Figure 1.2: Ground floor quiz–Ready or not?
CHAPTER 2
Implementing Innovative Practices
It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
—Henry David Thoreau
When I began teaching in the early 1980s, I sifted through the curriculum on my own and taught what seemed important. There were no grade-level standards, no scope and sequence charts, no state tests that counted for anything, and no common planning time. Curriculum was bundled around frameworks that identified a discrete set of skills for each subject area. Teaching was generally an individual endeavor. For the most part, education remained outside the public eye.
To make things more interesting, I made up my own worksheets and crafted special projects to keep students engaged. Students wrote study guides, solved problems of the day, and gave oral reports. I taught subjects in fifty-minute increments sandwiched between morning recess, lunch, and afternoon break. My reading, mathematics, and gifted groups were organized by ability. Textbooks served as the core resource for instruction and classroom activities.
When technology began to make its way into schools, our principal asked teachers to add computer science to the curriculum. At the time, we had a lab of Apple IIe computers and one Commodore 64 per classroom. With the looming opportunity for students to interact with a multimedia universe, I was determined to ensure my students were ready.
The third-grade team pooled our best thinking to design a three-week computer science unit. After a few hours of planning, we felt we had strong lessons that would make our principal proud. Students would learn what a computer did (even though we didn’t really know ourselves), label all the hardware, and understand the differences among a central processing unit (CPU), monitor, keyboard, and floppy disk. An end-of-unit exam would help us assess what our students had learned. To tie everything together, we invited students to make a computer diorama as an at-home project.
At open house, the students prominently displayed the dioramas around our classroom. I have vivid memories of one dad asking if students ever got to use the computer. I proudly responded, “Why, yes. Every week students get thirty minutes in the computer lab. And for students who finish their work early, they’re able to use the classroom computer.” His next question stopped me in my tracks: “What’s the purpose of my son learning about the parts of the computer without really using the computer?” Of course, there was no good answer. Sadly, I had mistaken the technology surge as a learning outcome rather than a learning tool. Little thought had gone into what students should be able to do with the technology. In fact, the hype of having a shiny new object in my classroom led me to assume students would be motivated by this new object too. By neglecting my own professional development about how this tool might accelerate learning, valuable instructional time became a wasted opportunity. I wonder how many of my former students are roaming the halls of the Silicon Valley telling coworkers what they didn’t learn in third grade.
If the goal is to make learning more impactful, we must revolutionize the student experience in innovative ways—otherwise instruction will remain more about us and less about them. Fluid thinking pushes us to tackle common instructional challenges differently than we handled them in the past. With standards, content, technology, and testing forever changing, educators have to rely on next practices rather than best practices. Best practices are about what we do today. Next practices are a playbook for tomorrow. Standing in front of a whiteboard lecturing is not a next practice.
While the term innovation may have become a bit overused, it continues to encapsulate exciting possibilities within our profession. Work is more magical when we design the physical and mental space to experiment with novel ideas. Innovative educators explore new topics with colleagues, and share what they know. They recast instructional strategies to fit the changing times.
This chapter focuses on the first touchstone for future-ready learning: implementing innovative practices (see figure I.1, page 2). These next practices derive from a sense of selflessness, risk taking, time, flexibility, and trust. Within this chapter, readers will discover six characteristics of innovative educators and eight themes that underscore how teachers can innovate in their classrooms in an easy way. The chapter also offers tips and tactics to help practitioners make room for innovation within the confines of the school day and academic year. As mentioned earlier in the book, readers should not view these strategies as a prescriptive formula to get from point A to point B. Rather, the strategies can be mixed, matched, and applied as needed, depending on where their schools or classrooms currently fall on the innovation spectrum. The chapter concludes with Points to Ponder and Rapid-Fire Ideas to kickstart educators on their journey to implementing innovative practices.
Teaching disruptively is about reaching students in new ways … then turning them loose on the world.
—Terry Heick (2018), founder and director, TeachThought
Six Characteristics of Innovative Educators
Innovation hasn’t always been a hot topic in schools. Nowhere in teacher preparation courses or professional development days do we hear much talk about innovative practices. In fact, we as teachers work hard to eliminate uncertainty through step-by-step lesson plans and prescriptive learning experiences. We go to great lengths to identify objectives, use direct instruction to teach these objectives, and define problems we want students to solve. Adding to the concern is how our principal or supervisor will judge our performance. Winging it—as some might think of innovation—is a scary proposition.
Although the conditions in schools aren’t ideal for innovation, there are plenty of educators working hard to mix things up. Before we can ask students to be curious, creative learners, we have to understand the context for this work. The biggest question is where to begin—with ourselves, with our students, or somewhere in between?
Whether we are in search of better approaches to use with struggling learners, trying to improve our school’s results, or looking for ways to ease the worries of an anxiety-ridden student, new processes are necessary to solve age-old problems. Although we all deal with the same testing requirements, budget constraints, and demographic challenges, there are six characteristics that innovative educators have in common (Couros, 2015; Miller, Latham, & Cahill, 2017).
1. Innovative educators are problem finders. Rather than wait for a good problem to surface, innovative educators actively search for problems. They’re just as fascinated with figuring things out as their students are. They ask “why” not to be difficult, but to start a ripple effect that leads to applied innovation.
2. Innovative educators issue grand challenges. Grand challenges are difficult—but important—local, regional, or global events that require unorthodox solutions. From climate change to homelessness, clean water, cyber security, school safety, or aging infrastructure, there is no shortage of grand challenges out there. The aim of a grand challenge is to connect learning outcomes to content and grade-level standards.
3. Innovative educators borrow freely. Breakthrough thinking often resides in people with experiences that differ from our own. It occurs when we leave our familiar box to explore less-conventional alternatives. Innovative educators look outside education for ideas. They borrow freely from imaginative industries to challenge the status quo.
4.