Tag Archives: innovative teaching and learning

10 Ideas To Move Innovation Forward

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by -= Bruce Berrien =-

Through a lot of conversations on social networks, face-to-face opportunities, and reflection, I have been thinking about some of the things that I have seen to create new and better (innovative) opportunities for learning.  This is not only in the context of student learning, but as well as opportunities for staff and their own professional development.  Below, I would like to share some of my thoughts as well as some corresponding quotes from people both in and out of education.  (I have written about this topic before, but I really wanted to focus on people specifically.)

1. Have a clear vision.

Although the term “innovation” talks about continuously developing new ideas, I really believe that it is imperative that the notion of risk-taking and continuously developing better learning opportunities for students.  The other idea is that leaders should have some clear notion on what learning could look like in today’s classroom, not simply having a vision that is not clear.  Once those ideas become clear to others, trust that those you serve will take off and make amazing things happen.  Give them the autonomy to make the vision come to life.

“If you do a good job of teaching your values and mission to the people at the bottom of your organization, then once you give them control, they will do the right things with it.” Charlene Li

2. Model what you want to see.

It is really easy to go say, “do this”, but it is more important to say, “let’s do this together”.  If you think about the way many run staff meetings, they often talk about “21st Century Learning” but do not model it when educators are present.  People rarely change because they hear something, but are more likely to grow if they experience something.  How are you making those learning opportunities something people experience?

“Meaningful change ain’t gonna happen for our kids if we’re not willing to invest in it for ourselves first. At the heart, it’s not about schools…it’s about us.” Will Richardson

3. Break it down into smaller steps.

When we have a giant vision of what “better” looks like, it often becomes overwhelming to people who are nowhere near an “endpoint”.  To help people move forward, skill and confidence have to be built along the way.  Every step closer to a vision, is great progress.

For example, if you want people to become more connected, show them ways that they can benefit immediately as opposed to focusing on all of the amazing ways they can bring experts into the classroom, help them find one single resource.  Once they see the value of that, they are more likely to make the next step which could eventually lead to the giant leap.

“The path to success is paved with small wins. Even the grandest and most glorious victories rest on a string of modest but constructive steps forward.” Robert I. Sutton

4. Help people move from their “Point A” to their “Point B”.

Everyone is at different points in their learning journey.  This is not just students, but educators as well.  Too often we offer workshops and expect people to be all at the same point by the end, but is this really honouring where people are at?  I really believe that once a teacher quits learning, they will become ineffective.  It may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen. That being said, I can easily work with anyone that is wanting to learn and get better; they don’t have to be at the pinnacle.  Start where people are at, as opposed to focusing on where you want them to be.

“Multipliers invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius—innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence.” Liz Wiseman

5.  Work with people 1-on-1.

One of the best things that I have done this year (in my opinion), was offer “office hours” that gave teachers the opportunity to ask me about whatever they wanted to learn.  Large group sessions give ample amounts of information, but can also be ineffective for many.  Much of the time, teachers would come to me with questions of things that they were interested in learning about, and I led them to initiatives in our division that would help them.  The big “light bulb moment” for me was this; it was not about what I wanted to teach them, but about what they wanted to learn.  It is much easier to work from that point when helping others move forward.

“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.” Daniel Pink

6.  Promote champions.

In education, no matter the level, it is never about “us”, but it is always about others.  It would be really easy to maintain a space where you are always seen as the “expert”, but it is more important to build systems and capacity if we want long term growth.  Sometimes, even when you know the answer, it is better to be a “connector” and show that you value the people who are already doing great stuff.  A system should never be dependent  upon one but should tap into many.

“…the world changes by dint of small groups of dedicated people.” Margaret J. Wheatley

7. Share, share, share!

“And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.” Stephen Johnson

One of the neatest things about many of the initiatives that we have within our district is that we really focused on a few things to get to that transformative level in our work.  When sharing became the default with many educators, we were learning from so many others and really pushing the limits of our work.

A simple analogy.  Most people know that we do not use something simple like Microsoft Word past ten percent of it’s capacity (not the innovative type of software I am promoting, but the example is used for familiarity). What happens when everyone’s ten percent is different, but we all share?  Our learning grows so much when we all share what we know with one another.

“The smartest person in the room is the room.” David Weinberger

8. Model and promote risk taking.

We often talk about “promoting risk taking”, but do leaders model it?  People will not feel comfortable unless we openly share the things that we are trying to do to get better.  Every time I write a blog post, I am taking the risk of looking stupid or saying something that someone would take offensive, yet I focus on clarifying my thoughts openly since I want our community to do the same.  How can I ask it if I do not model it?

Once people see that you are doing this, they are more likely to try their own ideas and push what is happening in their own situations.  Giving people license to take risks, will more likely lead to some amazing things.

“if you want innovation, it’s critical that people are able to work on ideas that are unapproved and generally thought to be stupid. The real value of “20%” is not the time, but rather the “license” it gives to work on things that “aren’t important.” Jonathan Fields

9. Find the balance of “pressure and support”.

I have talked about this to a great extent in my blog, but I think it is important to create a sense of urgency in our work while also ensuring that people are supported.  If it is important, you will find money, and make time for people.  This sense of urgency and support will help people to move when combined, much more than if there is an abundance of one and lack with the other.

“I believe that managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.” Tommy Lasorda

10.  Always remember that we are in the “people” business”.

No matter how urgent things are, it never helps when we make people feel incompetent. We can have great ideas, but it is important to understand that we often do not know situations that people are dealing with in their personal lives, and what is happening outside of their work.  Ensure that you show you value what they already do, before you start pushing where they should be.  Once a person knows they are valued, they will go to much greater heights than if they never felt cared for in the first place.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

Concluding Thoughts

As we continue to work on growth and change management, working where people are and caring about them, makes them not only more open to change, but eventually want to embrace it. It is a process that needs patience, but with each small victory, many get closer to the big goal.

“Rather than viewing change as a threat and something to be feared, we will find ourselves embracing change, recognizing its potential to drive us to even higher levels of performance…”John Seely Brown

How about now?

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“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Tela Chhe

During a session I was facilitating, one of the questions a participant asked was,

How do we prepare students for a future that we are all uncertain of?

My first thought was, are we even preparing them for right now?

You look around at our world and you see everyone have a mobile device (there will be more mobile devices than people by the end of the year), yet many schools are still struggling with putting devices in the hands of students, or worse, won’t allow kids bring in their own devices.  Our students should have real time access to information, know how to evaluate it, use it, create because of it, and be able to share to an audience.  Do our schools today look anything like our world now?

If we worked with students to give them the ability to critically think, adapt, change, and connect and share their knowledge, wouldn’t they be prepared for whatever the future brought their way?

I love the notion of preparing students for the future, but I think that preparing them for their world right now is probably a good place to start.

“People do not fail in life because they aim too high and miss…”

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by http://heretakis.com

A superintendent was in one of my workshops with his administration team, and he raised his hand and said the following:

A lot of what you are talking about and sharing is great, but where would you find the time?

My heart sunk immediately.

Hearing the lead of an organization say that in front of his staff made what I was sharing optional.  What bothered me about the statement is that the work I was highlighting of so many teachers in our district, he acknowledged as being “great”, yet you could tell that it would never be something that he would see as a priority.

As an administrator, it is imperative that you have to be a “defender of time“, so you can’t do everything in your school, but if we were to take a look at a lot of the tasks that we do in school, do they lead to “great” or are they something we just do because we have always done it that way.  If we want to get better, we should look at what we need to do, while also what we need to get rid of.

If you look at any person that has done something awesome, the question that always comes up from others is “where did you find the time?”  It is not about time, but it is about an attitude and a way they live their life.  Most people that are really fit and in shape, don’t find the time, they make the time.  They know it is important and it is just what they do.  That’s it.  Is that any different from any endeavour?

Does every teacher have to be “great”?  Not necessarily, but I believe that this is something we should all strive for to benefit our students.  As I think of this notion, I heard this quote and it sticks out to me regarding this thought process:

“People do not fail in life because they aim too high and miss. They fail in life, because they aim too low and hit.” (Unknown)

Thoughts?

Learning With Multiple Forms of Media

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Dan Zen

I was fascinated by this tweet this morning from #CanEdu13:

I thought about the way that our students do “assignments” and many of them still write traditional “essays” that would never necessarily reference a “tweet”, blog, or YouTube video, yet there is a lot of learning that can happen from these digital spaces, they are just not what we are used to. For example, recently talking to an educator currently finishing her thesis, she told me how she was not able to reference a “blog” as it was discouraged in her cohort.

Why?

Should we not be able to curate, assess, and evaluate information from a blog as we would from a paper?  Information often loses accuracy in many instances because it is time sensitive, and a journal takes a while to be published, as well as a book.  Is there not any relevance in the “real-time” web?

Thinking about this, I found the following quote from Henry Jenkins’ paper on “Media Education for the 21st Century”:

“Adolescents need to learn how to integrate knowledge from multiple sources, including music, video, online databases, and other media.They need to think critically about information that can be found nearly instantaneously through out the world. They need to participate in the kinds of collaboration that new communication and information technologies enable, but increasingly demand. Considerations of globalization lead us toward the importance of understanding the perspective of others, developing a historical grounding, and seeing the interconnectedness of economic and ecological systems.”
—Bertram C. Bruce (2002)

If we are looking at how people are “moved”, some are through what they have read, but many are from what they see and hear.  I am not saying to get rid of looking at “traditional” media in assignments, but how often do we encourage our students to use a YouTube video as a resource?  Is this not a skill that our students need?

Removing Barriers and Educational Technology

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I was recently asked to share my thoughts on the current state of educational technology and the connection it has to education in British Columbia (for a BC website).  Here are some of the questions that came my way with my responses below.

    • What are you currently obsessed with at work right now? 

One of my big focus areas is on how we give both teachers and students a voice in their learning. We live in a world where we all have the opportunity to share our thoughts instantly with the entire world, but schools have traditionally kept that learning within the confines of the building and have only shared during “special events”. If we give our students an authentic audience, we give them the opportunity to make a difference in their own lives, as well as the lives of others.

Tying into that notion is the idea of “entrepreneurship”. Students are creating some pretty amazing things in schools, whether it is in an art class, technology course, or english. How do we give them an opportunity to share their ideas to actually learn how to make a living doing something that they love? One of the things that I looked back upon during my time in the faculty of education was that we spent a lot of time learning how to “teach”, but no time learning how to actually get a job teaching. I believe that students should not only have great opportunities for learning in school, but we need to teach them how to create opportunities for themselves.

    • How is technology changing the face and pace of K-12 education? 

Information is abundant and as Daniel Pink discusses in his latest book, it is not about accessing information, but about curating it. When you have access to all of the information in the world, there is obviously some great stuff, and some stuff that is of a poor quality. How are students critical of what they see, and how do they reflect and share? Too many schools are worried about students “googling” answers on test because that would make them “cheaters”, yet as adults, we would be considered resourceful if we did the same thing. What we do with the information is much more important now than simply finding it. We need to look at how students are not only consumers of information, but creators of content as well. That is where the real learning happens and technology gives us the opportunity to be able to share easily with the entire world.

    • What are some of the smartest teachers doing in this space? 

Many teachers are looking outside of their schools and classrooms for new ideas to inspire and engage their students. Nothing in our world seems as stagnant as the “curriculum”, and many educators are learning to continuously embrace change and bring it into their classroom. They are looking at what successful organizations outside of education are doing and bringing those experiences to their students. They are not only making learning relevant, but real. There are teachers in pockets that are doing this, but many of them struggle with the politics of school and administrators that sometimes encourage risk, yet do not model it. As Chris Kennedy states, administrators need to be “elbows deep in the learning” with their students and faculty. In the area of British Columbia, Surrey School District (SD36) has been making some tremendous strides in becoming a “culture of innovation”, but I am guessing that even in their situation, they never feel like they are “there” and are striving to continuously get better.  Learning constantly changes and grows and the best organizations continuously grow and adapt so that they can always excel.

    • What opportunities are there for collaboration and transition between K-12 and higher ed given current technologies?

With learning having the ability to be so visible in our time, K-12 and higher education need to spend a lot more time working together to improve education for our students. You often hear K-12 complaining that universities are out of date and are forcing schools to go to an old model (grading practices are a prime example of this), and many universities are saying that students are not coming into their schools with the skills that they deem valuable. Instead of talking about each other, they need to spend more time working with each other and figuring how to do best for the students, and not take the easy way out. Within our school division, we are looking at working with our university to work with teachers to give them an idea of the skills that we expect them to have and be able to teach their students. We are hoping that we can build a partnership to learn from each other and really have education take the next step.

    • What are some of the challenges? (BC’s Privacy Legislation any others?)

The privacy laws in BC are outdated and holding schools back significantly. They often talk about data being stored in the cloud as being “unsafe” but it seems that it is more about controlling it from an outsider perspective. These policies were created in a totally different world and are now holding schools back to help students understand and thrive in the world that we live in currently. This is similar to the outdated election laws in 2011 and how many became subversive because of those policies.

If provinces were really about “moving education forward”, they would look at removing barriers, not putting them in the way.

The First Step to Change

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I get a lot of emails asking about creating the conditions for change and recently was asked, “As a new principal, what is the first step to create a better learning environment in our school?”

Here is my answer…do nothing.

Too many times people walk into buildings and have some great ideas and they start trying to tweak this, and change that, etc., yet that often alienates the people that you want to get better.

What I would strongly suggest is that you sit back, watch, learn, and figure out what people are great at already and build from there.  You will build relationships and people will trust that when new initiatives begin popping up in your school that you already value their skills and abilities.  Also, this will create a team approach as opposed to the “admin vs. teacher” culture that is prevalent in many schools.

“It takes far less energy to move from  first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.”  Peter Drucker

Looking Forward To?

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Foxtongue

When I was in grade 9, I always remember hearing about the cool project that you would do in Mr. Still’s grade 10 class that had to do with learning about war and peace around the world.  In the project, you would become a fictitious country and each day you were given scenarios of what was happening around the world, then discuss with your group what you would do next.  Each decision had a consequence, and could lead to more violence or peace.  You also had to guess what the other countries would do in situations, and base your responses on these uncertainties.  Our class made it 6 days before we went to an all out World War.  I remember how excited I was about this project, how exhilarated I was during the process, and how it lead me to major in European History in university.

The next year, I anticipated Mr. Bellamy’s class project where you would create a product, and do all of the advertising for it to try and sell it to others.  People would walk out of the class loving this experience, and I remember distinctly creating a new “shoe”, and the accompanying commercial with the release of the product (which had me dunking off of a trampoline which would probably not go over well in a school now in our litigious society!).  This project, again, was one I looked forward to, loved doing, and led me to have a huge interest in media and advertising, even as an educator.

Both projects lived up to their billing and had some impact on what I do now.  Although I am not in “sales” or a politician, both of these experiences show up in some capacity within my career and I am thankful for the opportunity to take part in these meaningful learning opportunities.

With that being said, I honestly do not remember much else about my time in high school in classrooms, outside of those projects.  Of course I remember fun times with friends, playing sports, acting, etc., but I do not remember much about any other distint projects.  Of course I had great teachers that made a huge impact, but these things stick out in my memory.

So when we look at our own classrooms, what do you think gets kids to wake up early in the morning, excited for what they are about to take part in during the day?  We don’t often look enough at our classrooms as a place where students should want to be, and we treat them as a place they have to be.  Every teacher should be, and hopefully goes into the profession to make a difference, not just “teach”.

So are you one of those teachers that has a classroom with these types of projects, or will it be an experience that kids soon will forget?  In my opinion, these types of meaningful learning experiences (that took a lot of work yet were highly engaging) should be present in every classroom.  This is where we go from “pockets of innovation”, to a “culture of innovation”.

What is the learning event(s) that kids look forward to in your classroom?

Making Meaningful Sense of Our World

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Spree2010

I asked a group of teachers, “When you need information, what do you do?”

Think about the question yourself…what do you do?  Do you ask colleagues? Look at encyclopedia? Throw in your “Encyclopedia Britannica” CD Rom into your computer?

What they ALL said (all of them) was that they “google it”.

The ability to google something is important, but assessing that information is imperative.  Many have advocated that students should have the ability to have a device during exams.  Wouldn’t that create a better test?  Finding the information is important, but what you do with the information is where the rubber really hits the road.  If I can google the answer to the test, is the assessment any good?

If you think about it, how many adults go to a textbook to find information? Honestly, why do we even teach with textbooks anymore? Because they are engaging and mirror what we see in the real world or because they are the easiest way to deliver a packaged curriculum? Nowhere outside of schools is “science” that packaged.

Now, when I think about how I look for information, “googling” something is not on the top of my list. Often I ask the question on Twitter and get fewer results which are always better, because they are researched and used by teachers that I have connected with.  Can anyone do that at this moment?  Probably not, but I have taken the time to develop a network of educators that has actually saved me time in the long run.  The time spent following and learning from other educators has been invaluable to my work and is actually a “21st Century Literacy“:

Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought.

I also have learned where to get information on specific things such as hotels. Searching google might lead me to the hotel’s website and let me know what the people who own the place think of it but Trip Advisor tells me what people who have stayed at the establishment think of the place.  How many hotel websites say that their establishment is just “ok”.  Sites like Trip Advisor keep many organizations “honest” and actually forces them to produce a better product.  Having a “name” as a hotel is no longer enough; you have to back it with quality.  If you aren’t using sites like this already, what information are you losing out on?

I have thought a lot about this topic when I saw the following quote:

“When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.” Seth Godin

The technology will always change, but the skill to find information, make sense of it, and then do something meaningful with what we have learned, is essential.

6 Reasons Why You Should Do a “Blog Study”

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cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by carlos.a.martinez

Talking with good friends Tom and Leah Whitford, we were discussing moving staff forward and some of the conversations that drive our thinking.  As I started to think about how many leaders do “book studies”, and have been moving those conversation back and forth from and online and offline setting, I thought about the notion of having a “blog study”.  I know that administrators like Kathy A. Melton have done this before, but I just wanted to write what this could look like.

For example, look at an educator blog (Bill Ferriter, Will Richardson or Dean Shareski could be good options) and have teachers subscribe through email to their posts.  As they write, perhaps have a discussion time once a week or month, on things that were stated in the blog, and whether they agree or disagree, and how those ideas apply to your school.  You can host a chat online through something like twitter, or keep them offline if that is what works best for your community.  Ensure that if you do pick a blog, make sure that it is someone that updates consistently and perhaps connect with the blog author and let them know that you are doing a “blog study” on their work.  This is something that you do not have to do with necessarily an educator blog (Seth Godin would be an interesting one), but I think that it would be more applicable to use a blog on education for schools.

Here are some of the reasons this would be beneficial:

  1. Powerful conversations can start from short time commitments.  Books can be very daunting in any profession where time is always at a minimum.  Reading an entire chapter from a book can take a large amount of time yet a post can take you 30 seconds and still spark a powerful idea. It can be a video that is shared, a quote, a podcast, or whatever medium that the author decides to use.  For some, video is a much more powerful medium to receive a message and resonate in an entirely different way than a written post.  The blog format can give educators an opportunity to have some powerful learning in small amounts of time.
  2. Anywhere, anytime, any place learning.  The nice thing about a blog is that I can access it from any device that I have connected to the Internet.  I can literally be sitting at the doctor’s office and read while I am waiting, or at halftime of a basketball game.  As long as I have my device with me, I can connect to that blog.  Although many people enjoy reading paper books, if you are not carrying that book, you don’t have access.  The Kindle app is a great opportunity to have that anywhere, any time, any place learning, but the blog guarantees that access.
  3. You are truly learning as you go with your staff.  There is a reason that administrators choose the books that they do.  They convey a message that the administrator is in total agreement with and they want to share that message with their staff in some manner.  With a blog, you might not necessarily agree with what the author has said on any day, but the discussion that can ensue is where the real learning can occur.  Yes, you will have an idea of how the author writes, but you have no idea what they are going to say.  The learning that can happen there can be truly authentic and real with your staff which could lead to some interesting conversations.
  4. Interactions with the actual author.  One of the biggest benefits of doing a “blog study” over a traditional book study is that you are more likely to be able to interact with the actual author of the blog.  Through the process of commenting, you can ask for clarifications on ideas, push back, challenge, or even thank the author for the idea.  After you read a chapter you disagree with, there is no opportunity for clarification from that author.  What is written is what you are left with.  More authors see the value in connecting through social media with people that read their books, but you are more likely to get a response from someone who is already sharing openly in that space.
  5. Learning can lead to more learning.  Bloggers rarely only share their own ideas, but often the ideas of others.  I have connected with many great blogs, twitter accounts, and articles by reading specific blogger material.  Learning (again) doesn’t stop at what is written on the page, and you can’t click a physical page in a book.  Many authors reference in books some other books that they have read, yet you have to put down the book, grab your computer, do a search, etc.  With a blog, you click and go.  Who knows that this will lead your staff towards.
  6. Teachers can see the power of blogging to start conversations.  The potential of a teacher of every teacher in a study writing a book is slim to nil.  The opportunity of them deciding that they write a blog is considerably higher.  Seeing the power of sharing ideas in different mediums might inspire them to do the same.  It may also encourage them to explore using this same idea with their students.  I was not comfortable starting my own blog until I was able to see what other blogs looked like and how they shared.  This might be the inspiration that others need to start sharing some of their own ideas and inspiration.

There are ways that you can do this online as well as offline.  Creating your own hashtag or blog space to ask questions can help archive your work, and using sites like Storify can help you share your ideas in a single space in an organized manner.  It can also open the study to others outside of your school.

As I go through these points myself, I think there would be a lot of benefits of trying something like this.  Any other thoughts?  Suggestions for blogs to follow that would be good for this kind of learning?  I think that there could be some real power in this type of learning.

Thanks to Kathy A. Melton for the face-to-face conversation that helped me flesh out these ideas.