Creating a Culture of Innovation

On November 19^th I facilitated a full-day workshop entitled: Teamwork, Technology & Transparency – Envisioning Your School Innovation Plan. This was a challenging and awe inspiring day of discovery with an emphasis on moving forward as effective 21^st century teaching and learning communities. Educators and school leaders came together from across the city to begin laying the foundation for a school-wide Innovation Plan focusing on curriculum goals, improvement initiatives and technology objectives.

Throughout the day, participants were asked to grapple with this question: School transformation happens when? Some of their initial responses were quite telling:

Sonia, a teacher in Brooklyn said: “Transformation happens when teachers are open-minded to change and to learn new strategies and techniques to implement into their classrooms.”

Joan, an Assistant Principal in Staten Island said: “Administrators need to provide PD with new initiatives and technology and have a well versed on site Technology coach and PD from outside sources.”

Brian, a Principal in Queens said: “Teachers are engaged in socialized learning setting to share technological knowledge bases for purpose of investigating ways to use technology to enhance instruction and improve efficiency. The technology plan must support the instructional mission of the school and be viewed as a tool/vehicle, rather than an add on obstacle.”

Teams then worked collaboratively to envision their ideal 21^st century learning community. In order to complete this activity I asked participants to put on their thinking hats to brainstorm what they would like their schools to look like 5-years from now. Participants took on the role of students, teachers, administrators, and parents to describe what these learning communities would look, sound, feel, and think like. We watched a video entitled “What If” to spark their intellect. We also modeled how they might make their own video response by using the simple web based montage mixing tool, One True Media. View my video response below:

Participants spent the rest of the day working with their teams to begin the development of their school wide Innovation Plan. We reviewed and discussed the core components of an Innovation Plan: 1) Envisioning the 21^st Century School; 2) Curriculum and Implementation Planning; 3) Hardware, Software, and Infrastructure Policy and Implementation; 4) Evaluation; 5) Transformation. And then participants worked on setting SMART goals connected to a key area of the plan they wanted to focus on for the remainder of the day. In order to stay true to workshop theme  -- we utilized Google Docs to work collaboratively and share our results. 

This was a powerful day of learning – in which participants began to articulate how technology should be integrated to accelerate and positively impact teaching and learning. As the day came to a close one of the participants chimed in: “I now see why we’re calling this an Innovation Plan and not a technology plan. This is about creating a foundation for whole-school change.” I couldn’t have said it much better myself.