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A free tool/process to brainstorm ideas.

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People dedicated to making "unstuck" accessible for every person and moment; the 5-question tool that's emerged; and resources and stories to share.

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Free resources for teacher professional development

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Professional Learning | The Joy of Professional Learning | Joy of Professional Learning

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Joy of PL provides resources to engage teachers in professional learning.

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A design thinking game to inspire empathy and devleop an innovative mindset.

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English

© 2022 Instagram from Meta

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Coaching Teachers Using a Curiosity Mindset

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Coaching Teachers Using a Curiosity Mindset

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"The key to this isn't just the sense of community that coaches have, it's the moment of intervention during practice," said Victoria Solway, director of teaching and learning at the school. That's what makes this type of coaching different from the standard lesson observation leaders used to do. In a typical observation, the teacher doesn't get any feedback until after the lesson is over, and then it usually feels evaluative. At the British International School of Shanghai, Hopkin and Solway are trying to create an experience among the staff that helps teachers notice their own teaching moves as they happen in the classroom.

"We're trying to get to a space where someone coming into your space isn't the expert," Hopkin said. "You as the teacher are still the expert with responsibility and control for your professional experience." They didn't want to follow a checklist of teaching practices or try to emulate the teaching approach of one star teacher. Instead, their goal was to help each teacher become a star in their own unique way.

"When we tried to boil down what we were looking for -- it was helping our colleagues rediscover their curiosity," Hopkin said. He wanted teachers asking themselves questions like: Why does my lesson go this way? Why don't I like this kind of student? Why did this go so well? "We wanted them to see the world with awe and wonder," he said.

Ironically, this focus on curiosity, learning mindsets, hands-on experiences, and reflection are exactly what teachers at this school offer to students. But they weren't as comfortable engaging in the same process around their own professional learning. Hopkin hopes the coaching model he's developing -- one based around partnership and shared responsibility between coach and teacher for the fate of the lesson -- will help teachers shift their mindsets about change.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE

Hopkin and Solway quickly found that they needed to be flexible with their colleagues, many of whom were uncomfortable with this new approach to teacher professional development. The two leaders wanted coaching sessions to be positive and supportive, personalized and teacher-centered, challenging and reflective, non-evaluative and retrievable. But they also knew many teachers had not experienced that type of coaching before and were wary of anything that seemed like an evaluation.

"What they're getting is something that's right for them not only in terms of what they should be working on, but also in how they like to learn and how they like to feel," Hopkin said. He wants the experience to support teachers as they become even more independent and autonomous in their practice. To do that, he needed them to feel completely safe, so he made it very clear to the staff that nothing from coaching sessions would ever come up in annual reviews.

"No one will take a risk if they feel like they will be kicked in the teeth for landing on their face when trying something new," Hopkin said.

All coaching sessions start with a pre-lesson meeting when the coach and teacher talk about goals for the lesson and try to anticipate questions or obstacles that might arise. Together they practice how the teacher might address those scenarios. The coach videotapes the lesson with a camera mounted on a Swivel to track the teacher as he or she moves about the classroom. Depending on the teacher's comfort with in-class coaching, the coach may also be in the room quietly offering observations or questions at the point of practice. For teachers who hate that idea, Hopkin and Solway offer asynchronous coaching based on the video footage. No matter which style of coaching happens, the coach and teacher meet again to reflect on what happened during the lesson.

When Solway coaches, she likes to flag moments in the video with voiceover, pointing out strong moments or areas where she noticed something. Sometimes she'll offer resources to the teacher to help further their thinking on the goal they've identified. Solway says it's important that if the lesson goes poorly the coach shares the blame, but if the lesson goes wonderfully, it's best to give the teacher all the credit.

The pre-lesson materials, video and reflection make the experience a retrievable one. Teachers can revisit the video or the notes on their own time. Hopkin admitted it took teachers time to get used to this coaching model and many were skeptical at first. Teachers were also at very different points in their professional learning. Some were already experimental, pushing beyond what felt comfortable regularly and wondering "what if" as a matter of practice. Others, needed more coaching on the nuts and bolts, with the coach continually referring back to a schoolwide "Teaching and Learning Principles" document.

In those cases, Hopkin said "it's an interplay between are we working on the basics or are we working on something more bespoke to you?" But because the coach is working to help teachers notice and correct course autonomously, he or she is often only asking questions and leaving space for the teacher to develop her own thought or next action.

"It's painfully slow because you're just going to ask questions that you want the teacher to ask themselves," Hopkin said. This type of professional learning is akin to what many schools want teachers to provide students. Leaders at British International School of Shanghai learned that using the same teaching pedagogy with professional learners can be an effective way to shift instruction.

After one year of coaching in this way, Hopkin surveyed staff to see if they could substantiate how the coaching had improved their teaching. Teachers reported a 30 percent increase in their confidence, and they felt they were saving 40 percent of their time because they had to do less re-teaching. School leaders also looked at an array of measures like student grades and test scores, student interaction rates, questioning skill surveys, student attention rates, collaborative learning conversations, etc. to try and determine if the quality of learning had increased. Using information from teachers, students, and leaders they compiled those results and determined that the quality of learning increased by 70 percent.
A WHOLE SCHOOL INNOVATION EFFECT
In the process of helping individual teachers embrace small innovations to their teaching, the school as a whole has become more able to embrace change. Before the coaching program began, the International School of Shanghai already had positive things happening, and Hopkin wanted to retain those experiences. But he also wanted to inspire innovation and he's aware that "efficiency suffocates new thinking. The better you are at something the less likely you are to be open to something different."

So he framed the coaching sessions as little experiments, each in service of the broader school strategy. A teacher would make a hypothesis, experiment with it in the classroom, reflect on the insights garnered and how it connected to the larger community goals. The results of those experiments then became data points for broader decisions school leaders were considering.

"We wanted to have a pioneering spirit from people who are well seated in the more traditional paradigm," Solway said. They tried to allow teachers to move up and back along the innovation spectrum, with each person offering important insights to the learning community. They did not only celebrate the pioneering teachers, but also the pioneering spirit of very traditional ones.

"TeachMeets" are one way school leaders celebrate individual learning as a community. Any person who wants to share what they are working on and how it's going can do so. The rest of the "audience" -- other colleagues -- move around to different speakers depending on what interests them. Multiple mini-presentations are going on at once, with the audience moving between them fluidly. This practice helped spread insights beyond grade-level or subject-specific teams. It creates a positive buzz in a staff meeting and individuals can follow up with questions afterwards.

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When Coaching Teachers Has Curiosity As Its Primary Goal - MindShift

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"The key to this isn't just the sense of community that coaches have, it's the moment of intervention during practice," said Victoria Solway, director of teaching and learning at the school. That's what makes this type of coaching different from the standard lesson observation leaders used to do.

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Principals engage in design challenges as part of the School Retool fellowship. ( Courtesy School Retool)

When vice principal Tim Carlin arrived at Everitt Middle School in Jefferson County, Colorado, he wanted to hold a schoolwide assembly, a pretty common activity in most schools. But his principal told him that the school didn't hold assemblies anymore because too many kids were getting suspended for bad behavior when they did. That was the first clue that the school culture was not positive at Everitt, and it was clear the negativity and stress were affecting, students, teachers and staff alike.

"I kept hearing our teachers say we've got to change culture," Carlin said. "We can't have it feel like this at work. I think it really bothered people every day." But when Carlin got a group together to brainstorm how they might change the school's culture, the room was silent. "No one knows how to do that just off the top of their head," Carlin said.

'It becomes really empowering to them as principals that they have all those levers of change at their disposal' Susie Wise, Director K12 Lab Network at Stanford's d.school

With the support of his principal, Carlin applied for a School Retool fellowship led by the Stanford d.school and supported in Colorado by the Colorado Education Initiative. The program is designed specifically to help school building leaders identify and manipulate design levers like space, time and ritual to make concrete change in schools. The d.school is trying to promote a "hacker" mindset in school leaders, as opposed to a "rollout" mindset.

Participating in School Retool was transformative for Carlin, who not only got to try some quick generic hacks, but also had the experience of implementing a small change idea, learning from it and building momentum incrementally. Working in this way makes it much easier to take risks, learn from failures and build grass-roots support within the building for new ideas.
SCHOOL RETOOL
Carlin has had a diverse career in education, working mostly with experiential learning programs, then as a classroom teacher and now as an administrator. He has always looked for ways to make school more meaningful to students and that made him a strong candidate for the School Retool fellowship.

"It's for people who are in other contexts, but they are raising their hands to say, what could deeper learning, student-centered learning, personalized learning, student-agency look like at my school?" said Susie Wise, director of the K12 Lab Network at Stanford's d.school. She doesn't think this program would work as district-mandated professional development or for leaders who are already way down the change road. But she says principals are an overlooked group that can make big changes in schools, but rarely get much guidance on how to lead well.

"The thing principals get out of being in the cohort and workshops with us is a change in their mindset of being able to start small with scrappy experiments that get them moving in the right direction instead of thinking about rollouts," Wise said. Principals contend with a lot of issues from instructional support, to culture building, and parent communication. There are often many areas that could use improvement, but top-down initiatives can be expensive and poorly received by teachers tasked with implementation.

In School Retool, facilitators push principals to think of themselves as designers of human spaces. They are uniquely positioned to help all the humans in the building have a more fulfilling and productive experience. Principals control things like the schedule, how spaces are used, communication, school rituals and process - all of which are design levers.

"It becomes really empowering to them as principals that they have all those levers of change at their disposal," Wise said. The School Retool program is built around some basic design tenets that can feel a little overused, but are often missing from schools: a bias toward action, start small, fail forward. Starting small enough is often where principals need the most coaching, Wise said.

Principals are asked to try some basic "hacks" to get their feet wet. They might shadow a student for the day, put their desk out in the hallway for a day, or ask students for advice. These are context agnostic, but can help shake principals out of their old ways of doing things.

"The combination of those things tend to shift their perspective enough and open these little cracks," Wise said. Then they are more willing to think about what small hacks they might try that are specific to their schools.
STUDENT-CENTERED
For Carlin, asking students for advice has become a regular part of his practice. This year his staff is looking at how they can provide academic interventions during the school day instead of in an "8th hour" after school. Carlin surveyed students about how many would attend 8th hour if they weren't made to by staff. Only 4 percent said they would go for extra help, despite the fact that 48 percent of students are failing at least one class. As Carlin thought about that statistic, he asked his student Albert why that was.

"He launched into this story about his life," Carlin said. Audiology appointments, counseling, therapy, family obligations - in the face of all those commitments, that worksheet for school just doesn't feel worth his time. "It just gave me that perspective on how students were feeling about the process." Albert's input sent Carlin looking to the intervention literature, where he found that the most successful programs built extra support into the regular school day. Now, Carlin almost never proposes an idea to staff without first running it by some students who he knows won't be shy to share their opinions.

The initial School Retool research and design work was supported by the Hewlett Foundation, which is very interested in spreading "deeper learning" practices to more schools. But even when educators were inspired by models like High Tech High, they didn't feel capable of pushing for similar models back at home. School Retool came out of a desire to support "deeper learning" leaders.

Wise thinks the most transformative part of School Retool is not the individual hacks, but rather that school leaders get the chance to experience the deeper learning process. They work on a project back at their schools, fail forward, get advice from other principals in the cohort and generally puzzle their way through something new.

"It's a lot about getting them to move and see their mindsets in action," Wise said. The principal is the instructional leader in the building, so modeling risk-taking, starting small and learning from things that don't work sets an example for teachers. When principals are open to new ideas and have experienced the power of the process, they are more likely to open up those same spaces for their teachers.

"When you're always trying to make things better and you're trying to articulate what better is, to have a framework and a lens to think about it, it makes you feel more normal," said Elizabeth Domangue, principal of Panorama Middle School in Colorado Springs.

Domangue has had an uphill battle. She became the principal at Panorama last year two days before the school year started. The middle school had three different principals in five years and 80 percent of Domangue's staff were new that year, but she hadn't hired them. Students were not doing well academically and school climate needed work.

Domangue knew it would take time to change all these factors, but she began laying the groundwork for some bigger changes. For example, she's been trying to use the brainstorming and empathy tools she learned from School Retool to engage and empower her staff. She holds walking meetings with a small group of teachers that include new and old staff to try to think about how they can realistically build in time to make connections with kids outside of academic spaces.

"Knowing where we were, I knew if we just started with advisory without any kind of background or framework it would just be another initiative," Domangue said. Veteran teachers even told her that advisory wouldn't work - they had tried it before, got no support from the administration and it ultimately failed. So rather than pushing for something the staff wasn't ready for, Domangue kept engaging them on what could work.

They settled on something they call "Right to Read," a silent sustained reading time every Monday morning. Teachers aren't assessing what kids read or doing any formal debriefs. "We want it to be a time to be present in school before things start for the week," Domangue said.

She has also been hustling to bring more funds into her under-resourced school. They recently got a violence prevention grant from Colorado University at Boulder, which will bring training around positive intervention, and will essentially fund advisory twice a week for four years. The trainers will bring toolkits and lesson plans that will help support teachers as they build their skills.

"We can't wait for things to happen to us. We have to make them happen," Domangue said. She encourages teachers to make connections outside the school, to write grants, and to bring their passions into the building. In her eyes that's the only way they will be able to create a school that their community and staff deserve.
CULTURE CHANGE
To change school culture Carlin wanted to look into bringing an advisory program to his campus, but he knew that many advisories fail because the activities are too canned or there's so little structure that it becomes a planning burden on teachers. As part of his fellowship he decided to work on the idea with a small group of staff who were also excited about the idea.

"I used the same process of going from aspirations to big ideas to small hack," Carlin said. The aspiration was to have a Crew structure, like EL Education schools, with the big idea that every student would have a trusted adult in the building. To get there, staff members tried lots of small experiments that didn't cost a lot of money or upend any current systems, just to see what could work. "It was important that there was that structure. It gave us a base to start from," Carlin said.

Carlin likes challenging the stereotype that veteran teachers don't like to change when he talks about Bill Gold, a 40-year teaching veteran on his staff, as one of his most innovative, collaborative teachers. He was one of three teachers and two counselors who began exploring what elements should be part of an advisory program.

"One component we wanted was this practice of counsel with our kids," Carlin said. Gold decided to try and build a space where students felt safe to talk about their experience of school and their lives outside of it in his existing homeroom. "It was proof of concept. He came back to our group and said I think this should be part of what we do," Carlin said.

Over the course of a semester the working group put together a calendar of advisory activities that fell into categories like expeditionary or project-based learning or academic support. Each small group member worked to build out lessons for a category. The planning work took place throughout the spring semester, and when school started this year Everitt Middle had an advisory program.

"I've heard almost unanimously our staff say that crew is something we should keep at our school," Carlin said. That doesn't mean there aren't ups and downs, or that kids don't frustrate their advisors, but fairly quickly, taking small steps, Carlin helped guide the staff toward a big change. And, he was finally able to have a whole school assembly, where every person in the building participated in a giant human puzzle.

"I think if you lead it first in a small group, then it helps the larger group see that it works, because I think so many educators are hesitant to think anything else is going to work," Carlin said. He also acknowledges that there are always linchpin people in any organization that hold sway over others. In this case Bill Gold, the veteran teacher, was one of those people, so his excitement helped get everyone fired up.

"If it was just on me there's no way this would happen, but with the team I had, it made it possible," Carlin said. And the team of people at Everitt who want to be involved in work like this is growing as Carlin builds trust and staff see their ideas taken seriously.

School Retool costs $2,500 per principal, but Wise said that many of the first 18 cohorts they've done were sponsored by regional funders interested in investing in the school ecosystem. Both Domangue and Carlin received full or partial scholarships to participate, for example. Wise said her team priced the course at $2,500 because that's the budget many principals have to attend conferences.

Unlike a conference, however, School Retool fellows get the chance to put ideas into practice, get feedback and support from the cohort, and try again.

Empowering Principals As Designers Capable of Retooling School

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Empowering Principals As Designers Capable of Retooling School

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When vice principal Tim Carlin arrived at Everitt Middle School in Jefferson County, Colorado, he wanted to hold a schoolwide assembly, a pretty common activity in most schools. But his principal told him that the school didn't hold assemblies anymore because too many kids were getting suspended for bad behavior when they did.

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Sometimes the best way to innovate is to say no.

This may seem counterintuitive, but not if you talk to teachers or administrators who are dealing with initiative fatigue. Ask those educators to list the number of programs that are promoted in August and then completely forgotten by October-year after year after year.

We abandon initiatives for one of two reasons:

Overwhelmed abandonment: We lack the resources, primarily emotional energy, to persist.

Impatient abandonment: We are not patient enough to wait for results.

Abandoning initiatives for these reasons leads to frustration, disillusionment, and eventually, cynicism. Most importantly, these types of abandonment do not lead to productive innovations that benefit students.

We need what management expert Peter Drucker calls organized abandonment. Simply put, we cannot do everything well. If we attempt to be all things to all people, we will fail to do anything well. Therefore, school leaders should thoughtfully abandon those things that fail to serve students well, and even some things that would serve them well.

Using the Three Buckets Method

Bill Coon, award-winning principal of Meadow Glen Middle School in Lexington, South Carolina, is a strong believer in innovation. Coon brought EL Education to Meadow Glen-the first school in the state to use this model. The school's mission statement is: "Learn by doing. Leading by example."

At a recent convening of education leaders, someone asked Coon, "How do you and your teachers know which initiatives to pursue?"

Without hesitation, he responded, "If it is not in one of the three buckets that are part of our core mission [mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality work], then we don't do it."

With the three "buckets" or dimensions of achievement as a filter, Coon and his team determine how they will innovate based on what they will do and, maybe more importantly, what they will not do. These buckets encompass a great deal, but they also provide direction for when to say no.

Setting Up Rules to Help Say No

I recently conducted research in three high schools-one urban, one suburban, and one rural-to determine how they developed collective leadership, with teachers and administrators leading together.

Each school's innovations employed " equifinality "-many ways of achieving a desired state. Because each context was different, they had to say no to different initiatives. For example:

No to PLCs: One school did not set aside time for formal professional learning communities because, with only 26 full-time teachers, there were too many "singletons"-teachers of subjects without any counterparts.

No to anything not in the SIP: Employing a method similar to the three buckets idea, one school's leadership team used their school improvement plan (SIP) as their filter. Each spring, administrators, teachers, and students would participate in a two-day retreat to write the SIP. All initiatives were supported or rejected through this process.

No to traditional staff meetings: Another school had ended traditional staff meetings. Previously, 150 teachers would listen to a principal sharing what could have been communicated through an email. Staff meetings were now 30 minutes long, were led by teachers, and celebrated innovations occurring in classrooms and across the school.

Of course, innovation is about more than just saying no. These schools are saying yes to many grassroots ideas that are effervescing from the classrooms. Teacher leaders are making it easy for others to say yes because their ideas fit their school's buckets of work-buckets they helped design.

Saying No to Good Things

What happens when a school is doing things really well, but there isn't capacity-human or financial-to continue to do all of those things well? This is when innovation is really hard-and really important.

Innovation cannot be an add-on. Most administrators and teachers I know are working at or beyond their capacities. Innovation at many schools probably means streamlining good work that's already happening.

One of the high schools I've studied prides itself on starting any club a student suggests. The goal is to create a safe space and sense of belonging for every student. This is a noble goal. However, over 40 clubs are sponsored by volunteer teachers, who do that work without any compensation. If the volunteer sponsorship is energizing for the faculty sponsors, this is great. If, however, faculty sponsors are being spread thin and losing energy for work that is closer to their own core missions or the school's core mission, maybe some of these clubs should not exist. While there's no compensation for the faculty sponsors, there is certainly a potential cost for individuals and the school.

Turning back to the example of Meadow Glen, many great initiatives there over the years did not fit into the three buckets. A cohesive and thoughtful leadership team had to determine those three buckets. Most initiative fatigue results from saying yes to too many good things too quickly. Maintaining focus requires discipline to determine how to use financial and human capital-especially when good initiatives might consume scarce resources. Sometimes we need to say no to good things in the interest of supporting the best things.

When it comes to innovation, saying no is more than OK-it's essential. Remember, there is a no in innovate.

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Sometimes the best way to innovate is to say no. This may seem counterintuitive, but not if you talk to teachers or administrators who are dealing with initiative fatigue. Ask those educators to list the number of programs that are promoted in August and then completely forgotten by October-year after year after year.

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When the same choice is made over and over again, the downside of trying something different is limited and fixed - that one soda is unappealing - while the potential gains are disproportionately large. One study estimated that 47 percent of human behaviors are of this habitual variety.

Yet many people persist in buying branded products even when equivalent generics are available. These choices are noteworthy for drugs, when generics and branded options are chemically equivalent. Why continue to buy a name-brand aspirin when the same chemical compound sits nearby at a cheaper price? Scientists have already verified that the two forms of aspirin are identical. A little personal experimentation would presumably reassure you that the generic has the same effect.

Our common failure to experiment extends well past generics, as one recent study illustrates. On Feb. 5, 2014, London Underground workers went on a 48-hour strike, forcing the closings of several tube stops. The affected commuters had to find alternate routes.

When the strike ended, most people reverted to their old patterns. But roughly one in 20 stuck with the new route, shaving 6.7 minutes from what had been an average 32-minute commute.

The closings imposed by the strike forced experimentation with alternate routes, yielding valuable results. And if the strike had been longer, even more improvements would probably have been discovered.

Yet the fact that many people needed a strike to force them to experiment reveals the deep roots of a common reluctance to experiment. For example, when I think of my favorite restaurants, the ones I have visited many times, it is striking how few of the menu items I have tried. And when I think of all the lunch places near my workplace, I realize that I keep going to the same places again and again.

Habits are powerful. We persist with many of them because we tend to give undue emphasis to the present. Trying something new can be painful: I might not like what I get and must forgo something I already enjoy. That cost is immediate, while any benefits - even if they are large - will be enjoyed in a future that feels abstract and distant. Yes, I want to know what else my favorite restaurant does well, but today I just want my favorite dish.

Overconfidence also holds us back. I am unduly certain in my guesses of what the alternatives will be like, even though I haven't tried them.

Finally, many so-called choices are not really choices at all. Walking down the supermarket aisle, I do not make a considered decision about soda. I don't even pause at the generics. I act without thinking; I automatically grab bottles of Diet Coke as I wheel my cart by.

This is true not only in our personal lives. Executives and policymakers fail to experiment in their jobs, and these failures can be particularly costly. For example, in hiring, executives often apply their preconceived notions of which applicants will be a "good fit" as prospective employees. Yet those presumptions are nothing more than guesses and are rarely given the scrutiny of experimentation.

Hiring someone who doesn't appear to be a good fit is surely risky, yet it might also prove the presumptions wrong, an outcome that is especially valuable when these presumptions amount to built-in advantages for men or whites or people from economically or culturally advantaged backgrounds.

For government policymakers, experimentation is a thorny issue. We are right to be wary of "experimenting" in the sense of playing with people's lives. Yet we should also be wary of an automatic bias in favor of the status quo. That can amount to a Panglossian belief that the current policy is best, whereas the current policy may actually be a wobbly structure held together by overconfidence, historical accident and the power of precedent.

Experimentation is an act of humility, an acknowledgment that there is simply no way of knowing without trying something different.

Understanding that truth is a first step, but it is important to act on it. Sticking with an old habit is comforting, but one of these days, maybe, I'll actually buy a bottle of generic soda.

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When the same choice is made over and over again, the downside of trying something different is limited and fixed - that one soda is unappealing - while the potential gains are disproportionately large. One study estimated that 47 percent of human behaviors are of this habitual variety.

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Vulnerability Helps Build A Stronger Team

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Vulnerability Helps Build A Stronger Team

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If you'd like trust to develop in your office, group or team - and who wouldn't? - the key is sharing your weaknesses, says business writer Daniel Coyle.

At some level, we intuitively know that vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust. But we may not realize how well this process works, particularly when it comes to group interactions.

Jeff Polzer, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard, has spent much of his career examining these seemingly insignificant social exchanges. "People tend to think of vulnerability in a touchy-feely way, but that's not what's happening," Polzer says. "It's about sending a really clear signal that you have weaknesses, that you could use help. And if that behavior becomes a model for others, then you can set the insecurities aside and get to work, start to trust each other and help each other. If you never have that vulnerable moment, on the other hand, then people will try to cover up their weaknesses, and every little microtask becomes a place where insecurities manifest themselves."

Vulnerability is less about the sender than the receiver. "The second person is the key," Polzer says. "Do they pick it up and reveal their own weaknesses, or do they cover up and pretend they don't have any? It makes a huge difference in the outcome."

Polzer has become skilled at spotting the moment when the signal travels through the group. "You can actually see the people relax and connect and start to trust. The group picks up the idea and says, 'Okay, this is the mode we're going to be in,' and it starts behaving along those lines, according to the norm that it's okay to admit weakness and help each other."

This interaction can be called a vulnerability loop. A shared exchange of openness, it's the most basic building block of cooperation and trust. Vulnerability loops seem swift and spontaneous, but they all follow the same steps:

1. Person A sends a signal of vulnerability.

2. Person B detects this signal.

3. Person B responds by signaling their own vulnerability.

4. Person A detects this signal.

5. A norm is established; closeness and trust increase.

Each signal takes only a few seconds to deliver. But they're vital, shifting the dynamic and allowing two people who have been separate to function as one. It's useful to zoom in on this shift. Scientists have designed an experiment to do exactly that, called the Give-Some Game. You and another person, whom you've never met, each get four tokens. Each token is worth a dollar if you keep it but two dollars if you give it to the other person. The game consists of one decision: How many tokens do you give the other person?

This is not a simple decision. If you give all, you might end up with nothing. Most people give an average of 2.5 tokens to a stranger - slightly biased toward cooperation. But what's interesting is how people tend to behave when their vulnerability levels are increased a few notches.

Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

In one experiment, subjects were asked to deliver a short presentation to a roomful of people who were instructed by experimenters to remain silent. They played the Give-Some Game afterward. You might imagine that the subjects who endured this experience would respond by becoming less cooperative, but the opposite turned out to be true: the speakers' cooperation levels increased by 50 percent.

That moment of vulnerability did not reduce their willingness to cooperate but boosted it. The inverse was also true: Increasing people's sense of power - tweaking a situation to make them feel more invulnerable - dramatically diminished their willingness to cooperate.

We think about trust and vulnerability the way we think about standing on solid ground and leaping into the unknown. First we build trust, then we leap. But science is showing we've got it backward. Vulnerability doesn't come after trust - it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

The MIT team's approach was closer to a hastily scrawled plea shoved into a bottle and lobbed into the ocean of the Internet: "If you find this, please help!"

Question: How would you go about finding ten large red balloons deployed at secret locations throughout the United States?
That question was dreamed up ten years ago by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the US Department of Defense tasked with helping America's military prepare for future technological problems. The Red Balloon Challenge, which DARPA announced in October 2009, was designed to mimic real-life situations like terrorism and disease control, and offered a $40,000 prize to the first group to locate all ten balloons. The immensity of the task - ten balloons in 3.1 million square miles - led some to wonder if DARPA had gone too far. A senior intelligence analyst declared it "impossible."

Groups quickly signed up. They were a cross-section of America's brightest minds: hackers, social media entrepreneurs, tech companies and research universities. The vast majority took a logical approach to the problem. They built tools to attack it. They constructed search engines to analyze satellite photography technology, tapped into existing social and business networks, launched publicity campaigns, built open-source intelligence software, and nurtured communities of searchers on social media.

A team from MIT Media Lab found out about the challenge just four days before launch. A group of students, led by postdoctoral fellow Riley Crane, realized they had no time to do anything that resembled an organized approach. Instead, they took a different tack. They built a website that consisted of this invitation:
When you sign up to join the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, you'll be provided with a personalized invitation link [with your name in it]. Have all your friends sign up using your personalized invitation. If anyone you invite, or anyone they invite, or anyone they invite (. . . and so on) wins money, so will you! We're giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all- we're also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 [to] whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on . . . (see how it works).
The MIT team's approach was laughably primitive. There was no organizational structure, strategy or software. It was closer to a hastily scrawled plea shoved into a bottle and lobbed into the ocean of the Internet: "If you find this, please help!"

Two days before launch, MIT switched on the website. For a few hours, nothing happened. Then, at 3:42 p.m, people began to join. Connections first bloomed out of Boston, then radiated to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Texas, and far beyond, including Europe. Viewed in time lapse, the spread of connections resembled the spontaneous assembly of a gigantic nervous system, with hundreds of new people joining the effort with each hour.

At precisely 10:00 a.m. Eastern on December 5, DARPA launched the balloons in ten secret locations. Thousands of teams swung into action, and the organizers settled in to wait: they estimated it would take up to a week for a team to accurately locate all ten balloons.

Eight hours, fifty-two minutes, and forty-one seconds later, it was over.

The MIT team found all ten balloons and did so with the help of 4,665 people - or as DARPA organizer Peter Lee put it, "a huge amount of participation from shockingly little money."

"Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating," says vulnerability researcher Jeff Polzer.

The other teams had used a logical, incentive-based message: Join this project, and you might win money. This sounds motivating, but it doesn't really encourage cooperation - in fact, it does the opposite. If you tell others about the search, you are reducing your chances of winning prize money. These teams were asking for participants' vulnerability, while remaining invulnerable themselves.

The MIT team, on the other hand, signaled its vulnerability by promising that everyone connected to finding a balloon would share in the reward. Then it provided people with the opportunity to create networks of vulnerability by reaching out to friends, then asking them to reach out to friends. The team did not dictate what participants should do or how they should do it; it gave out the link and let people do what they pleased. And what they pleased was to connect with lots of other people. Each invitation created another vulnerability loop that drove cooperation - Hey, I'm doing this crazy project and I need your help.

So what made the difference wasn't how many people a person reached or how good their balloon-search technology was - it was about how effectively people created relationships of mutual risk. The Red Balloon Challenge wasn't really a technology contest; it was a vulnerability-sharing contest.

Cooperation does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a pattern of repeated interaction.

Most of us see vulnerability as a condition to be hidden. But when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement. Polzer says, "Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitating. It lets us work as one unit."

I began to see vulnerability loops in other places I visited. Sometimes they were small, quick exchanges. A pro baseball coach began a season-opening speech to his players by saying, "I was so nervous about talking to you today," and the players responded by smiling sympathetically - they were nervous too. Sometimes these loops took physical form, like the Failure Wall at Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation, where people could share moments where they'd fallen short.

Sometimes they were habits of seemingly invulnerable leaders, such as Steve Jobs's penchant for beginning conversations with "Here's a dopey idea." ("And sometimes they were," recalls Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design, in his memorial to Jobs. "Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.")

Each loop was different yet shared a deeper pattern - an acknowledgment of limits, a keen awareness of the group nature of the endeavor. The signal being sent was the same: You have a role here. I need you.

Cooperation does not simply descend out of the blue. It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same: a circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.

Excerpted with permission from the new book The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle. Published by Bantam Books, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Coyle. All rights reserved.
Watch the TEDx Talk on growing a talent hotbed from Daniel Coyle:

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How showing vulnerability helps build a stronger team

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At some level, we intuitively know that vulnerability tends to spark cooperation and trust. But we may not realize how well this process works, particularly when it comes to group interactions. Jeff Polzer, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard, has spent much of his career examining these seemingly insignificant social exchanges.

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Please add your favorite resources for inno

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SxSwEDU - Unlock Innovation - Hernandez & Prince

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On the Frontiers of School Reform (Trailblazers, Pioneers, Settlers, Stay at Home, Saboteurs) P Schlecty

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On the Frontiers of School Reform (Trailblazers, Pioneers, Settlers, Stay at Home, Saboteurs) P Schlecty

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Great framework for thinking about how others react to change