Tag: school change

Finding Your PLN #WanderlustEDU #Teacher #Change

If you are feeling lonely in your teacher journey… you are doing it wrong. Teaching is about sharing, collaborating, and growing. The concept of closing the door and focusing only on your own teaching in your own space is not what our profession is all about.

As a second-year teacher, I remember the excitement that ran through me about leading my students to participate in a certain project-based learning activity. I bolted down the hall with great enthusiasm to share my excitement with a veteran teacher I greatly respected. Unfortunately, the teacher’s reaction was cold and even negative. He seemed offended I was trying a strategy he did not believe was worth the time it took. As I thought about it further, I realized this teacher would be the only one not using this new strategy, and perhaps he felt a loss of solidarity as I crossed over to “the dark side.” That encounter taught me a couple of things. First, I realized out-of-the-box thinking can be received in two ways: with fervor or hostility. Each response depends on the person we are sharing the new idea with. I realized the same goes for enthusiasm. While some colleagues find the enthusiasm to be infectious, others perceive it as a threat.

The colleagues that we see face-to-face, I like to think of as our Professional Learning Community (PLC). Our PLC can be a powerful group to grow and change with, but change takes time. Sometimes we need to find a group more in alignment with who are in the moment, social media provides us with the venue to customize our very own Professional Learning Network (PLN). These are people you can connect with at any time about some very unique teaching strategies and concepts that are most meaningful to your growth in-the-moment.

Who are the people in your PLN? Compose a post on you favorite social media site (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc…) and tag your top 5 PLN members. Use #PLN and #wanderlustEDU to share with other readers. Here are a few of my favorite PLN members (there are MANY more).

Understanding who you are in the change process is important. More about you PLC and PLN can be found here… better yet check out Chapter 4: Helping Others Along and Finding Your PLN in WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

Let’s Do This!

September 5, 2019
Who are you? #WanderlustEDU #edtech #teacher #change

Sounds like the makings of a 70’s rock song…

Well, who are you? (who are you? who, who, who, who?)
I really wanna know (who are you? who, who, who, who?)
Tell me, who are you? (who are you? who, who, who, who?)
‘Cause I really wanna know (who are you? who, who, who, who?)

…but I digress.

You can take a personality test, a learning style inventory, or even a which-character-are-you quiz, but I would argue the power of meaningful self-perception. Perhaps a better title for this post would be “Who do you think you are?” It is extremely important that we recognize our strengths and weaknesses in our professional practice, such recognition can lead to real, positive growth. While you may take up the role of champion as a general way of perceiving your fit within your school system, we may find ourselves identifying with one adopter category or another when discussing emergent technology. We call these categories: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. Adopter categories can be illustrated on a bell curve on the basis of innovativeness.

If you were to identify yourself as an adopter of innovation, where do you think you would fit in?

Image originally illustrated in Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations. New York: Free Press.

Make a mental note about what you think your “adopter category” is.

Now let’s try one of those tests. Think about your overall approach to innovation or change, compare all five words in each row and rank the words from 1 to 5.

1 = not me at all
2 = not very much like me
3 = sometimes like me
4 = often like me
5 = most like me

You may want to do this on a piece of paper and list out A – DD. Then tabulate your responses in the “TOTALS” row… and keep reading for the interpretation of your results.

Now that you have gone through this check the results here.

Understanding who you are in the change process is important. More about each of the categories and understanding people involved in change can be found here… better yet check out Chapter 3: Who Are You? in WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

Let’s Do This!

August 27, 2019
Navigating a successful teacher journey #WanderlustEDU #teacher @edtechteam

Let’s be honest, there are times in our teaching careers when we feel anxiety, frustration, trapped, and/or apathetic. These are hardly the hallmarks of a successful, well-loved career. So then what can we do to navigate our teacher journey successfully? First, we need to understand what is going on… and lucky for us there is a field of study that can directly address our needs: human performance technology. I know sounds a bit nerdy or overly scientific-y (that’s a word, right?), but from this field, Dr. Joe Harless developed the Performance Success Model, that I have framed this way:

Charting the impact of each of these areas is the first step in understanding more about how we work and what we need to be the best version of ourselves. There’s more on the topic developed here… better yet check out Chapter 2: Setting Up Your Journey For Success in WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure.

Let’s Do This!

August 20, 2019
Why did you become a teacher? #WanderlustEDU #teacher #Change

Now is the perfect time to reflect on this very important question…

Why did you become a teacher? Or why did you get involved in education?

Perhaps it was a person that made a difference in your life. Or maybe you just really like working with children or young adults. Take a minute and just think about your WHY (it’s a really big deal).

Equally important is to identify what it is that keeps you teaching day to day.

Once you feel good about your answer(s), SHARE them with the world! Go to Twitter and tweet your response using these two hashtags: #whyiteach #wanderlustEDU

I will tweet nice things back to you… better yet, will you join me in commenting on what others have to say about this?

Let’s Do This!

Available now on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

August 13, 2019
Education is changing because the world is changing. Are you ready for change? #WanderlustEDU #innovation #teacher #change #edtech @edtechteam

WanderlustEDU: An Educator’s Guide to Innovation, Change, and Adventure is the perfect book to guide you in change.

Available now on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

Our journey in education is one of constant iteration, managing change both personally and professionally is what we have to do because the world is changing. WanderlustEDU is a book about that change. In WanderlustEDU we learn to appreciate the journey we are on in education by revisiting our core purposes for doing what we do, and by learning about what lies ahead. Navigating change is difficult for anyone, but when it comes to navigating those changes on behalf of our students’ future there is a special onus to do it right. WanderlustEDU is a great read for anyone who works in this state of change as a teacher, a coach, or as an administrator. This book focuses on the most important aspect of change: the people… who together form a culture perfectly capable of innovating. No matter the scale, successfully innovating means understanding the effects of change on ourselves and those around us. Without a clear understanding of what change does to people, we can end up surrounding ourselves in an anxious, frustrated, trapped, and apathetic school culture. We must understand that to successfully innovate, it is always about the people who have to embrace a new situation and carry out the corresponding change.

Let’s Do This!

August 8, 2019

Understanding School Culture

“The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization.”

– Ken Blanchard

Schools are a funny thing. No really. Have you ever stood in front of a class of students and thought, “I am glad they do not realize that there are way more of them than me” or “Oh no, I’ve lost control, what do I do now?” I have found it is best to keep these as inside-thoughts. Where else do you have a small authoritarian rulership (administrators and teachers) oversee a body of free people (students) with little to no voice in decisions, who vastly outnumbered their oppressive rulers, yet we find relatively few uprisings? Sounds like the making of a dystopian young adult novel… super meta.

In education, we plan very hard to organize and arrange our careers, content, and clientele into a predictable structure of choices and consequences. Our preloaded, university-education-based decisions are not always very realistic. Our best-laid plans do not always work out. The Teacher Experience (TX) we gain on our journey prepare us more than almost anything else. A map of our journey that clearly lays out all possible outcomes for classrooms and schools, frankly, does not exist. The teacher journey better reflects a “Choose Your Own Adventure Story” where we keep trying for the best outcome.

We have learned to organize our schools and our school days to maximize learning potential in the most effective and efficient ways possible… or at least that’s what we tell ourselves. The way we think about schools in terms of a hierarchy can, of course, support certain levels of efficiency, but it is important that we do not allow this structure to define us and box us in declaring “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” Our most basic school organizational structures we have reporting lines that operate with certain levels of interaction between school administrators, teachers, students, parents, and our communities.

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These interactions, particularly the lateral ones do little to support or encourage interdisciplinary instruction and therefore support one of the greatest detriment of modern education, silos. Silos, or cross-content barriers, illustrate industrial revolution thinking around preparing an individual for a certain task in a certain place. Think of a traditional assembly line where a worker adds one single widget to one machine, they do this as they have been trained to with no real comprehension of all of the moving parts. This training and preparation for tasks can be seen in the lack of interdisciplinary instruction we often see.

Conway’s Law

According to Conway’s Law, the lines by which we explain our interactions with each other can tell us about ourselves (2). An organizational system built on sharing and collaboration will look very different than that of which fosters a competitive atmosphere. Take for example this satirical look at Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.

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Would a review of our school hierarchical structures match conversations with teachers and administrators over the same communication structure? Would we be Google or Apple… or Microsoft? Would we see instructional silos which limit our collaboration? Would an exploration of our school building schedules reveal an even worse case of ubiquitous isolation? If so, we have just identified a barrier in growing a culture of innovativeness, we have to spend time with each other to develop and establish our shared cultural norms, our shared beliefs about school.

The Activity System

In education, we develop school-wide vision statements that explain our educational focus and mission statements (which explain how we are going to get there). The process of developing these should take into account all the activity that goes on in our schools and communities. While accurately reflecting who we are. The word “activity” represents a cultural phenomenon (4) which is unique to each school context. We cannot automatically generalize our context-specific activities to other settings when we discuss school culture we want to be as specific as possible about what “school” we are talking about. Analysis of a school building will yield a more intimate result than of a school district. Therefore, we must first decide on the school to be explored.

With our specific school in mind, we need to understand how all the actual moving parts are connected we call this an Activity System. Our understanding of the Activity System can go a long way in increasing our understanding of how our school cultures work and more importantly how to help us toward innovativeness. The Activity System illustrates how we engage in achieving organizational goals (school vision). The system points out that we must seek to describe the subject(s), object, outcome, tools, community, rules, and division of labor and how they are interconnected, in order to understand the full picture of our school culture at work. This provides us with a critical lens, a context-template, to investigate the unique activity of innovation adoption within our school culture. In short, we can better understand our rich journey by exploring it with this magnifying glass called the Activity System (5).

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The many moving parts each dynamically contributing to the school vision (GOAL) we hope to achieve. In the case of this book, the quest for innovativeness, let us frame the “vision” as a school culture that embraces innovativeness. To making full use (and sense) of the Activity System we must then describe the various components involved (see School Culture Analysis Chart).

Here’s how to think about all the components:

Goals – are the vision statement which explains your school’s focus to embrace innovativeness.
Community – comprises people that share in the same general mission. They consist of people that share a set of social meanings relevant to their context.
Object – for our quest for innovativeness discussion, is TPACK, a mission for a school to embrace innovativeness. TPACK illustrates that the teacher experience (TX) is dynamically formed and reformed by the interconnectedness of content, pedagogy, and technology.
Rules – refer to the regulations, norms, and conventions that constrain actions and interactions within the activity system. Economically speaking, these are the financial opportunities and limitations that inform a school’s activity process.
Division of labor – refers to the work requirements to be fulfilled by the subjects. The functionality of a school’s hierarchical structure is a school’s own cultural phenomenon.
Tools – can be methods employed and/or the devices (technology) used by the subjects toward fulfilling their work requirements. We not only use tools, we also continuously renew and develop them, whether consciously or not, further we not only obey the rules, we also mold and reformulate them while we work. The tools are as dynamic a part as any to the Activity System.
Subject – describe Faculty and Staff as Adopters (Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards), literally we need to list who fits within these categories when framing our understanding around innovation.

Thinking through the components of the Activity System (1,5) (before moving forward) can help us to frame powerful insights into our school culture. Recreate and complete the School Culture Analysis Chart before moving on:

School Culture Analysis Chart

Goal	Vision – What will be produced?	Innovativeness
Community	How would you describe your school community? Locally? Regionally? How are they connected?	Building(s) – District – Region – Organizational Hierarchy –
Object	What types of interventions might work to help create a culture of innovation?	TPACK
Rules	Content area requirements? Diploma fulfillment requirements? Financial opportunities and barriers to adopting emerging technology? Technology deployment strategy?
Division of Labor	How does your school’s organizational hierarchy look? (Who are people accountable to?)
Tools	What technology-based solutions are available? (hardware and software) What learning environments are available?	Devices (hardware) Apps/Extensions (software) Open Rooms/Flexible Spaces
Subjects	Who are the people in your school?	Innovators – Early Adopters – Early Majority – Late Majority – Laggards –

Once you identify the different components of your school culture, it is time to dive into what is going on. Perhaps the most important piece to this cultural analysis puzzle is how each part interacts. The arrowed-lines that connect each of the components are meant to force us to investigate more than just who or what is in place. Looking at the lines, ask yourself the following (4,6):

Does the Community actually inform Tool adoption and expectations?
Do Subjects have the ability to take risks and try new things or are they confined to their job as described in the Division of Labor? What are the approval channels for Faculty and Staff to innovate?
Can Subjects inform the adoption of specific Tools? How?
Do the Rules and Community allow/want Subjects to adopt emergent technology?
Do the actual activities of Adopters match up with the Division of Labor? Are their reporting gaps?
Tools change over time… What funding is in place to support this? What funding can be pursued?
Who has a voice in the decision-making process?
- Parents?
- Teachers?
- Students?
- Administrators?
- School Board?
- The Workforce?
Whose voice is not heard?

Contradictions

We then can summarize our school culture in terms of how are we achieving TPACK as individuals and as a school culture. We must also discuss the contradictions between how we defined the components and how they actually work. Do not regret having contradictions, they are very important to the innovation adoption process. Contradictions are the moving force, the disruption necessary, for the change and development of the system (1). As the contradictions come to the surface, we can expect, some of our Adopters to begin to question and deviate from our established norms5 which is just the change we often need. Contradictions can escalate into collaboration and a deliberate collective change effort (5).

The Activity System illustrates how the multiple variables in our schools are involved in the success or failures of our Vision. The Activity System provides a critical lens to investigate the activity of innovation adoption within an organization. The Activity Aystem reports on our living/breathing school culture as best it can, as a snapshot in time. School is not stagnant, not totally predictable. Reiteration, Reformation, and Redefining are tenants to design and development of school cultures embracing innovativeness (4). As educators if everything went as planned, every time, we would likely question what we did wrong or what we missed. But the discussion around the activity at our school centers on an in-the-moment analysis. A more clear understanding of where we have been and where we are going can be found by exploring the process on which we embark on this epic disruptive saga.

Image Credit: Chris Stein, a superstar Teacher, and illustrator Extraordinaire!

Source Notes (in order of use)

Engeström, Y. (1996). Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory: The case of primary care medical practice. In S. Chaiklin & S. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (First., pp. 64–103). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Amrit, Chintan, Jos Hillegersberg, and Kuldeep Kumar. “A social network perspective of Conway’s law.” Proceedings of the CSCW Workshop on Social Networks, Chicago, IL, USA. 2004. https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/iebis/staff/amrit/SocialNetworksConwaysLaw_latest.pdf
Cornet, M. (A reimagined illustration based on the work of Manu Cornet). Featured in the New York Times, Business Day section July 12, 2013.
Jonassen, D. H., & Rohrer-Murphy, L. (1999). Activity Theory as a Framework for Designing Constructivist Learning Environments. Education Technology Research and Development, 47(I), 61–79.
Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133–156. doi:10.1080/13639080020028747.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. Retrieved from http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/Engestrom/Learning-by-Expanding.pdf

November 8, 2018

Teacher: Know Thyself – School Culture Shift is about the people
“Courage is contagious.

When a brave man takes a stand,

the spines of others are often stiffened.”

– Billy Graham

Think: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, every good quest-adventure story has a team of contributors, each with a special skill set that contributes to the team’s successes. They fumble about lampooning the human experience on their way to epic saga-like success. We are often engaged by both their plight and how we can relate to them. A key character in these stories is the hero, or champion.

If you are reading this blog post it is likely that you are the champion, my friend, and that you will keep on fighting until the end, since there’s no time for losers, cause you are the champion of the world…. but I digress.

Champions

Many champions feel more like an imposter than an expert or leader. Perhaps it is this feeling that drives champions to keep learning and growing toward mastery. The mastery for the future is not in a tool or workflow solution, it is found in innovativeness, in the champion’s ability to change.

A champion is someone that is instrumental in successfully guiding projects through the approval hurdles: displaying persistence, expressing strong conviction in the innovation, and involving key individuals.1 In our quest for innovativeness we can embrace this role for ourselves and/or find allies within these ranks. The adoption of an innovation by an organization is more likely if key individuals (champions) are willing to support the innovation.2

This willingness is extremely important. We can very easily take the role of bystander in our school community. The bystander effect3 is a scary aspect of the human experience that we must all work against. It explains to us that we may look at a problem as “not ours” or that “someone else will take care of it.” This is a paralyzing condition that actively works against positive change in our schools. Champions are just the people who believe in positive change.

Champions are the organizational mavericks, they exist within a system but are given autonomy to explore alternative, creative solutions. They can be transformational leaders, who harnesses support from other members of the organization.2 The impact of a champion on both the adoption and sustainability of an innovation is undeniable. Selecting individuals who display these particular champion behaviors can increase the probability that adoption of innovation occurs.1 A champion in the organizational adoption process is someone who possess the certain attributes and skills. Champions are credible experts and planners that can network well with colleagues since they are perceived as sensitive to colleagues needs by demonstrating an objective approach to finding meaningful solutions. An innovation champion must be tenacious, assertive, decisive and should instill passion and positive thinking in the innovation process.4

Adopters

You can take a personality test, a learning style inventory, or even a which-character-are-you quiz, but I would argue the power of meaningful self-perception. Perhaps a better title for this chapter would be “Who do you think you are?” It is extremely important that we recognize our strengths and weaknesses in our professional practice, such recognition can lead to real, positive growth. While you may take up the role of champion as a general way of perceiving your fit within your school system, we may find ourselves identifying with one adopter category or another when discussing emergent technology. We call these categories: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.5 Adopter categories can be illustrated on a bell curve on the basis of innovativeness.

Read through the descriptions below with one type of emergent technology and see how you fit. For example if the topic was gaming in the classroom: who do you think you are?

Innovators: “Lets do this!”

Innovators are interested in new ideas from outside of established local social system. Able to understand and apply complex technical knowledge. Innovators must be able to cope with a high degree of uncertainty about an innovation at the time of adoption. Innovators are risk takers, they learn from failure like a gamer.

Early Adopters: “Describe the value in it and how to do it and I am all in!”

Early Adopters are invested and respected in the local school community. They are cautious and want their efforts informed by research if not best practices. Early Adopters are not known for risk taking, but have a reputation for well-thought out execution of emergent technology. Change agents seek this group out a local voice missionary for speeding the adoption of innovation.

Early Majority: “Show me my colleagues using it and I will try it too.”

The Early Majority adopt just before the average person making them an important link in seeing the adoption process successfully take off. The Early Majority wants to employ best practices based on the experiences of Innovators and Early Adopters. They will make the necessary changes but do not want to go first.

Late Majority: “I am a team player, I will support this but I probably will not be the best at it.”

The Late Majority adopts just after the Early Majority. They adopt sometimes due to economic pressure, peer pressure, or both. The Late Majority must see the innovation as already being successful before they adopt. You might call the Late Majority our “team players” since they are willing to join the other adopters once they realize it is for the greater good. The Late Majority may not be super excited about technology of any particular kind but they make the change for the benefit of their school community.

Laggards: “I am not convinced this will benefit my classroom. I have done fine without it.”

Laggards are near isolates in the school community. Their point of reference is past practice and past perceived successes. Laggards must be positively certain that a new idea will not fail before they can adopt. They are concerned about being blamed if the innovation fails to yield expected results.

A review of these adoption categories is relevant for several reasons, it will help us predict how our colleagues may feel about adopting emergent technology, and this review will help us understand how to find Early Adopters who often have respected Champions in their ranks. Further, these adoption categories help us to better understand the sphere of influence each adopter has. For example, an Innovator can inspire Early Adopters and potentially some Early Majority, but would be hard pressed to motivate a Laggard. Why? Innovators can be seen as people doing some pretty far out there stuff, beyond the skill set of later adopters. Innovators, by definition are risk takers, they accept failure in a ways that make some people uncomfortable. This is why Early Adopters often serve as more effective Champions, they make up a larger percentage of people and have a reputation for a more measured approach to adoption.

Derek Siver’s Ted Talk “The First Follower: Leadership Lessons from a Dancing Guy”6 illustrates the importance of Early Adopters in the Adoption process (If you have not seen this three-minute video, please check it out). Siver’s explains that a Leader (Innovator) has the guts to stand out and be ridiculed, but that does not start a movement. The First Follower (Early Adopter) who joins the Leader validates the movement (Adoption) and makes it appear less risky for others to follow. These Late Adopters model their behaviors of after the First Follower, not the Leader. The movement gains momentum and then we see a real shift in cultural adoption. In this account, we must understand that the Leader treats the First Follower as an equal, as a co-leader.

Additional key roles include opinion leaders who have informal influence and change agents who positively influence innovation decisions. Change agents work to develop a need for change on the part of the client, establish an information-exchange relationship, diagnose the client problem, develop an action plan, implement, and shift the client from reliance on the change agent to self-reliance.5,7

Decision Making

If you are a decision maker for a school or organization there are multiple types you might consider which affect the adoption of innovation process. These types might even be considered steps toward adopting innovation: (1) Optional innovation-decisions, (2) Collective innovation-decisions, and (3) Authority innovation-decisions.

Optional innovation-decisions: The choice to adopt or reject an innovation is made by an individual independent of the decisions by other members of a system. The individual’s decision can be influenced by the norms of the system and by communication through interpersonal networks.5 An example of this may be a teacher from a school choosing to go paperless at their school while their colleagues continue to teach with paper.

Collective innovation-decisions: The choice to adopt or reject an innovation is made by consensus among the members of a system.5 An example of this may be like the above-mentioned person, except at a department level choosing to go paperless.

Authority innovation-decision: The choices to adopt or reject an innovation is made by a relatively few individuals in a system who possess power, high social status, or technical expertise.5 An example of this may be where upper-level leadership has decided their school community will go paperless so they will no longer purchase printers, ink or service photocopiers.

As a leader, if you were to allow your Innovators and Early Adopter, the flexibility to make optional innovation-decisions. Their successes may naturally lead the Early and Late Majority joining them in a collective innovation-decision. Finally, it may take the authoritative approach to move the Laggards forward in the desired adoption.

If perhaps you were to approach this same list of categories with topics like Virtual and Augmented Reality, the Maker Movement, Coding, and/or Robotics… you may find yourself in a different adopter category. The Maker Movement’s Innovator may also be the Robotic’s Laggard, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all learn and grow at different speeds and in different ways. Identifying the value of emergent technology within the context of our classroom needs and content is the first step toward becoming a change-agent in our professional communities. The level of perceived relevance in our classroom will likely inform our adoption category and approach with any innovation. Once a specific innovation becomes a seamless part of our classroom we have reached the pinnacle of innovative adoption.

Image Credit: Chris Stein, a superstar Teacher, and illustrator Extraordinaire!

Source Notes
1. Howell, J., Shea, C., & Higgins, C. (2005). Champions of product innovations: Defining, developing, and validating a measure of champion behavior. Journal of Business Venturing, 20(5), 641-661. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com.libezproxy2.syr.edu/science/article/pii/S088390260400075 8#
2. Greenhalgh, T., Robert, G., Macfarlane, F., Bate, P., & Kyriakidou, O. (2004). Diffusion Of Innovations In Service Organizations: Systematic Review And Recommendations. The Milbank Quarterly, 82(4), 581-629. Retrieved from: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0887-378X.2004.00325.x/full
3. Darley, J. M. & Latané, B. (1968). “Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 8: 377–383. doi:10.1037/h0025589. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9c2f/63826605843d83fd08f56fbf75790cf74614.pdf. Accessed 17 Apr. 2018.
4. Daily, Alisia (2014). “Social Innovation and Innovation Champions: An Analysis of Public and Private Processes.” Diss. Virginia Commonwealth U, 2014. Abstract. VCU Scholars Compass, n.d. Web. <https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=4460&context=etd>.
5. Rogers, E.M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.
6. Sivers, D. “Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy | Derek Sivers.” https://sivers.org/dancingguy. Accessed 17 Apr. 2018.
7. Clarke, R. (1999, Sept). Roger Clarke’s innovation diffusion theory. Retrieved from http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/InnDiff.html
September 16, 2018
Innovativeness is the Pedagogy for the Future #edtech #wanderlustEDU

The journey of the educator is much like a quest. We strive to successfully gather the necessary skills and knowledge loading our brains and backpacks (teacher toolkit) with what we think will best benefit our students. But like any journey our supplies and frame of thinking need to be constantly refreshed, a state of constant change (innovativeness). Our supplies might be a new instructional strategy or program, but often the newest thing is perceived as a form of technology.

What is it about technology that compels us to believe it is a necessary component for a well-rounded education? We inventory how much of it we have, how many times it is used, and ask ourselves if we need more of it? Maybe we should stop and ask ourselves exactly what is it that we are talking about.

Perhaps you are feeling a little overwhelmed about trying to keep up with the latest technology and the newest thing for your classroom or school? Did you know that the pencil, the original 1:1 device, took nearly 100 years to be widely adopted in education?

It seemed that with each new decade, the 20th century brought some new thing for the classroom.

But the critical eye would notice that much of these tools would remain, overlapped in purpose, for a long time. Much of our instructional practices today have been informed by these tools, rather than good pedagogy informing how to use these tools. We must allow technology to amplify good instructional practice, rather than tell us what good practice is. Overtime cost of new technology have been reduced leading to an increase in accessibility, but accessibility does not equate to need.

To accept that incorporating emergent technology into our students’ educational experience is indeed a major step for successfully preparing for our future. But beyond that, the struggle comes between deployment and employment of new technology. To deploy is to distribute, but to employ infers activity in which one engages.

We use the word technology in the most simple sense to mean a tool used by mankind to achieve certain goals. Yet, the modern dictionary focuses on a different aspect of the word, pointing out that technology transcends a physical object and infers application, capability, and methods of accomplishing a task, in short, new technology might be thought of as a better workflow.

Educational institutions at every level struggle with the effective and efficient uses of new devices, new strategies, new workflows. Schools easily assess the quantity of instructional hardware but often express concern that the devices are just not being used. We must move past the 20th-century bravado which pointed to the quantity of computers we possessed and grow to foster learning communities where technology is simply the workflow we use to produce powerful learning experiences and the platform we employ to provide our learners with voice. Yes, we still boast about quantity, we have just changed our language and now say “we are a 1:1 school.”

Our concerns about how, when, and why instructional technologies are being used are merely symptoms of a greater problem, we need to foster a culture that embraces innovativeness. The word innovation refers to something new or to a change made to an existing invention (product, idea, or field), like the invention of the telephone led to the innovation of the smartphone. Can we begin to think about schools as inventions in need of innovation? We must frame our thinking around our school culture, as a collective understanding about where we are and where we need to be.

A school culture that embraces innovativeness is a group of people who chose to frame their thinking around change. Recognizing the need to dynamically approach innovation, in the form of tools and interventions, and realizing they will never arrive at a place where they can rest on the laurels of past successes. The idea of innovativeness is both exciting and scary: cutting-edge applications of emergent technology, embracing failure as a necessary component of the learning process, trying new things and falling in love with the process… but this mindset becomes an expectation, the way we now operate is, no cruise control, no this-is-the-way-we-have-always-done-it, we now are always changing.

So why choose this path? Why choose a state of constant change… the way of innovativeness? The path has been chosen for us. In the case of emergent technology, we cannot assume a static approach to teaching and learning is productive, we must consider technology to be dynamically changing, and thus triggers consequent changes in how we function. It is difficult to confront, but we know that our high-tech smartphones and tablets are the lowest form of technology our students will ever know. Simply integrating new technology will not change our practice, adopting a positive approach to innovation will lead to a paradigm shift. Innovativeness is the pedagogy for the future.

Image Credit: Chris Stein, a superstar Teacher, and illustrator Extraordinaire!

September 16, 2018