5 Barriers to Innovation

What is best for the student?

Dedicated educators are constantly asking themselves this question as we strive to create innovative learning experiences for our students. We need--our students need--new ideas and inventions that fly in the face of the status quo and transform our schools.

While our education systems has made great strides in recent memory, we need to do more. So why aren’t we making the necessary innovations?

5 Barriers to Innovation

Isolation Many teachers believe, “I’m doing fine. My students are doing fine,” they shut their classroom doors and go about their business. Even the most reflective teacher, who remains isolated, lacks the ability to share and learn from others.

For many years, I was an isolated teacher, one who was successful but whose growth was limited by my isolation. I was perfectly content to shut my classroom door and teach. In truth, it wasn’t until I became an administrator that my perspective widened as I began observing and communicating with peers.

Budgetary Constraints  Expansive collaboration--like shared collaborative planning time--requires time and money and many innovative ideas require increased funding.

For ten years, I was part of a high-functioning  freshman transition team. As part of our vision, we wanted to go to 1:1 technology. Our school administration was on board, we asked the higher ups for money, but alas no money was available. We wrote grant or two. Again a no go. We gave up. Back to traditional paper and pencil teaching.

Risk Intolerance: A child’s future is in the hands of his/her teachers. A failed standardized test can mean a student doesn’t graduate. Of course, many teachers are either formally or informally judged based on their students’ test scores. School communities, including the families they serve, are not risk tolerant.

After taking my class, students took a state-mandated standardized test; for many of my students this was their best chance to earn a required social studies credit. I’m proud to say that my students did extremely well on the test. But, knowing the “importance” of the test, I was always reluctant to take a risk, weighing the risks vs the consequences, far too often I stuck with the status quo.

Fads Filled with cynicism, many teachers see the next wave of innovation as a fad. I heard one teacher exclaim, “I’ve been doing this for so long. I’ve seen it all. Portfolios, technology, project-based learning. It’s all the same. It’ll come and it’ll go. Just like everything else.”

Innovative ideas, whether a fad or not, often complicate teachers’ work leading to disheveled implementation, dumbed-down instruction and ineffective instruction. Finding the appropriate balance between improvement and innovation

Control Who controls the decision-making in your school? In one system where I taught we were prohibited from straying from the state curriculum. Observing administrators opened up the state framework and tallied instructional time into three categories (black: directly related to the prescribed curriculum, white: outside of what should be taught, and gray: information that falls somewhere between black and white). Needless to say, “effective” teachers spent most instructional time in the black. Teachers were rewarded for PowerPoints that essentially copied and pasted from the state curriculum.

In writing this blog, I came across the stark realization that schools were not designed to innovate and are inherently risk avoidant. Innovation is risky, causing many people to run away from it and it’s almost become reflexive for many educators to say, “We’ve never done this before,” or “That won’t work.”

Too often we fall back on what is easy, what’s known or what’s comfortable.

We despiritedly ask, "Why bother?"

Innovation means working towards our ultimate goal of improving lives. Our mission as educators is to ensure each student reaches their potential, and we must constantly explore ways to ensure this happens. We must do what's best for our students. 

What are some barriers to innovation that you've experienced? Or better yet, that you've overcome?


Related Blogs
Creating a Risk-Taking Classroom 
Administrators Role in Encouraging Risk-Taking  

Going Beyond Standards

Several months ago I wrote about embracing risk-taking in our schools (here, here, and here). Wanting to show my confidence in our teachers and to encourage risk-taking, I talked to teachers about stepping beyond their comfort zones. I attempted to ensure teachers that risks were not just acceptable; they are desirable.

After a couple of initial conversations, I realized one of the largest impediments to risk-taking was—and is—our state standardized tests, the SOLs. Teacher after teacher commented, “I’d like to try something different, but the SOLs.” With so much emphasis placed on SOLs from the federal, state and local governments, school administrators (including me), parents and students, who could blame them for not wanting to diverge from the state’s curriculum?

The teachers’ motives made perfect sense? I don’t want to be the one responsible for a student not passing the SOL/earning their advanced diploma/graduating. Hard to argue with logic like that.

Only a couple of years removed from teaching, I too fell victim to over-emphasis on standardized tests. Now I had to plead to the teachers to do what I said, not what I did. To best move teachers—anyone for that matter—I’ve always found it best to ask questions instead of preach to them. Below are some of the questions I asked:  

1.     Why did you enter teaching? Not so amazingly, none of the teachers said, “So I could teach a prescribed curriculum and my students will ace the SOLs.”

2.     What is it that you want students to get out of your class?

3.     Where’s your passion?

4.     How can you pass that passion on to your students?

5.     What would your students say if you tried something different?

6.     Tell me about some of your most successful lessons and what made them successful.

Most of the teachers seemed to enthusiastically embrace risk-taking and the idea of going beyond the SOLs. I promised to support them. Undoubtedly, failures will occur. I ended each conference with a simple message, “I’m going to support you and I look forward to working with you and seeing the changes.”

Now about those standardized tests...

Creating a Risk-Taking Classroom Environment

As teachers, we know the importance of investing our time and energies into building trust and relationships with our students.

But just because your students trust you, doesn’t mean they’re ready to take risks. For true risk-taking to occur, students need to trust their classmates too.

Think about it. Who do most students want approval from? Their peers.

Are students in your classroom willing to take risks in front of their classmates?

The other day, a student, who is well respected by her peers and her teachers, told me she intentionally minimizes her class participation in several classes because she doesn’t want to be seen in a negative light by her peers.

Hearing this, I sat down at lunch with a group of our high-achieving seniors and asked, “Are there times where you censor yourself in class because you don’t want to be perceived negatively by your peers?” Almost universally, they answered, “Yes.”

One expanded on her answer, “In some classes I don’t even like it when a teacher calls on me to share an answer or my thoughts.”

Ouch!  Here were some of our best and brightest saying that they’re not comfortable answering or asking questions. They held back during class discussions. They intentionally minimized their risk-taking at the expense of educational exploration. 

So how can you encourage risk-taking in your classroom?

1.     Demonstrate and Model Risk Taking

This can be as simple as stating at the beginning of a new lesson, “I’m trying something new today with this lesson. It’s been a pretty good lesson in the past, but it wasn’t one of my best. I worked hard to create an engaging lesson. Let’s see how it goes.”

2.     Model Failure

I’m a horrible artist. I know it and as soon as I complete my first drawing, my students know it. One of my first lessons of the year requires me to draw a prehistoric scene.  After completing the drawing, I tell the students, “You have 30 seconds to laugh and make comments about my drawing.”

During the 30 seconds, one student—either an immense suck-up, someone who is equally inept at drawing or one of the kindest people on Earth—complements my drawing.

After the laughter subsides, I build upon the kind comment. “Thanks for the kind words. Simple complements like that can inspire. Most of you laughed or made snide comments; I’m fine with them because I know I’m an awful artist, and I think it’s important to be able to laugh at myself. But, lets always be mindful of others as we move forwards. We’re going to be with each other for another 80-plus days for 90 minutes each day; we want to be positive with each other.”

3.     Provide risk-taking opportunities

As teachers, we must give up some control. Students need autonomy. The learning needs to be real, relevant, interesting and meaningful. As teachers we must make learning possible. We cannot learn for the students.

One of the simplest means of providing risk-taking and authentic learning opportunities is to share your learning objective/target with the students and tell the students, “How can you show me that you [insert learning target]?”

Allow the students to brainstorm and collaborate. Initially it may be awkward for you as a teacher to relinquish some control (students also may be uncomfortable at first), but the end reward of authentic learning will be immense.

This philosophy, of course, is at the heart of project-based learning, but is just as effective with a simple daily assignment. Engaging assignments stimulate curiosity and creativity. As Daniel Pink stated in an interview with Scholastic, “Science shows us the better way to motivation is to build more on autonomy, our desire to be self-directed; on mastery, which is our desire to get better and better at something that matters; and on purpose, which is our desire to be part of something larger than ourselves.”

4.     Minimize the pain of making an error

In providing student with choices, many students will choose a safe, time-tested approach. Students—often it’s the ones with the highest GPA’s—are afraid to take risks because it can negatively impact their grades. Learning is a process that shouldn’t be graded. Errors and mistakes should be embraced as part of the learning process. If the project or assignment is being used for assessment, allow students the opportunity to demonstrate mastery in another way or extend the due date.

As teachers, it’s our job to instill in students the realization that effort will lead to improvement and learning. In her book Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy, Amy Edmonson says, we must highlight failures as learning opportunities “by avoiding punishing others for having taken well-intentioned risks that backfired, leaders inspire people to embrace error and failure and deal with them in a productive manner.”

Students who trust their teachers believe that teachers will turn their failures into learning opportunities. They know their efforts will be valued and rewarded by their teachers and peers. Only in such environments, will students be willing to take risks.