Sustaining Focus on Innovation

As viewers keep engaging with my work and my blog, they send me incredibly thought-provoking questions that make me think about my little piece of paradise in the public school realm. This week a viewer asked me, "What is your experience with how long educational environments are able to sustain their focus on innovations?" This is what I have to say.

Since my school is such an anomaly in the way that our team is cohesive, our administration is flexible, and we all work together with autonomy, I would like to frame this question in terms of my district instead. My experience is that our district can only sustain interest in an innovation for two years. An example of this is that three years ago an initiative was started to get educators interested in learning and using new tech - called the Digital Innovators Pathways. There were three levels of investment that teachers could apply for with each level being slightly more advanced in skill than the other. This initiative was designed to be for a period of 3 years. Year one was successful in creating interest and buy-in. By year two it was very clear that the more advanced levels were being treated more like the regular levels. As opposed to honoring the fact that the more advanced team could catch on more quickly and had a strong desire to be leaders of their own learning, ed tech teams taught down to them instead of at their level. By year three all three skill levels were either fatigued by the amount of work involved or tired of not being challenged. Also, teacher turnover took away educators from the initiative and new members were not replaced as schools deemed the initiative to be of little interest anymore. Additionally, student perception surveys indicated that students felt technology had equal or less impact on their studies than other methods of teaching. This data led some principals to encourage their staff to drop out of the initiative entirely. While this is only one example, this scenario is pretty typical with any of our district innovation focuses. It is for these reasons that my school works hard to avoid these problems in practice and as a result we flourish.