Chapter 5 discusses the importance of shifting the vision by revising and updating your innovation over the long term to take best advantage of technological advancement, as well as using data and formative assessment techniques to measure its impact on your building or district.
Finally, we include two appendices. Appendix A provides a full listing of the lesson plans offered in the other four NOW Classrooms series books, giving administrators an easy reference for individual grade bands. In appendix B, we’ve included a list of hundreds of resources, including apps, technology tools, and websites, as well as potentially unfamiliar technology terms. For each listing, we’ve provided a short description, web link, or other information that teachers and education leaders might find useful in deciding how to incorporate these resources into a classroom.
Similar to the grade-band books, we have included discussion questions at the end of each chapter that can be used for personal reflection or collaborative work with colleagues.
Conclusion
After talking with educators from a variety of schools that have successfully cultivated what we’ve termed a NOW classroom, we learned that there is no single right way to achieve that result. Every school and district is at a different starting point, and all of them face different challenges. Because of this fact, we wrote this book as a choose your own adventure, assuming that leaders would jump to the chapters that best apply to their situations. Your building- or district-level administrative team may also select chapters that specifically address its concerns about technology readiness or effective instructional coaching, as the case may be.
Whatever path you choose to start with, we hope it leads to creating a school full of classrooms where student learning is active, engaging, and purposeful. We suspected we were on the right track with our approach when one peer reviewer told us, “This book should be given to every teacher in a 1:1 classroom.” We believe you will agree.
CHAPTER
1
The Why: Creating and Communicating a Vision for Change
When contemplating any instructional innovation, the most important question a school district can ask itself is, “Why are we doing this?” That why—an inspiring and instructional vision for innovation—needs to be at the very heart of a district’s purpose. Yet all districts wrestle not only with the best way to articulate that vision but also with the best way to communicate it to the stakeholders who will support its implementation. This chapter discusses the importance of stakeholder support and offers advice on beginning the visioning process. We begin by addressing the challenge of helping everyone in a school building adopt the growth mindset necessary for successful innovation.
Establishing Growth Mindsets
The process of building NOW classrooms begins with changing your school community’s underlying culture. As a building or district leader, you can’t simply decree that the culture must change; you need a cyclical plan that cultivates it. The plan involves:
• Creating a vision for changing classroom culture and incorporating technology
• Implementing experiments to build that vision
• Assessing the success or failure of your experiments
• Revising the initial vision accordingly
In other words, successful innovation requires you to follow a cycle of continuous improvement through ongoing testing and reflection.
This type of rapid acceleration requires a whole new approach on the part of everyone involved. Incorporating new technology in the classroom requires flexibility and adaptability. Carol Dweck (2008), a renowned Stanford professor, coined the term growth mindset. By Dweck’s definition, a person with a growth mindset believes he or she has the ability to grow, learn, and change. By contrast, a person with a fixed mindset believes he or she doesn’t have the ability to effect change. As educators, we must use a growth mindset in both our language and our actions to move forward in our improvement of learning for ourselves and our students.
Our goal in every school should be to encourage growth mindsets in everyone in order to prepare our students for an ever-changing world in which they can thrive. To that end, we believe every teacher, parent, coach, and school leader will benefit from reading Dweck’s (2008) book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. We believe that to achieve lasting change with staff and students, everyone—not only students but also stakeholders—must develop a growth mindset in order to approach the process of teaching and learning with digital tools.
Many readers, after finishing the preceding paragraph, will already be able to hear the grumbling from their staff. A fixed mindset does not marry well with the technology innovation we write about; without the belief that it’s possible to become facile with technology through practice, stakeholders will throw in the towel and quit after hitting the first bump in the road. But we suspect that with the increasing prevalence of technology in daily life, the grumbling might not be as bad as it was back in 2007, when many teachers were still struggling to adjust to email and file management.
We all understand that change is hard, period. We also know that it’s our responsibility in education to prepare students for the real world. In other words, it’s our job to prepare our students to embrace change, and that means we need to understand how to embrace it ourselves.
To prepare for an effective vision for change, school leaders need to start by building a growth mindset with all the adults in the school, from the front office to the bus drivers. The language everyone uses with other adults and students should be focused on growth mindset. Used daily, growth mindset language will help to expedite a successful technology innovation. Look for opportunities to acknowledge flexibility and adaptability versus rigidity and a desire to maintain the status quo.
One effective way to get started with this is to have the building staff read Dweck’s (2008) Mindset as a group. The book has a companion website, Mindset Works (www.mindsetworks.com), which staff can use to supplement this reading group. The Growth Mindset Coach: A Teacher’s Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve by Annie Brock and Heather Hundley (2016) is also helpful for bringing a growth mindset into the classroom itself. As you read the book together as a staff, encourage everyone to consider the ways in which a growth mindset might operate in their personal lives and with their families, not just in their jobs as educators.
It may be helpful to read this book as a staff over the summer, since during the school year it can be more difficult to initiate work around a growth mindset while also doing everything else that goes into leading a school. However, if you lay the groundwork for a growth mindset over the summer, you can continue to build on it regularly during the year. For example, you might start every learning event with one key example of growth mindset that you have seen staff or students exhibit. If you lead in this way, soon everyone will start to notice and share his or her own experiences with growth mindset, and the concept will become part of the culture.
One way to start cultivating a growth mindset in the building is to create an empty bulletin board with the word yet by itself in the middle and ask each of your teachers to set a goal for the year, with each goal focused around the idea of yet. For example, a teacher who wants to work on increasing her students’ facility with online research might define her goal as My students don’t know how to do good research online … yet. The staff then writes those goals on colored cards and posts them to the bulletin board, encouraging a very public focus on growth mindset.
Teachers can also start to introduce growth mindsets to students by asking them to create their own yet