Innovate Inside the Box

In the initial chapters of their new book, Innovate Inside the Box, authors George Couros and Katie Novak tackle the common barriers to progress in education. They argue that despite the many, many constraints educators face, there is room for innovation, improvement, and meeting the needs of ALL students if we maintain an Innovator's Mindset and adopt a Universal Design for Learning.

It's easy to feel defeated by constraints. There are so many that it can feel overwhelming. For example, time is the most obvious one. Not only do teachers feel there is not enough time to teach what they need and want their students to learn, they also feel there is never enough time to work with their colleagues to improve their instruction. The challenge is to remain open to new ways of thinking through these challenges and working with what you have. People have to be willing to try something new and give it a chance before re-evaluating and revising the plan.

Another constraint educators often encounter are the expectations of others. Often based on tradition and not on best practice, people hold on to the way it's always been and resist attempts to change in the name of improvement. Helping resistant people, whether they are fellow educators or parents or even students themselves, understand that school as we know it isn't working as well as it used to is crucial. Today's students have been impacted by multiple traumas in many cases and have different social-emotional needs. In addition, they have different learning styles having come from different developmental experiences and family structures. Finally, the world needs people with different skills. The problems we face require innovative problem-seekers not compliance-trained box checkers.

An additional constraint exists within the standards that are handed down to educators as well the mandatory assessments that are designed to measure student success in meeting those standards. Teachers feel forced into a delivery model of instruction in order to ensure that they've covered their required material with students. Teachers need the time and support to learn a new model of instruction in which students can discover and develop the skills they need for their success both now and in the future. There is room for this within the standards, but so many educators don't take the time to examine the possibilities more closely by asking some of the tough questions: For whom is school working? For whom is it not working? Why? What kind of learning environment, process, and model is best for our students? What do we need to do differently to get there?

As I work with the educators in my school in the never-ending quest to improve our instruction for the benefit of our students, I need to maintain an Innovator's Mindset while navigating constraints. I can continually look for opportunities and possibilities when obstacles arise, create new solutions and ideas for growth, and use other people's success to create our own success.

Because I am a connected educator, I am a better educator. I am active on Twitter for professional use, I listen to educator-produced podcasts, I read professional books or listen to them on Audible, and I read education blogs. These experiences not only enrich my professional practice, they also give me total control over my professional development. I can learn about the topics that are relevant to me, from educators I respect, and at a time that fits my busy life. Often these experiences have an indirect impact on my work in that I might be introduced to a new idea that I continue to research or I may read a post that reinforces the work that I am already doing, helping to build my confidence in the decisions I am making. Other times the impact is immediate.

Recently I was listening to AJ Juliani’s podcast, Scratch Your Itch, on my way to work where I was facilitating a professional development session for teachers. Juliani’s topic for that podcast was the power of storytelling. He said: Our brains pay special attention to stories, engaging more areas of the mind then when we hear or see facts. And when we learn a good story, our brains synthesize the neurochemical oxytocin. This helps us feel others’ emotions and empathize with them.

As I listened to Juliani talk, I was nodding my head as I drove. I have always had emotional responses to stories. They help me visualize, connect, imagine, empathize, and more. Incorporating more storytelling in my interactions with students, staff, and families seemed like a move toward being a more effective communicator. I realized that an opportunity to try this new idea presented itself that very morning at a professional development workshop for my staff.

I opened the session by announcing to the teachers in attendance that I had a story to tell. I described how one day that week I was in the computer lab helping a second grade class get started on their mid-year benchmark tests. I told the group that, as I walked around, making sure that all students were successfully working, I noticed that some students had single sentence with a fill-in- the-blank questions while others had longer, multi-paragraph questions. When I mentioned this to the teacher, she told me she had let the students know to expect tougher questions the more they answered correctly. She told them to just keep trying their best.

The teacher and I happened to be standing behind a young student who often struggled with reading. He receives special education services and has IEP goals for reading. As we stood there, watching his computer screen, a new question popped up...it was a multi-paragraph question. This young student whipped his head around to grin at his teacher. The pride on his face was apparent and contagious. He was truly seeing this testing session as an opportunity to show what he knew and greeted the challenge of a tough question eagerly.

I thanked the teachers in the workshop for their work to make mid-year benchmark testing as positive an experience as possible for their students, for framing testing as an opportunity for students to show how their hard work this year has paid off so far, and to help students set goals for improvement. The focus on my words was intense. More than ever before, I knew I had gotten the teachers’ attention with my story. They were able to catch a glimmer of the message I had been sharing for months about creating a positive testing environment for students and helping them set goals around their performance as a step toward improving results. They were connecting to my message.

I am so grateful that I clicked AJ Juliani’s podcast that morning. His words, like those of so many other amazing and forward thinking educators that I have the opportunity to learn from, are most definitely a large part of the success that I have experienced in my career. As a lifelong learner, I will continue to benefit from being a connected educator.