Time to Emerge from the Silo by Myron Dueck

Time to Emerge from the Silo

1/24/2021

by Myron Dueck

I grew up in a small Canadian farming community about an hour and a half north of Grand Forks, North Dakota. The landscape was pretty flat--I could’ve sung along with the Who: “I can see for miles and miles and miles.”

I came to like two notable landmarks that broke the monotony: grain elevators and farm silos. Most dictionaries cite two definitions for silos. One, of course, is the tall cylindrical farm feature that is used to store grain or silage--a feature of many cattle farms. The second, which also has ties to my community and its proximity to the Canada-US border, is the military connotation of a silo: the underground chamber used to store a guided missile and the equipment used to fire it. According to the Grand Forks Herald (2015), by the late 1960s, northeastern North Dakota was home to 300 nuclear silos. I was born in 1972, and like so many others in my generation, I was inundated with news stories and movies that allowed me to, “grow up strong and proud, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.” Thanks, Freddie.

As I looked around for various definitions of silos, I came across a third, metaphoric definition. Beyond food storage for domestic bovines and apocalyptic subterranean nukes there is:

An isolated grouping, department, etc., that functions apart from others especially in a way seen as hindering communication and cooperation

Wait a second…this sounds much more related to my contemporary existence--education

It’s time for me to admit it: too much of my educational career has been spent in the ‘school silo’. “Isolated, functioning apart from others, hindering communication…” was I the model for that definition? Was my classroom bugged?! Sure, I’ve read books, watched documentaries, and engaged in many conversations that were ‘outside’ of education per se, but somehow my NORAD radar was not homed in on the array of themes and lessons from the ‘real world’ that were applicable to my role as an educator. I was shielded by the walls of my classroom and set in my scholarly ways.

In their fascinating and relevant book A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business by Barden and Morgan (2015), we’re challenged to identify and break our ‘path dependence’ in order to solve seemingly unsolvable problems and, well, make our constraints beautiful. The authors point out that ‘path dependence’ can be formal, such as the myriad ‘how-to’ manuals and long-standing protocols and procedures to which we all adhere. On the other hand, ‘path dependence’ can “exist in a more informal, pervasive sense of “the way we do things around here”—the learned best practices, processes, values data sources and partners that people pay attention to” (page 38). Breaking path dependence requires us to look outside for new ideas.

I suppose there is a sort of collision occurring in my thinking that prompted me to write this article now, in January of 2021.

We are living in the COVID silo, and the endless array of constraints brought upon by it. I don’t know of a year in my life that’s been more punctuated by the phrase, “we can’t do … like we used to”.
I’m working once again in my school district as an administrator and we’ve had to look outside of our school for solutions, ideas, and support like never before.
I am a dad of two high school students, and I am caught in a see-saw of emotions. On one hand, I’m frustrated that my kids, and their peers, are missing out on so many things they’d normally do. On the other hand, I catch myself thinking of Mark Barden’s recent comment to my leadership class that, “we may one day look at 2020 as a real gift--a time to world came together to solve a common problem…a dress rehearsal for how we can solve much bigger problems yet to come our way” (Zoom presentation, Summerland Secondary Schools Leadership class, October 22, 2020).

Might this COVID challenge, despite tremendous hardship, end up with some kind of silver lining? My kids are indeed living in a very interesting time in history.

In any event, I think we need to look outside our school walls a little more often, rethink our constraints, in order to overcome the challenges inside those walls. When feeling there is no way out of a gripping limitation, instead of repeating, ‘we can’t…we can’t…we can’t’, Barden and Morgan offer nine strategies using the phrase, ‘we can if…’. One of these approaches suggests we venture outside of the silo:

WE CAN IF . . . WE ACCESS THE KNOWLEDGE OF . . .

In my latest book from ASCD entitled, Giving Students a Say: Smarter Assessment Practices to Empower and Engage, every chapter starts with an account of something outside of the education silo. One of those ideas would fall under the heading:

WE CAN IF . . . WE ACCESS THE KNOWLEDGE OF ADVERTISERS.

Take the ‘elevator pitch’--often defined as the encapsulation of an idea in time it would take to ride an elevator from one floor to another. Steve Jobs described Apple as “having the ability to take really complex technology and make it easy to understand and use by the end user” (Arthur, 2014). Imagine for a moment you were tasked with coming up with an elevator pitch for your classroom, department, school, or district and it had to be simple--a sentence or two. In 30 seconds or less, how would you sum up your purpose, your reason for being, your ‘why’? Perhaps we’d be tempted to launch into what we do--teach, conduct classes, offer extra-curricular activities. Terry O’Reilly, the host of the enlightening advertising podcast Under the Influence, would be quick to interrupt. O’Reilly argues that the most successful companies have figured out a few really important lessons, and all of them center on why they do what they do.

Here are three to consider:

| 1 |
Know What You're Selling

Without glancing a few lines down, do you recall Michelin Tires’ iconic advertising slogan of the 80s and 90s? (Don’t look until you guess…).

Did you recall it? Maybe you remembered, “Michelin…because so much is riding on your tires.” O’Reilly argues that the French tire giant wasn’t selling tires, it was selling safety (O’Reilly, 2017). The late Tony Hsieh founded Zappos as a ‘customer service’ company that just happened to sell shoes (Alcantara, 2020). Heineken commercials over the past few years have shifted from flogging beer to the selling of inclusion, tolerance, and surprisingly--moderation!

Observe this remarkable evolution in beer ads here:

What might happen if we took a serious look at what we are ‘selling’ in our schools. Is it something more than information, knowledge? U.S. Representative and civil rights leader Barbara Jordan famously declared, “Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment.” If you think about it, throughout history education is inextricably tied to empowerment. Maybe, just maybe, we might rebrand ourselves as providing empowerment, engagement, and equity through our delivery of education.

| 2 |
Coin Your Own Elevator Pitch

As an educator, what are you selling? Really, what is at the heart of what you do? For the longest time, I defined myself as a ‘social studies teacher’, then after a while, I switched it to ‘educator’. Now I have challenged myself further, to take lessons from the world of advertising to hone my elevator pitch. When faced with the question, ‘So, what do you do?’, what if teachers described their purpose more than their actions…

I empower and engage learners to push the boundaries of their own competencies.

I strive to prepare today’s students to be tomorrow’s citizens--ready for challenges seen and unseen.

By focusing on why I can only imagine the changes that might occur with what I do and how I do it! In Giving Students a Say, I focus the book on this elevator pitch for assessment:

In every aspect of assessment, we will engage and empower the student by offering opportunities for student voice, choice, self-assessment, and self-reporting.

Maybe our debates over retesting, homework, or the choice of performance scales would shift if our elevator pitch centered on empowerment, choice, and student ownership.

| 3 |
How Will You Know if Your Pitch is Working?

Scott Cook, the co-founder of Intuit, said, “a brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is--it is what consumers tell each other it is.” This notion is rocking the advertising world in ways never imagined. As GM has found out around their Tahoe commercials, to its immense frustration and embarrassment, it’s the consumer who can redefine the product through platforms such as Youtube. If some of the videos weren’t so offensive, I’d suggest you search ‘Chevy Tahoe Parody’ on Youtube.

Scott Cook’s idea, from well outside my silo, inspired me to try something I never imagined doing. I transformed Cook’s line into my own inquiry:

Is a school no longer what we tell the student it is--it is what they tell each other it is?

I instantly recalled telling incoming grade 9s my impression of the school, but suddenly I wondered if my perception was anywhere close to that of our students. I designed a question and set off to ask students the following:

So let’s say you’re at a party or something in the summer and a new kid is talking about moving into our area. In trying to decide which high school to attend, they ask, So tell me about Summerland Secondary…I mean really, what do you think of it?

The responses were incredibly diverse, ranging from very complementary (our teachers are great and so helpful!) to what we need to work on (there’s a lot of homophobic comments in our hallways). The intention was never to publish the results but rather to use the data as feedback for us and how we run the school and our programs. One thing I am certain of, however, is that Scott Cook is absolutely correct.

The bottom line...

We have much to steal…I mean learn…from companies, other organizations, the world out there. First, look at the farm silos you can see, and the underground ones you might imagine, and then challenge yourself to not fit the third description of ‘isolated’. Secondly, explore the why of your school—through an elevator pitch activity, asking students to describe your school, or whatever tools you might employ. If nothing else, it will challenge your path dependence and just possibly ease the constraints you currently feel.

So, whether you are stepping out of your silo to the sound of cows, or squinting into the North Dakota sun as you exit your atomic catacomb, be sure that the silo is not one of your own making. There's a lot for us to learn out there.

Myron, Nick, Mike, and Heather chat over Zoom

Airport Stories: Piloting Students Beyond the Silos | with Myron Dueck | 2.2.2021
Myron Dueck and the Third Eye podcast team discuss how to help students navigate beyond the silos, in which we educators and our students frequently dwell.

Myron Dueck is a teacher and administrator from BC, Canada. Published four times in EL Magazine, he is also the author of the best-selling book, Grading Smarter, Not Harder– Assessment Strategies that Motivate Kids and Help Them Learn and Giving Students a Say: Smarter Assessment Practices to Empower and Engage. Connect with him at @myrondueck.