Innovation it is Everywhere

A thought occurred to me while writing my last post. The teaching profession like so many others loves looking for and implementing the next great thing. In my 20 years of teaching and learning, and my 18 years of learning prior to that (and no it didn’t take me that long to finish high school….) I have seen many examples of this. New curriculum has come and gone, classroom management strategies, professional development opportunities, inclusive education, pull outs, streaming of students, initiatives to increase student learning, whole language learning, social emotional training, outcomes based assessing, project based learning, moodling, googling, smart technologies, instructional leadership, site based management, professional learning communities, numeracy and literacy initiatives, and a host of other ideas that I have forgotten over the years but one thing has stood out. Great teachers have been doing what they do for generations and through all of these changes and chases they have continued to be great teachers, why is that? The answer is simple and I connected to it while I have been sitting here. Great teachers are innovators in the true sense of the word. When we consider the definition of innovation next week it relates not just to the business world but to education as well. Creating and innovating are two different things you can be creative and not innovative but you can not go the other way around. Great teachers are mindful of the “shiny fish hooks” that float around in our school division central offices and they ask themselves a simple question when deciding whether to buy in or not. That question relates to the definition of innovation. These new ideas and ways of doing things have to be better than what was done before and they have to be desired by our students. If we are trying to force innovation on them in our classrooms with no concern for what they actually want or need then the process is doomed to failure. A great teacher understands this. Go into any long term great teacher and you will see that innovation has been a part of their journey as teachers. Always getting better at educating because they respond to the needs of their consumers, I mean pupils.