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New roles are emerging for educators, teacher leaders, principals, and district officials. These new roles are being shaped by many factors including the shift from managed instruction to personalized models and the role of principals as school and business leaders. This blog first appeared on Teaching Science in the 21st Century, a blog by Lindsey Own, a science and health educator and difference maker who we met while at SXSWedu. In the blog, Lindsey shares ajob description that could serve as a template for building innovation leadership in any school.
Lindsey Own
There's been incredible progress in the past few years with individual, cutting-edge teachers making some incredible gains in innovations like #geniushour, project-based learning, design thinking, the maker movement, and more more more. But how do we SCALE those kinds of innovations wider throughout our schools and throughout the education system? Starting from discussions on Twitter and in our GOA course on Coaching Innovation, Maggie Powers and I have been on a kick about supporting innovation leadership in education...

When our SXSWedu core conversation on exactly that topic - Scaling Innovation in Schools - was accepted, we knew we had our work cut out for us... We co-moderated two separate twitter chats leading up to the conference, one on #dtk12chat and one on #isedchat, to begin building our ideas and lexicon. Our core conversation went excellently: you can find our session resources here and Maggie's reflections here. Over the course of SXSWedu, I also had at least a dozen separate conversations about what innovation leadership means for advancement of K-12 education. (There are also great conversations happening in the comments here, so this idea is still evolving. Please continue contributing!)

(Another resource for such school innovation leaders is this amazing eBook by David Culberhouse: Scaling Creativity and Innovation.)
My ultimate goal was to pull together all the ideas from our different conversations to craft a "job description" that could serve as a template for building innovation leadership in any school, and potentially even use in defining my own job description as I move into exactly this sort of role in my school (although my job also includes curation of our makerspace, which isn't discussed here).

Following ridiculous amounts of review and analysis of our three sessions, I put together the following Venn Diagram in creately:

So, here goes nothin' -

Job Posting: Innovation Learning Strategist

The _____________ School is committed to strengthening and enriching student learning through innovative teaching methods that put the student and his or her own goals for the future at the center of all learning experiences, and empower students to identify and solve problems, bridge content across traditional "subject" domains, and develop an unshakable growth mindset. We define "innovation" as mindsets, design processes, and teaching practices that challenge traditional norms and assumptions. These can take the form of new strategies or iterations or remixes of existing strategies.

Seeking: A listener and risk-taker to lead and support innovative teaching and learning in our school.

Qualifications:

Varied professional experience, both in classroom settings and outside of schools. Former entrepreneurs encouraged, having demonstrated ability to independently develop professional connections and skills.

Demonstrated expertise in listening and understanding needs, as well as in introducing new ideas without forcefulness.

Demonstrated reflection upon and learning from failures. Examples will be requested.

Demonstrated perseverance, resilience, and comfort with ambiguity. Examples will be requested.

Provide inspiration and support for faculty and students in developing and implementing new innovative learning opportunities. Connect with teachers individually to support each teacher's innovation growth from their own starting point and at their own pace. Publicly celebrate attempts, successes, and failures in new endeavors.

Support development of a community-wide common language around innovation, including faculty, students, families, and local community. Reach out to "outside" community to collaborate and form partnerships.

Create safe physical and emotional spaces for teachers to explore and develop innovative learning opportunities. Support a cultural shift towards more collaboration and less competition among faculty.

Build capacity of faculty and students to independently investigate and design new innovations. Act as a multiplier of faculty and student strengths.

Broker relationships between disparate groups both within and outside the school community. Foster ties between groups with different expertise and daily experience to encourage cross-pollination and boundary-crossing.

Collect data and track innovation growth throughout the school to support connections, monitor patterns, and provide example cases to others. Data might consist of qualitative project examples and specific feedback from teachers, students, and families, as well as quantitative numbers of students served and events held.

Establish long-term and quarterly goals for innovation growth milestones within the community. Meet with education administration team at least once per quarter to share data on innovation growth and solicit feedback for continued progress.

Connect with innovation leaders at other schools, such as:

Other duties as assigned.

For more, check out:

Lindsey Own teaches science at The Evergreen School in Shoreline, WA. Follow Lindsey on Twitter, @LindseyOwn.

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New roles are emerging for educators, teacher leaders, principals, and district officials. These new roles are being shaped by many factors including the shift from managed instruction to personalized models and the role of principals as school and business leaders.

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Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend in Austin. As I sifted through and notes from the conference, I tried to look for themes and key takeaways that came up throughout my various sessions.

In general, I attended workshops, panels, and sessions focusing on innovation and specific approaches to teaching and learning (e.g., Design Thinking, PBL, maker). Here are the recurring ideas that could have a truly meaningful impact on our schools if we put them into practice:

School must BE the "real-world"

So often, we talk of preparing students for the "real-world" that they will enter after graduating high school or at least higher education. At SXSWedu, many of the discussions instead centered on the idea of students engaging in real-world problem solving and projects while they are in school.

"When you can make something in your head real, that's empowering." - student quote #MakerEd #sxswedu

- Margaret A Powers (@mpowers3) March 9, 2015

Students are not just imagining becoming engineers and entrepreneurs nor simply learning skills that will help them to do that work one day/someday, they have become them in many schools. This shift from "playing" a maker to being one in "real-life" is a dramatic change for many educators, administrators, and school systems yet the power of being able to take an idea or a product from something that is conceived in your head to one that is available to the public is immense.

By inviting students and teachers to engage in innovative ways of teaching and learning (e.g., design thinking, making, and global collaboration), schools can become another piece of every child's real-world experience. For example, as Amanda Kruysman said, "DT is a way to solve problems for real users & you can look to your home community for those problems." In fact, the Design Thinking in the Humanities panel eloquently demonstrated with concrete examples from their classrooms how valuable (and feasible) it is to bring the real-world into the classroom and invite students to engage in human-centered problem-solving that but many times, has far-reaching and tangible real-world results.

Stop Accepting Space Constraints

There was one important ingredient to facilitating these real-world school experiences that was raised repeatedly at SXSWedu - agile spaces. As Steelcase demonstrated with their crowdsourced poll, everyone learns and thinks differently:

Proof that designing workspaces is not a one-size-fits-all. #SXSWedu #steelcase #askthecrowd pic.twitter.com/MLnVKjueD4 - Christen Cannon (@learninglasers) March 11, 2015

So having rigid, single-use spaces that cannot shift to accommodate different learners or learning activities will inherently leave some students behind. I ran into this first-hand when trying to setup the room for our core conversation on Scaling Innovation, which was arranged in concentric circles and was not conducive to small group work.

One of the Buck Institute for Education PBL sessions I attended also addressed this issue. We spent a lot of time discussing transformational learning experiences which almost always involved addressing real-world problems. To facilitate those types of learning experiences attendees came to the conclusion that schools need spaces that support active, hands-on work, hacking, play, collaboration, and a wide variety of learner interactions. Another session focusing on holistic design also discussed making schools more flexible and agile to respond to students' needs. In small groups, we problematized the idea of traditional roles and spaces, imagining all teachers as learning coaches and every space as a place for discovery and collaboration (e.g. Learning Stairs). Schools were re-imagined to have "neighborhoods" with centralized resources and spaces that could be responsive to change over time. Ultimately, though...

Tech, furniture, buildings are just tools - it's about human behavior & human-centered design to create change #hollisticdesign #sxswedu

- Margaret A Powers (@mpowers3) March 11, 2015

Innovation Leaders can Help

To help the people involved in schooling change their behaviors, schools need support and guidance. One way to achieve this is to ask for help by appointing one or more educators in your school who can serve as Innovation Leaders. Lindsey Own and I led a core conversation on this topic at SXSWedu.

Our hope was to give people a process (resources here) that they could bring back to their schools and organizations to explore the question of how to scale innovation and also help everyone walk out with some concrete takeaways (i.e., challenges to scaling innovation and a job description for an Innovation Leader).

We began by asking everyone to map what innovation currently looks like at their schools, thinking about whether it is centered around specific people/hubs and how it flows (or doesn't) within the school. From these maps, we invited groups to pull out challenges they saw (e.g., silos, a lack of resources) and after organizing by these themes, groups worked together to dive deeper into why these challenges might exist. Using the 5 Why's exercise and small group discussions, attendees were able to get to the root of the issues and discover what would be needed to help overcome these challenges.

The groups were then able to chart what mindsets, professional/personal qualities, experience, and team needs an Innovation Leader would require to overcome that specific challenge. Combining all of their responses together, we could see clear themes that align with with many of the ideas of other SXSWedu sessions. For example, having varied experience (e.g., working at a startup or in a specific industry) and empathy are key outcomes of the real-world experiences students should be able to have in schools and being flexible and a risk-taker are helpful when trying to re-envision learning spaces and think differently about traditional school setups. .

One of the reasons educators attend conferences like SXSWedu is to come together and hear inspiring stories and learn from amazing speakers. These stories give us hope that every student and each classroom can become a place for students to have those "wow" factor experiences that can be life changing for both students and teachers.

Just look at the stories shared by Emily Pilloton about her work in or with nine year old girls who have learned welding and an assortment of other equally impressive, tangible skills! You'll notice how the homework she assigned everyone is also connected to my SXSWedu takeaways and does not involve a single worksheet.

And I think , in her closing, might have shared the key that we are all looking for when we come to these conferences - connected learning. She encouraged everyone to help students find a #learninghero:

Kids need a #learninghero to infect them w/their passions & expertise, inspire them to connect school learning to interest @mizuko #sxswedu

- Margaret A Powers (@mpowers3) March 12, 2015

Isn't that exactly what we, as attendees, are searching for?
While I learned a lot in the different sessions I attended, the most meaningful part of SXSWedu was connecting with my tribe, the colleagues and friends (Thank You!!) I knew from Twitter (but mostly never face-to-face) and the new people I connected with who are passionate about innovating and using technologies to create and connect students globally. These connections and the natural exchange of ideas, resources, and support that come with them, are the key to my own growth and learning. I think it is the hidden, unnamed link we all share as innovation leaders.

The attendees in our session did not seem to notice that their very presence in the session speaks to a powerful component of an Innovation Leader. She or he is always looking for connections and new learning heroes who can "infect them with passion and expertise" and inspire them to connect school experiences to students' own passions and interests. In order to help students capitalize on connected learning, bringing in local and global real-world problems and reimagine what classrooms can and should look like, we need Innovation Leaders who are connected, leaders who are always looking to add one more learning hero to their network.

One of the biggest challenges raised in our Scaling Innovation session was silos, within schools and between them, but maybe we are not so siloed, we just have to help each other and our colleagues find their tribe and understand how to nurture and build upon the creative synergy that results from being part of a virtual neighborhood of learning heroes.

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Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend SXSWedu in Austin. As I sifted through my tweets and notes from the conference, I tried to look for themes and key takeaways that came up throughout my various sessions. In general, I attended workshops, panels, and sessions focusing on innovation and specific approaches to teaching...

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Final: SXSWedu Scaling Innovation Worksheet

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Create a relationship map of innovation at your school

Look for elements in your map that facilitate innovation and roadblocks (write them on stickies & add them to our charts!)

Work in small groups to tackle key challenges to scaling innovation at your school

Try: 5 Why’s Exercise

Create T chart of successful/unsuccessful practices to address those challenges

Work in small groups to fill in the “Innovation Leaders” grid

Create a job description for a new innovation position at your school

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Challenges Identified in Relationship Maps

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Challenges Identified in Relationship Maps

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- Time

- Comfort Zone/Culture/Mindset (fixed)

- Leadership

- Silos

- Restrictive spaces

- Lack of Vision

- Money

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is an amazing Wednesday weekly twitter chat around the use of design thinking in K-12 education. But topics vary across a broad spectrum of innovative topics in education, including courageous creativity, "Maker" education, embracing failure, technology integration, and more.

On Wednesday Jan 28, we - Maggie Powers and Lindsey Own - co-moderated a #DTK12chat on scaling innovation in schools. The idea for this chat came out of our upcoming core conversation at - Scaling Innovation in Schools: New Leadership Roles . We're both ultra excited about these new roles - Innovation Coach, Director of Learning Innovation, and more! - and are especially interested in figuring out the patterns in how these roles are being implemented. What have been the tangible benefits arising out of developing these roles? What are the best-practices that are emerging? What have been the pitfalls that early adopters have already begun solving?

Following the chat, Maggie posted a full-conversation Storify archive of the chat. A little later, Lindsey curated the tweets a bit more to get summaries of answers to each of the formal questions. This lost a bunch of the amazing side conversations, but hopefully captured the participants' answers to the official chat questions.

Executive Summary of the Discussion

We agree that it is vital that PreK-12 education support learners in becoming change-agents, and learning to create and bridge knowledge rather than merely absorbing. We want our learners to learn to think flexibly, apply a growth mindset, and be human-centered in our world of diminishing human connection. These, essentially, are the desired outcomes of "innovative teaching and learning."

Bringing innovation into schools can be a very challenging proposition, even if it is just into one's own classroom! Therefore, scaling innovation across a whole institution takes some very deliberate action... In many institutions, it requires a major cultural shift towards collaboration rather than competition among faculty, and willingness to fail publicly, as administrators, as faculty, and an entire school community, and demonstrate the learning that comes from each failure.

From within the classroom, teachers can lead innovation through modeling, collaborating with colleagues, and making their students' work - successes and failures - publicly visible. But having an individual in a formal role of supporting innovation school-wide can have greater impact: A single individual - who can keep a single pulse on programs across the whole school - can better see where the programs can go and how to inspire and connect others. In addition to providing scaffolding and follow-through support as colleagues take new risks in their teaching, that individual must first and foremost deeply believe in, model, and encourage learning from failure and growth through exploration.

The Keys To Innovation might just be: willingness to fail, a culture of innovation throughout the school, a growth mindset, and perseverance perseverance perseverance.

To view my (probably excessive) question-by-question reflections of the conversation, you can check out this GDoc. Please leave comments, thoughts, questions, and suggestions for deepening this conversation, as we fully intend to continue it into our SXSWedu session and on and on as this role grows!

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Scaling Innovation in Schools: New Leadership Roles - 1 of n

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is an amazing Wednesday weekly twitter chat around the use of design thinking in K-12 education. But topics vary across a broad spectrum of innovative topics in education, including courageous creativity, "Maker" education, embracing failure, technology integration, and more. On Wednesday Jan 28, we - Maggie Powers and Lindsey Own - co-moderated a #DTK12chat on scaling innovation in schools.

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#isedchat - Scaling Teaching & Learning Innovation in Schools (with images, tweets) · mpowers3

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On Wednesday, March 3, 2015, Lindsey Own (@lindseyown) and Margaret Powers (@mpowers3) co-moderated an independent ed school chat around innovation.

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A lack of ...

- Leadership

- Time

- Funding/Resources

- Professional Development

- Silos

- Vision

- Committment
- Communication

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Created by Grant Lichtman