LILA ~ Learning Innovations Laboratory at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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  1. Sue Borchardt

    Flexpertise in Action by Janet Pogue & Darris James

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    Genlser is a is an American design and architecture firm headquartered in San Francisco that has a large number of practice areas they work in and so need to monitor progress in many fields from hospitality to health care. They took on the question what does it mean to be a success at Gensler? They have come up with a developmental model for talent development that spans the early stages of career when people are more generalists (skills exploring), all the way through to expert (skills sharing) at the emeritis stage of career. Between career beginning and ending are stages of refining, narrowing, leading, and defining skills. They have worked to come up with a four part definition of success that holds for all stages of career development: Connect, Learn, Lead & Deliver.
  2. Marga Biller

    How to Break the Expert’s Curse by Ting Zhang

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    We have the pervasive problem of the expert-novice gap. Consider an illustrative example from an interview with a medical student. During her first weeks, she admits that she did not know something basic when she walked into the operation room: “where do I stand.” Her attention would be better directed on the substantive procedures in the OR. Experts find it difficult to relate to novices, though they themselves were once novices. This is because one, they have imperfect memory which leads them to mistakenly think that they have always known what they know now. Two, experts are victims of the curse of knowledge, so they assume the uninformed parties are knowledgeable. Three, difficult processes have become automatic for experts, and experts underestimate the amount of time it takes novices to learn.
  3. Marga Biller

    Simple Rules by Kathy Eisenhardt

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    Kathleen enthralled our LILA community with compelling arguments on coping with complexity with simple rules. This brief captures the features of simple rules, why they work, and how to create (and update) them. Each major point is illuminated with examples (indented) of simple rules effective for the respective organizations or further explanation. Simple rules may be different even in similar situations if the people are different. Indiegogo and Kickstarter are both crowdfunding websites but they have different values which are reflective of the founders’ values. Indiegogo, founded by Berkley graduates, has a rule to fund anything as long as it is legal. It’s liberal, egalitarian, and for everyone. Kickstarter, who’s founders have a background in art curation, fund only if it fits one of their thirteen categories. They follow the model of curation—some criteria must be met.
  4. Laurent Bernard

    Can a Fitbit create a transformational learning experience?

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    Like more and more people, I have a Fitbit — a little device that captures a lot of information about me: how much I walk or exercise, how well I sleep and even what I eat. After months of ubernardsing it, I wanted to share some of my findings and ask whether we can learn something from the Fitbit experience that we can replicate in the work environment. My goal is not to talk about wellness best practices, but to provide some thinking about how we can better manage change. I’m thinking about transformational learning, which uses new skills to gain a new perspective and new behaviors.
  5. Marga Biller

    Improvisation Capability and the Flexible Firm by Dr. Dusya Vera

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    In the LILA October 2014 meeting, we argued that flexible experts have certain skills and abilities, dispositions, traits, metacognitive and self-regulatory skills, and experiences. Dr. Vera suggested that improvisation is one of those competencies that people develop at an individual, a team, or an organization level. She began the lecture by proposing the following questions: Is it enough to have a few people improvising? Or do you need an entire organization to improvise?
  6. Marga Biller

    How to run a company with almost no rules – Ted Talk by Ricardo Semler

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    What if your job didn’t control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don’t have to). It’s a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?
  7. Katie Heikkinen

    Building Dynamic Capabilities by Maurizio Zollo

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    In this first talk, I’ll go into what dynamic capabilities are and why they are important… and then how. How do you know you have a dynamic capability and how can they be developed? I’ll also juxtapose different directions for strategy. As learning academics and practitioners, we need to make distinctions between the various strategic directions. You can apply dynamic capabilities toward multiple strategic directions and goals; how do you determine which to pursue? Finally, I’ll bring in sustainability. That is the ultimate challenge. It doesn’t get more complex than that.
  8. Katie Heikkinen

    Flexpertise: A 10,000 Foot View as of February 12, 2015

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    This is a talk shared by David Perkins at the February 2015 LILA gathering. The idea is to provide a wrapper for some of the things that were shared at the October and February LILA gatherings. As David described, the talk has 4 themes: defining flexpertise, understanding it (why would we want it), valuing it (what is it worth), and fostering it (what do we do to get more flexpertise, when we want more of it).

Harvard Graduate School of Education