Elements of Successful Innovation - Part 3 - Embedded Support and Community

The post from Jon Bergman's Twitter account came across my feed months ago, but when I look at the list, I'm still grateful to work at GRACE where almost all of these things were part of our culture before we adopted the one to one program.  As we talk about other innovations, we are blessed to still have all the things on this list.

Two of the things Bergman finds critical to flipping that are also important for any innovation are Embedded Support and Community.

By Embedded Support, Bergman doesn't just mean a strong IT department - although that is important and will be featured in next week's post.  He means people with knowledge of both technology and its pedagogical use.  The first step on my road to tech was bringing in my own laptop.  While that went well, it was not particularly innovative; I was using slides and video rather than the whiteboard and overhead projector.  It was not a bad first step, but it would obviously not be enough to have stayed there.  The school bought a few SMART boards, and we were given a day's training on HOW to use them. What we were not given was training in how to incorporate them into a lesson.  I think we did a pretty reasonable job of figuring it out, but we could have implemented it far better if we had someone dedicated to learning as much about the pedagogy of the smart board as possible.  For that reason, when I served on the committee that was choosing our one to one devices, I beat the drum of training.  A board member expressed concern that he didn't want the one to one program to be like the SMART boards.  I knew what he meant.  Those are very expensive devices that were not being used to their fullest potential, and I was one of the people using it.  I said frequently on this committee.  Teacher MUST be trained, not only in the use of the device but in how to best use them IN the classroom experience.  If you want us to innovate with them, we can't rely on what we learned about books and expect it to translate.  Without training, you can get a chisel and stone or an iPad.  The innovation level will be about the same.  The school stepped up in a big way.  Not only did our IT people constantly seek out tools and pass along articles, our administrators sent links to ideas and articles.  Our media specialists became technology coaches and even created a program for our improvement.  There were also a few teachers who were more tech savvy than others who were identified as those you could go to with questions.  We even got special training from Apple (who are better at teaching you how to use it in school than Microsoft - Sorry Microsoft, but your trainers don't see the difference between education and business).   Everywhere you looked, there was support.

In addition to that, we were a community learning together.  It's hard to describe the power of that in the first year of a new, widespread innovation.  We shared ideas all the time, at meetings, in e-mails, on our lesson plans, in online discussion boards.  We were in this together, not just as teachers, but with students.  Students gave me some of my best tools, and they suddenly felt comfortable e-mailing teachers.  They had the ability to do it before, but now they experienced a culture shift that made them feel they could (and boy do they - like all the time).  Our school is already strong in community, but it really showed during this time.  That doesn't happen by accident.  It happened because a culture had been cultivated for years and was intentionally strengthened even more during this time.  Our innovations now are not as widespread.  They tend to be within a grade level or department, but that community still exists.  In an earlier post, I mentioned our project brainstorming meetings.  English, science, art, math, history, and foreign language teachers sitting in small groups have a lot of brain power.  We were able to view projects from such a variety of angles that we couldn't help but get results.

You can innovate alone if you don't have these things in your school, but you should at least seek out support and community online.  There are lots of communities out there.  Search education-related hashtags.  Find teachers to follow on Twitter.  It is better to have it in your building, but if you don't have it in person, have it online.  It makes a difference.  Next week, I'll address technology specifically, but innovation isn't just about technology.  It's about doing something different, whether that uses technology or not.