Where is your R&D?
A snapshot of one student’s Expeditionaries portfolio poster.
In 2015, it started as a Google Doc.
It was a great start, but clunky and time consuming. So in 2017 the Google Doc evolved into Moleskine notebooks. They were simpler, more accessible, and easy to use.
In 2018, we expanded those notebooks.
But they lacked the scaffolding for reflections and feedback we needed. And they didn’t allow students to share their work. And yet they had created room for us to imagine something even better: in mid 2019, we evolved that Moleskine prototype into a 3’ x 4’ poster.
I’m referring to the Expeditionaries tool for capturing learning, providing feedback, and showcasing student work. [1]
Expeditionaries is a 100% project-based, 100% team-based, and a strengths-based learning experience. We knew that we could not assess—much less communicate—student growth and performance with traditional grades. But we didn’t have an alternative.
So we created one, in the form of that first Google Doc prototype in 2015.
We tested it, learned from feedback, then built version 2.0, 3.0, and now version 4.0, the 3’ x 4’ poster—which we convert into a digital portfolio.
For the schools that send students and teachers to Expeditionaries, the experience can function as an R&D lab. We can experiment and iterate without disrupting “school.”
North Shore Country Day School had the same idea when they hired us to design their Live + Serve Laboratory in their newly renovated library.
As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said, “Nothing can be taken for granted, and there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. You have to be good at refreshing yourself at the crucial times.”
Whether you “refresh yourself” by partnering with outside organizations or by sponsoring an in-house function, your organization needs an R&D strategy, because “Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed; and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed.” [2]
So where is your R&D taking place?
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*There are 3 individual student spots left for our MLK Jr Day Weekend Expedition, which starts this Friday after school. Register here.
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[1] Expeditionaries began as Social Entrepreneurship at Malvern Prep, where I was Head of School from 2012-2017.
[2] From What You Do Is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz. He goes on to say:
“Imagine a culture of strict accountability that punishes failure […] Now consider an idea that has a 90 percent chance of failing, but that would pay off at 1,000 to 1. Despite it being an extraordinarily good bet, the company that punishes failure will never fund it.
“Hierarchies are good at weeding out obviously bad ideas. By the time an idea makes it all the way up the chain, it will have been compared to all the other ideas in the system, with the obviously good ideas ranked at the top. This seems like common sense. The problem is that obviously good ideas are not truly innovative, and truly innovative ideas often look like very bad ideas when they’re introduced.”
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