Dive Brief:
- Innovation requires risk-taking, which many teachers are either hesitant about or openly opposed to, but Jennie Magiera, CTO for Illinois' Des Plaines School District 62, has five strategies to get a critical mass of teachers on board.
- Magiera tells eSchool News that administrators should understand whether they are asking teachers to innovate in a way that is consistent with their existing values or to embrace a paradigm shift, and lead school transformation efforts accordingly.
- Building a culture that supports innovation and the first-try failure that might come along with it, committing to innovation despite opposition, giving early adopters an opportunity to share their stories and foster excitement among others, and being courageous are four other strategies.
Dive Insight:
When ed tech leaders in a school truly believe in something and the high-level logic makes sense, it is easy to force teachers to fall in line, especially given the urgency of education reform and the ever-present drive to improve classrooms now. But forcing unwilling teachers to adopt new tools and make paradigm shifts is not likely to secure positive change for students. Administrators are better off allowing change to come incrementally, as teachers make the internal shifts necessary to change their own instruction.
This is true for pedagogy as well as technology implementation. School districts that blanket every classroom with new devices are less successful than those that require teachers to make concrete plans for how to use them before adding them to their classrooms.
