Educational Application of Cynefin Framework

Making sense of it all

My challenge, once I met Dave Snowden in Bogota during his 2014 New Narrative for Colombia stint, after the Peace Process with the FARC guerrillas was finally announced, was figuring out a way to further use the Cynefin Framework for beneficial, sustainable, real change.

In 2017 the ‘United Way Colombia/Secretary of Education - Live Education Innovation Laboratory’ was born. Its aim was activating a living laboratory within public school classrooms by providing an ongoing feedforward between teachers and students. This would allow for adjustments to improve the quality of the education experience. Over four years, we engaged close to 10,000 students across the municipalities of Bogota, Medellin, and Cali, the country’s three largest cities.

We co-designed feedback and feedforward studies to capture assessments of the Future of Education from educators and students. We developed an approach that comprised a robust human-centered design thinking element. We trained teachers to make sense of the data and to develop small experiments in their classrooms in response to student needs. We created a supporting kit that included “playing cards” to buttress the ongoing use of data while keeping a finger on the pulse of educational innovations.

The work was done in collaboration with two master’s degree students of Information Engineering at Bogota’s University of Los Andes, using machine learning and visual analytics methodology designed by Tamara Munzner, University of British Columbia computer science professor. The challenge was to make sense of 10,000 stories from both students and teachers, while gaining a deeper level of sense-making from an outsized volume of data by natural language processing applied to text, drawings, and stories captured through SenseMaker. By creating language processing libraries, it prioritized children’s emotional tone, and was capable of identifying – for example – a pattern of sadness in a student’s narrative even when the child self-referenced as happy.

Two significant findings emerged in terms of public policy design and implementation: 1) Teachers are not there to transfer information, they are no longer teachers in a traditional sense. They are most effective when they see themselves, and are seen as mentors, counselors, guides and/or facilitators; 2) The two words most associated with happy children are “Life” and “Play.” These two elements are particularly relevant during this time of COVID-19, given all public and private schools in the country have been “virtual-only” since March 31, 2020. It’s been announced that by August 2020, schools should start to partially reopen, combining physical attendance with some work time at home (as of the closing of this text, Colombia was reaching an epidemiological curve peak).

Through these investigations, we identified that students see school as the central axis in their community and that the strongest motivation for attending, is the emotional connection with other children and their teachers. While the ministry had assumed that students are motivated to go to school to cultivate a stronger sense of competition, the data provided evidence that what’s really wanted, and what would be more beneficial, is a stronger collegial environment that supports developing teamwork and upholds the importance of understanding others. The appropriate vectors were developed and are currently being implemented. The teachers involved in the study have also been trained in sense-making methods, design thinking approaches, and how to apply these to create more organic motivational strategies inside their classrooms.

The project offered a way to test “objective” top-down assumptions against accounts from students and teachers.