Elements of Successful Innovation - Part 5 - Communication

I almost made this my shortest post ever by saying, "Communication is everything" and being done with it.  I thought you might feel that was clickbait, so I will expand on that.  Communication always matters, but it matters all the more when you are doing something unusual, i.e. innovating.

Communication with Students
If you are doing something new, it is obviously something students have never done before.  You can't expect them to read your mind.  If you want them to present their findings in a specific format, you should tell them.  If you want them to choose the best way to present their findings, tell them that too.  I made this mistake last year.  My physics class was working on their challenge-based learning project on electricity.  These are juniors and seniors, and I want them to make decisions about the best ways to pursue it.  I thought I had communicated this to the students, but the day of the forum, a student came to me in a panic because every other group had made a poster to go with their presentation.  She was worried that she would be graded down when obviously "we were supposed to make a poster."  They weren't supposed to; that was just the choice made by the other groups.  Next year, I will make sure to emphasize the degree of choice they have in this area.  They aren't used to it yet, and it scares them a little.  Most new things scare most of us a little.

Communication with Parents
The more e-mails you send, the fewer you get.  This may be the most important thing I've ever written in this blog.  E-mail (or whatever method of mass communication your school uses) is the greatest tool you have.  Just as students aren't used to things when you innovate, their parents aren't either.  Because we have all been to school, we all think we know what it should be like.  Depending on the grade you teach, most of your kids' parents graduated from school at least a decade ago.  They built dioramas and wrote five paragraph essays.  They did not blog or animate concepts.  When you ask their children to do that, they may not understand why.

It is important to communicate both what their students will be doing and why.  Send them the same set of instructions you give the students.  That will communicate the what and give them the chance to converse with their students whose answer to "what did you do in school today" is usually "nothing."  It is also important that you communicate why you are asking these things of students.  My 8th-grade students blog publically.  Last year, a parent objected to the public nature of the blog.  She had safety concerns, but she also didn't understand why it needed to be public.  "If the point is that he reflects in writing," she said, "why can't it just be turned in to you?"  Let's be fair to her.  She doesn't go to education conferences or attend faculty meeting where "real work for real audiences" is discussed.  She hasn't read the research about why this matters.  She just sees one aspect of "the point" of the assignment.  We compromised by having his blog set to private so that only those people she had approved (his teachers, a few friends) could read it. (I am, after all, not his parent; and she had safety concerns.)  If I had explained the value of public work up front, she could have experienced less stress even though she might have ultimately come to the same conclusion.  In my school, all teachers read the same book over the summer.  We send those book titles out to parents so that if they wish, they can read them as well to get an idea of what the teachers are learning.  If you are innovating based on something you have read, it might be a good idea to include the book title or link to the blog post, research study, or article that explains the value of that innovation.  

When you communicate up front, you get fewer e-mails that begin with "I just don't understand why . . ."  I'm not saying you won't get questions from parents because you always will.  I am saying those questions will come from a place of inquiry rather than doubt in your teaching.