Innvolutionary

I have been working on Professional Learning for the last few months, and it will be a year in April. I love working with the people that I am working with and am enriched by helping to support the instructional coaching model in our district.  Having separated myself from the day-to-day operations of  a school and getting a more global perspective of the scope of work happening in our very large district, I have been able to really reflect and see the full spectrum of our district.  There are some great things happening in our district, but there are still miles to go, and education will always be in flux because the by-products of the educational system are human beings.  So, here are my thoughts:

Leadership should be relative to place, but leadership should be guided by common values and beliefs. There needs to be a way to align ideas, resources, values and beliefs even across a large school district.  We need to have the courage to define what is important and set out to support those priorities.We need to have courage to make the changes that are needed.  We need to have the courage to define the beliefs ad values, and the courage to find and develop the right leaders in the right places to make change happen.Values and Beliefs need to be tied to the system and not a person or people.  Too often change agents come up with change and push forward great change, but there is not sustainability.

That brings me to Innovation and Revolution. We beat around the word, "innovation" a lot in education, but there is not much widespread innovation in education because it is easy to slip back to the comfortable and it is hard work to support and sustain innovation.  I came across this definition of innovation from businessdictionary.com:

To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful products. In business, innovation often results when ideas are applied by the company in order to further satisfy the needs and expectations of the customers. 

I like the idea of this definition even for education. Innovation needs to be replicable across schools and fulfill a need.  Innovation is purposeful, but the key for me and the implication for education is that this application may take existing resources and repurpose them.  It is not always about bringing in something new or spending money to make lasting change.  Schools and systems often relay on what they can introduce or bring in rather than looking at what already exists and rethinking and reinventing these resources in a new way. The part about satisfying the needs of the customer is paramount because at the center of all educational innovation should be dividends for students!

Innovation happens at all levels of the educational spectrum.  As a new classroom teacher in a low-wealth county, I had to be innovative about how to get students to read classic literature, which was not readily available in the English Department.  What was available was random copies of books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Old Man and the Sea, and The Crucible.  So, I created a man and society literature dive, and to pull us all together and to introduce culturally relevant literature (it was 1994!) where I supplemented African- American literature and other cultural literature that brought in modern perspectives.  While this idea may not seem innovative now, it was when was in a school where they planned chronologically and lived by the textbook, which was organized chronologically.  Years later, when I was an Assistant Principal, I often looked for ways to innovate, repurpose scheduling, looking at planning periods to allow for collaboration and looking at existing course offerings to build pathways to have students be able to take classes with STEM related content and strategies.  I had little to no money, but by repurposing courses and looking at sequences of courses, and then working to develop teacher competencies in collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creativity to engage students. Innovation is a state of mind.

In order to innovate you often have to revolt.

In conjunction with Innovation there is Revolution.  In order to innovate you often have to revolt. Revolution is an interesting word. Its origin and initial use is in astronomy to describe movement and repetition of movement.  As the word moved through people, astrologists began using the word. "Sixteenth-century astrologers serving princes and generals spoke of  revolution to desig­nate abrupt and unforeseen events determined by the conjunction of planets-that is, by forces beyond human control" (http://chagala.com/russia/pipes.htm). As the word was applied to human action, the word became synonymous with change that is "sudden and unpredictable." (http://chagala.com/russia/pipes.htm).) For me, I think that changes in schools to be innovative should be "sudden and unpredictable."  Not in a continuous and chaotic way, but to disrupt the status quo.  That is the kind of change we need in schools.  

In a real sense innovation is the idea and revolution is the action to make innovation move. In  When I decided to pool books together and supplement with other literature, others could not understand why I was doing this because we always started with Native American literature, moved to Puritan literature and hardly ever got to 20th century literature.  When I started to look at how we could group existing classes together to help build a pathway for STEM courses, some people were resistant because that is not how it has always been done.  The idea would go nowhere unless the time and effort was put into making the changes.

That finally brings me to the title of my new blog.  I never really liked the title of the blog-- Make a DIFFerence, which was really bad word play on differentiation.  When I began to come up with a new name, I thought a long time, and tried to determine what changes schools at the core.  After thinking about it, it boils down to innovation and revolution.  However, innovation is a word that we use a lot, but I am not sure people stop to think about it. In our ever-changing world, innovation is almost common-place and can blend in with just daily existence. Schools are places that are poised for effective change and not just change.  Schools are asked to change all the time.  What schools need, then, is innovative ideas  and  a revolutionary spirit (the action) to move the innovation forward.  That is why I think school improvement lies at the "Crossroads of Innovative and Revolutionary"-- a term I coined-- Innvolutionary.

Let's go out and be INNOVLUTIONARY!