for talking with me today. I really appreciate your time.
