NOW Classrooms Leader's Guide. Meg Ormiston

the right thing for the school’s culture, and the success of any innovation ultimately depends on it.

Supporting Stakeholders

      To develop a complete and satisfying innovation—and to ensure that there are no roadblocks to successfully implementing it—districts should ensure that all key stakeholders have a voice when beginning to dream up any major initiative. One of the first steps to take when attempting to answer the question why is to identify those key stakeholders and to engage them in the visioning process.

      Depending on the individual district, the key stakeholders who need to be involved may include school board members, administrators (including technology directors and business officials), teachers, students, parents, or community members. Some districts may already have district leadership teams, which typically include representatives from all of these stakeholder groups. If your district doesn’t—or if it does, but doesn’t include some of the key groups we’ve mentioned—be sure to invite representatives from outside to ensure a minimum of misunderstanding (or interference) later in the process.

      In particular, it’s important to involve school board members from the beginning and to ensure that they’re clear about the why behind your vision. Imagine what might happen if several districts in your area purchased devices and subsequently received a lot of publicity. Members of your own board might be concerned that perhaps the district is more interested in trying to “keep up with the Joneses” by hopping on the new device bandwagon than it is with improving instruction or engaging in a learning innovation. To prevent these concerns from cropping up in your own district, and to avoid any critical miscommunications, it’s very important to involve board members from the outset. Remember: school board members are the stakeholders who represent the community by voting for or against any funding initiatives for infrastructure, devices, or other learning supports. That means that they’re the ones to whom parents and other community residents will address questions about how their money is being spent.

      It’s also imperative for the district’s business officials to be involved in planning and forecasting from the beginning, as the vision may require additional implementation funds for professional development, staffing, or other infrastructure. If business officials are involved early in the process, they’ll be more likely to understand the why behind your innovation, which means that they can argue persuasively on its behalf when it comes to budgeting. This is very important in today’s economic climate, where there are many competing priorities for dwindling public resources.

      Most important, however, as we’ll stress throughout the remainder of this book: it’s imperative to continue dialogue and communication well beyond these initial consultations regarding the why of your innovation. Without information or updates on the progress of implementing your vision, the support you corral early on can quickly drop off.

Developing a Vision

      Now that you have the right stakeholders identified, it’s time to begin working with them to develop a vision. Here are some of the questions we’ve used in the past to guide our thinking.

      • What do we want our schools to look like in the future, and how can we plan for that today?

      • What does quality teaching and learning look like with technology?

      • Why is it critical for our students to connect with one another beyond the walls of the classroom?

      • What skills do our students need in order to be successful in the future world outside of schools?

      Note that none of these questions necessarily depends on any specific devices, platforms, or other resources. At this early stage of the innovation process, we have found that it’s imperative to keep the focus on teaching and learning rather than on devices, infrastructure, and technology personnel. The nuts and bolts will come later to fill out the details of the vision. For now, the desired student outcomes are more important than any specific implementation plans. To that end, in this section, we write about some big-picture items to keep in the forefront of your thinking as you contemplate the why of your vision, including a cautionary note regarding potential counterproductive decision making, a look at essential 21st century skills—the four Cs (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2015) and the SAMR model—and how to manage the visioning process.

      The Paper Police: A Cautionary Note

      Real systemic change requires big thinking and a lot of focused energy. But most important, it requires a good, forward-thinking answer to the question of why—one that always centers around the idea of student learning.

      We caution you to consider what might happen when the will for systemic technology change isn’t accompanied by a strong vision for transforming learning with all key stakeholders and staff members on board. Consider the following possible scenario: a district administrator representing the business office visits an elementary school to speak at a faculty meeting. During the meeting, the administrator presents colorful slides showing paper usage in the building and the total monthly overage charges on the copy machines. The cost of the paper and the overage charges are more than what the district would spend on 1:1 Chromebooks for every student.