SUPPORTING INNOVATION

The global shift to remote and blended learning pushed the innovation needle in the right direction, as many school districts were faced with the “ready or not, here we go” scenario.  To avoid reverting into the old ways of teaching it is imperative that leaders go beyond just providing access to technology and adopt a mindset that allows the innovation to continue. Below is a brief description of what that innovative mindset could look like. 

Learn

Assume a position of a learner, researcher and curious practitioner. Don’t make any assumptions about what you know and understand about technology and the people you are leading.  Ask questions, illicit responses, send surveys and dig deeper through formal discussions and informal conversations. Learn about the people you work with, their triggers, their unique skills and their hidden misconceptions. Learn about the innovative tools at your disposal and the ones that could be acquired. Examine your own attitudes towards innovation, technology, motivation, leading and supporting people. Look for multiple perspectives including how the community you serve and your teachers and students view innovation and technology. When you come across ambiguity, ask clarifying questions and whenever possible create opportunities for discourse and collaborative critical analysis. Take notes and reflect on what you are seeing, hearing and learning. Start formulating an action plan that would plug in the gaps between the perception and reality, teaching and learning, attempted and actual curriculum, as well as policy and actual practice.

You and your team are learning when you are hearing more questions than statements unsupported by data. You and your team are learning that the questions get more challenging and more nuanced as the time passes by.

Lead

In striving for excellence, do subscribe to the Kaizen ideology, but don’t forget that you are living in exponential times. Do not wait for your plan of action to be perfect or even complete. The times of sitting on good ideas are over.  As you are pondering the fine points of implementing grandiose plans and ambitious undertakings, start by taking small meaningful steps, as soon as possible. Thinking big and beginning small, allows you to be quick, nimble and responsive to multiple measures of data, which by the way, you should collect and review continuously. To check that you are moving in the right direction, make sure that your leadership actions can be quickly assessed, adjusted and scrapped if necessary. Celebrate small successes but remember to celebrate mistakes even more and own them publicly.  Getting used to this process will allow you to scale up your initiatives in a manner that is not only effective, done with fidelity but also inspiring to others, as it is driven by data rather than perceptions or opinions.  

You and your team are leading when every meeting ends with specific next steps for each member of your team and the sense of horizontal accountability permeates all initiatives.  

Inspire

Treat your followers as volunteers who have the best of intentions and who are intrinsically motivated, after all most teachers enter the profession for intrinsic reasons. Instead of using your hierarchical power, focus on building consensus around common, shared values and overall mission of your organization.  If you did step one (Learn) with diligence and fidelity, you know how to align personal ambitions of your people with the goals you are after, and you will also know what outside resources you will need. If you put the right people in the right seats of the proverbial bus, the people will gravitate towards leadership activities as they form committees, study groups and virtual communities.   

You and your team are inspiring others when all people take on challenging tasks without being asked to do so.

Support

Avoid the temptation to assume that those who are carrying out your plans have everything they need to have to implement your ideas. Equally important is avoiding assumptions that you know what they need. Any efforts to support must be grounded in evidence, so ask questions and bring people together to identify patterns of inequity.  Focusing on what’s essential and urgently needed and providing it to those under your supervision will only happen when you know, not just assume to know, what they require to have.  You and your team are supportive when all members of your community feel, perceive and can articulate feelings of being valued and being invested in.  

Repeat

View this entire process not as a cycle but as a spiral of opportunities that elevate all constituencies of your school, department and community.  You know that you and your team are implementing this learn and lead cycle when the questions become more nuanced, more specific and zeroed in on the teaching practice and learning, while constantly attending to excellence and equity of outcomes all hallmarks of successful school systems.

By now you are probably surprised that this post doesn’t mention much about technology.  That is because barriers to leading innovation are hardly ever of technical nature . The adoptive challenges to innovating teaching and learning are very much hinged on leadership that supports innovation in a manner which is systematic, flexible, inspiring and supportive. The spiral of improvement described above, when implemented is a good first stop to promoting this transformational change.