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. Innovative educators embrace messiness. Chasing perfection is not part of an innovator’s mindset. Innovative educators welcome a sense of not-yetness—when things aren’t fully under control—by paying heed to the fact that learning and doing are messy.
5. Innovative educators use technology correctly. Innovative educators embrace a coherent approach to technology integration that generates relevant insights. Digitally rich learning comes from using the right technology, at the right time, in the right dosage.
6. Innovative educators are comfortable with mistakes. Innovative educators push the boundaries of teaching by taking risks. Along with risks come mistakes—mistakes with lessons, mistakes with technology, mistakes with timing, mistakes that students make. When teachers make mistakes, they get back up, dust themselves off, decide what went wrong, and have another go at it.
The formula to bring innovative practices into the classroom is actually not formulaic (Couros, 2015). Instead, it’s a combination of methodology, structure, work practices, and ad-libbing. Words like teaching lean, bottom up, and participatory underscore the experience. To avoid innovation limbo, any creative undertaking has to be student-centric and accessible to all.
Eight Themes of Practical DREAMING
By and large, teachers are better executors than innovators. From personal observations and decades working with, supervising, and teaching teachers, I have found that most succeed by sticking with what’s already in place rather than trying something new. With little time to analyze and reflect on professional practice, it’s easier to repeat what learning has been instead of focus on what learning could be. Moreover, the majority of teachers is conditioned to teach students from their own worldview and life experiences. Classroom practices tend to conform to a teacher’s personal beliefs, opinions, and biases.
Within that framework, innovation is an ambiguous term. It can feel like a race with no defined finish line. Hesitation exists among some educators who worry that a less conventional approach won’t work in their classrooms. One California teacher described her own skepticism this way:
Sometimes I think education is a circus. We’re just contained in this tent and we take it down in the summer and we put it back up every fall. In fifteen years of teaching, it never occurred to me to look outside of the tent …. Optimism is not lacking in schools, but it’s all reserved for our students …. If teachers viewed themselves as designers and believed they could affect [sic] change, and really believed in themselves, I think a much better system is possible. (IDEO, 2013)
Clearly, our mindset about the best way to design and deliver content is essential to any innovative process. In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama reminded the nation that thirty years before no one predicted something called “the Internet” would lead to an economic revolution. The President noted that while the future is ours to win, we cannot stand still to get there. To compete for the jobs and industries of the era, America has to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” (Obama, 2011, p. 4). So what will give teachers the confidence and permission they
