I'm interested in how the Antifragile 
principle might apply to education. . It's basically the idea that somethings — like humans — get better under stress. Most of our systems don't though. And our systems are under a lot of stress. The education system itself is being exposed to a number of new stressors, and it's breaking. I wonder how we could rework the education system to be antifragile — to grow stronger under stress. This relates to the Innovation while cost cutting idea. - Luke
Luke, there is an important idea here for us to parse out here. I was intrigued when you introduced this concept to me and it makes perfect sense. While I am not overly fond of the term "antifragile" (it feels clunky), I am really intrigued by the importance of this idea. Quite frankly, I am wondering why we don't have a better name for this critical aspect of life. - Thompson
Second law of thermodynamics: entropy. All energy moves to lower forms of order. But healthy organisms (and organizations) are Disentropic.
The adaptive process of moving to a higher level of order comes through healthy stress. We call this being Comfortable being Uncomfortable.
These places of healthy, creative discomfort happen when we enter into Ecotones.
Jami recently shared a story with Ward and Thompson that helped us understand how she is modeling this experience of Antifragility in her school:
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>This has been a difficult year for some of the teachers at the Dayton High School because of a challenging freshman class. There is a group of students that are particularly disengaged and have been disrupting several of the core classes. Hours have been spent meeting and discussing how to manage this dynamic so that the education of the the other students is not impacted. > Rather than apply standard practices of discipline to try to "control" the situation, the school has decided to radically re-imagine their approach. > They started from the premise that these six students are not simply troublemakers, but frustrated makers and creators whose potential greatness had not yet been recognized. They sat down and met with each one of them individually and posed a challenge that they work together as a team with their teachers to create a new learning environment. One that would be built out in the shop, which was their Safe Space, that would integrate core core subjects that they needed in order to graduate. > It would be their responsibility to define a project and shape their studies and to demonstrate how their learning mapped back to the standards. This process would be guided and supported by their teachers. > As a first step, it was their responsibility to teach their English teacher how to weld. > Dayton is courageously stepping out into the unknown with this pilot.