By Darah Bonham (@darahbonham -twitter)

In the June 2008 edition of the Harvard Business Review, Tim Brown wrote an article entitled “Design Thinking”. Mr. Brown is the CEO and president of IDEO, an innovation and design firm with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. His perspective on innovation focuses on the need to use “design thinking” as a strategic process for not only making products and services more aesthetically appealing but to create ideas that better meet consumers’ needs. (follow Tim Brown at the IDEO web site http://www.ideo.com/)

In reading his work, I reflected on how design thinking could play a role into secondary education. Corporate America is increasingly looking towards innovators and creative thinkers to not simply repackage existing products or services but to create new opportunities often stemming from the problems that are facing their consumers. Mr. Brown references Bank of America’s “Keep the Change” experiment in 2005 that provided a savings incentive to consumers who decided to sign up for this service with their debit card. In return, the customer would have their purchases rounded up to the next dollar with the difference deposited into their account for savings. This ingenious idea and plan led to 700,000 new customer accounts.

Ideas such as this seem clever in retrospect but they are strategic in design, process, and delivery. So how can educators use this model to not only initiate reform but cause measurable change that is driven by its employees and stakeholders, not simply top level management? One possibility could be tied to merit pay and pay for performance in our schools.

It is no secret that from the President, to the Secretary of Education, to local school leaders, compensatory reform for teachers is a hot topic. The debate is nothing new but the focus from a new administration surely brings more people to the table for the discussion. Many of the opponents to merit pay argue that the playing field isn’t level. Teachers don’t get an opportunity to choose the kids in their class nor their aptitude and attitude. How is it fair that some teachers get a better “crop” to plow, they may argue? Added to the argument is the notion that state or other summative assessments are used as the, often only, metric in determining success in the classroom. Landing on the “how” may cause such merit pay desires to get caught in bureaucratic battles with school officials and teachers’ unions.

What is one possible solution to create incentives for teachers to perform their job better and strive to be exemplary (by whatever that is defined by)? Perhaps a look into Tim Brown’s article can open up new ideas for how to reward those who are performing at the level that is benefiting our schools. One solution I’ve been bouncing around looks at rewarding staff members (not just teachers) in compensation based on their “design thinking” that Mr. Brown alludes to. Instead of rewarding just teachers for higher test results at the end of the year, how about rewarding “stakeholders” with creative “systems thinking” plans, not just ideas, that help improve all those areas we keep focusing on in education: dropout rates; achievement gap; interdisciplinary approach to project base learning; STEM integration, etc.

Teams could be created within each school and division ( think-tanks come to mind but I would rather they be more focused on outcomes and plans than simply conjuring up ideas) to tackle solutions with creative ideas that are not necessarily derived from how we normally “do” education. Entrepreneurs see problems as opportunities. The bigger the problem, the greater the opportunity to maximize a benefit for your company and the consumer. The problem in education is that we see many of the problems as bigger issues beyond the scope of a teacher’s job along with the less feeling of empowerment to actually make change work. The critical part in this type of work is providing the time and resources to have educators create, design and put a plan in action. Brown’s article focuses on the development of rapid prototypes. We don’t need long, laborious, wordsmithing exercises that involve rewriting strategic plans, rather actual prototypes that can be tangible in use.

How would this type of work tie in with a compensation model? One of the metrics used to identify exemplary work in education is student performance. Most often this is tied to a standardized assessment where improvement is noted either within particular classes/students or in comparison to previous classes’ results. These measurements can’t be ignored for they are a critical measurement of the high stakes testing that is part of our environment. That being said, the use of such a specific metric doesn’t take into account the other factors that measure student success and doesn’t truly define what success “is” or “looks like”. Too often whatever improvements were made are reinvented or lost with an entire group of new students the following year or with an unsuccessful teacher.

Creating an incentive model that focused on systems change tied to collaborative, creative design thinkers would allow improvements within schools and divisions that would not be terminal and could be implemented in various ways with continuous improvement and tinkering. In Virginia, we speak of the SOL’s (standards of learning) tests as the “floor not the ceiling”. With a systems, creative-thinking model, the results of a well thought-out, collaborative, stakeholder owned plan, would look at improving the system as a whole that would reverberate into positive outcomes for the individual student.

How would such work be compensated? Rather than looking at individual test results, look at the results of enacted plans from the stakeholder groups. While this may take more than a year to measure, stipends could be provided for those participants of plans that caused incremental and significant improvement in the way things are done in schools. If you truly want stakeholder involvement, don’t limit the improvement process to simply student scores and performance. Expand the opportunities for systems improvement in areas such as transportation, student wellness, employee morale, community involvement, and yes, eliminating the achievement gap.

Well run companies spend sufficient resources towards targeted employee improvement plans and providing opportunities to improve processes and products within their institution. While intrinsic motivation is inherent in most teachers and school employees, most see their role in improvement centered upon the day to day work that happens inside their classroom walls. That other “stuff” on the outside is critical but what a student learns takes precedent over all else. (no argument here) Consequently, most of the effort and energy is left to those particular students within that teacher’s class when, in fact, the strategies and plans the teacher implements could have greater implication on the school beyond those 120 students. Why not foster, empower, and incentivize these opportunities?

While collaboration and innovation are becoming over-used terms in education, similar to 21st century skills, more opportunities are available to provide these opportunities through the use of technology. The internet is no longer a one-way street. Social networks, collaborative software, and cloud computing all allow platforms for educators (custodians, finance officers, administrators and teachers) to share, improve and design. While school buildings are usually the last to catch up with the latest technological advances, the likes of Twitter, Wikis, and blogs have provided more tools to share ideas with those in-house and from other areas across the country and world. Perhaps the collaborative teams don’t all reside in your own school house.

If we truly want all of our stakeholders to be vested and active towards system change and educational reform, we owe it to provide a platform for creative, design thinking that is supported by resources that could include additional dollars in one’s pocket.

In the spirit of collaboration, I encourage your thoughts and comments.