The innovation plan at the heart of my work in the Digital Learning and Leading program is intended to provide teachers a path toward helping their students engage in deep learning and develop growth mindset thinking. In true constructivist fashion, teachers learn to help their students do this by doing it themselves, examing their own learning process and investigating ways to apply that process to the discipline in which they teach.
These plan components lay out the basic initial structure for my innovation plan. This was the beginning of the process, determining the all-important “why” of the plan. As can be imagined, the “why” determined everything else. From the “why,” details of “what” and “how” began to emerge, including research and data explaining why this innovation plan was valuable and ideas on long-term goals and expansions for the plan.
The plan update focuses on improvements made to the plan after examining the efforts of others. Key lessons that I took from that study and tried to keep in the forefront of my mind as I modified my plan were the importance of establishing clear goals for any initiative (relating back to the “why”) and the notion that successful innovation comes not from the top down but from the ground up. (This idea will be revisited later in this post, as I address one of the key things I could have done better as I attempted to launch my innovation plan.)
This portion of the plan reflects a narrowing of my focus, choosing to concentrate my efforts on the teachers’ professional learning component of the plan. The more I developed my program, the more I felt that helping teachers expand their own learning and experience would be the most essential part of my efforts: helping teachers learn eventually benefits not just the teachers but ultimately their students, present and future.
While this is the portion of the plan that I think will provide the most wide-ranging benefit to the most learners, it is also the component I am least focused on as I attempt to launch my innovation plan. I believe that further research into the impact of studying the creative process will yield important data as educational leaders attempt to rethink what learning can and should be for tomorrow’s learners. I also feel that this data will be best collected with a larger sample size of students and teachers than the initial scaled-down version of the program will involve.
My State of Innovation
My original goal was to begin implementing my innovation plan at the start of the 2019-2020 school year. Several circumstances have made it necessary to alter this plan and timeline.
First, as my DLL coursework has progressed, I’ve made changes to my plan to reflect my ongoing learning. I expected this to happen, and welcomed it. As I explored the principles of backward design, learned about various methods of assessing instruction, and actually developed online instruction materials, I naturally felt compelled to apply what I was learning to the work I eventually hoped to share with my colleagues in a professional learning environment. This constant process of revision can be a challenge--there is the ongoing worry of letting the “great” become the enemy of the good, and the idea that since, as Hattie (2016) writes, nearly anything positive one does as an educator is going to help students learn at least somewhat, one should go ahead and do something. Nevertheless, I weighed these thoughts against the desire to make my first effort at innovation leadership as strong as possible out of the gate and decided that both this and future innovation plans would be better served by taking the time to reflect and revise.
Second, I encountered obstacles within my school building that made it both necessary and advisable to rethink my timeline. Based on conversations with colleagues, I believe these obstacles stem from several factors. First and foremost appears to be “initiative fatigue” My district launched a new LMS at the start of the 2019-2020 school year, a process that has been challenging for teachers and students alike. It is clear in retrospect that I overestimated many of my colleagues’ willingness to tackle two large projects in the same school year. Add this large influencing factor to the many other educational initiatives teachers have been asked to undertake in my district within the past year--grade policy review and implementation of a Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS) program, among others--and it becomes easy to understand teachers’ reluctance to add one more untested idea to their plates.
Another factor, one which I did not and could not anticipate, was the district’s decision to change the system by which teachers earn professional development hours. Previously, teachers were required to complete 12 hours of approved professional development activity during the school year. One selling point of my innovation plan was that, by participating, teachers would earn all 12 required hours in the course of one program spread out over the school year, rather than piecing together credit form several activities. At the start of the school year, the district announced that teachers would now be able to earn the required credits by submitting reports on activities of their own choosing, rather than having to complete district-approved ones. While this is a positive change for teachers, allowing them to earn credit for learning activities that are most relevant to them and their teaching, it does remove some of the incentive for teachers to participate in a pre-planned, long-term activity like my innovation plan.
The final factor has to do with interpersonal dynamics within my school building, and with my own failure to apply lessons I had learned. The original intent was to launch my innovation plan with at least one teacher from each academic discipline taking part, enlisting the aid of department chairs in finding teachers willing to participate. In retrospect, this was clearly a mistake on my part. I failed to take to heart the very idea that I had focused on so intently earlier in the planning process; namely, that successful innovation comes not from the top down but from the ground up. I had hoped that having chairs present my program idea to their departments would lend the plan a sense of legitimacy and group purpose. While it may have done so, this legitimacy is not what was needed to bring teachers on board. What was needed was a sense of relevance and value, to help convince teachers that the program would be worth their time. The person to do that is not a department chair, but me. I am in my eighteenth year of teaching in my building; I have a good working relationship with my colleagues, high visibility and recognition among the faculty, and a reputation in the building for being helpful and easy to work with, especially when it comes to technology. I should have leveraged these strengths as a source of influence through social motivation, a la Grenny et al. (2013); I’ve tried to learn from this mistake as I recruit teachers one by one to take part in a scaled-down pilot version of my innovation plan.
I intend to launch this pilot version in the second semester of the current school year. While the core elements of the plan remain the same--learners will explore the creative process through audio production, and collaboratively develop ways to utilize that process in their own classrooms--some details have been modified. Rather than recruit a teacher from every academic discipline in my building, I am instead seeking out particular teachers with whom I have strong prior working relationships and convincing them individually to take part in my plan. I have held on to the idea of having teachers from subject areas less typically thought of as creative, such as math and science--I believe this component is important enough that it should be present in all versions of the plan. But rather than focusing only on broad representation, I am looking for teachers who will provide useful feedback on the learning activities as they go through them, and who will be strong sources of influence on other teachers as I attempt to launch the full program later.
While not ideal, the modification and delay in the implementation of my plan have not been all disappointment. In particular, they have given me the chance to test and modify some of my ideas in my own classroom. The learning activities in my program are based on activities I designed for my music technology students. I developed my innovation plan while the school year was underway; from the beginning of this school year, I have been able to conduct these activities with my students while also considering how the concepts might be applied in other disciplines. I have even been able to ask my students how the ideas we are exploring in music and music technology relate to things they are studying elsewhere. I intend to bring thee insights into the learning activities I conduct with teachers participating in my plan; I can think of no better way to help these teachers determine how to make what they are learning relevant to themselves and their own students.
REFERENCES
Hattie, J. (2016). Hattie ranking: Backup of 138 effects related to student achievement [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://visible-learning.org/2016/04/hattie-ranking-backup-of-138-effects/
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