Creating a Culture of Innovation
Neat post, with plenty of food for thought. Among my favorite quotes:
If this is going to change, school leaders must grow comfortable with ambiguity, rethink teacher assessment to foster risk-taking, and promote learning by doing, which all but ensures that failures will occur. However, the difference between an innovative culture and a stagnant one is whether these failures are embraced as paths to success or rejected as signs of incompetence.
Where I believe I’ve tried to be innovative in how we shape teaching and learning using technology, I have heard others warn: “But I don’t think everyone can do that.” I think these are the failures mentioned above.
And do leaders need to be using technology? It certainly helps!
This year I witnessed first-hand the power of modeling from several school leaders in my building that has sparked risk-taking and creativity throughout the building. Our principal began exploring various web 2.0 technologies for more effective and efficient communication. From these explorations, he began blogging and integrated RSS into the school website. This use of participatory media demonstrated a number of vital organizational beliefs to educators: a commitment to instructional technology, an understanding of the importance of the philosophy of web 2.0, a belief in life-long learning, the value of risk-taking, and the disdain for stagnation.
…Teachers began talking to me about blogging and web 2.0 and soon discovered curricular and instructional needs that would be met with these tools. No fear. No apprehension. Because of a leader’s model, there was already a belief that the organization believed in this…
Our approach wasn’t the same, but we got similar results. I look forward to the Ed Tech 2008 conference this year at Randolph-Macon college. There I will be brining a principal who is going to talk about how he uses technology at his school. And I definitely see a rub-off on the use of teachers there, as a result.