I twitch a little bit every time I hear the word ‘innovation’ nowadays because this once seldom-used word seems to be everywhere in schools; innovative education, innovation hubs, innovative pedagogy etc. I’m not sure if some of my irritation is because it’s an in-vogue buzzword, or perhaps it’s just because I’m Northern (I won’t expand on that). I’ll pop this here first and foremost because I’m sure some people are already wondering: I am not anti-innovation. Not in the least, in fact I’m a scientist and so I actually love innovation in science and technology. I try to explicitly teach for it because I want my students to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, solve problems, and imagine things that just don’t exist yet. I want them to really think from as many perspectives and outside every single box to ask those wild “what if…” questions (these are sometimes absolutely bonkers and make for a great story). I wholeheartedly believe this is part of what a good education should create.
There’s a bit of a difference though between teaching students to become innovative and using their education and schooling as the place where we as adults get to perform innovation. The OECD takes some of the prestige off the word ‘innovation’ when it describes innovation in education as significant change in educational practice (which probably means that half the time we’re using the word, that’s really not what we’re doing). Even when we do innovate according to the actual meaning of the word, experiencing something different is not always better. So, if a school says it’s innovative with its teaching and learning, fine, but it should be ready for some awkward questions to prove that this is having a positive effect on the students in their care. What exactly has changed in the way students are being taught? Why is this better than what came before? How do we know? At what cost?
Kids spend real learning time inside whatever we as the decision makers decide to call ‘innovative’, and little Johnny gets one shot at Year 8 so we have to be pretty sure when we’re going into whatever change we’ve made. If we spend that year, or even half of it, using an ‘innovative’ teaching and learning idea that sounded wonderful but didn’t actually help him learn, we can’t give it back to him.
In the sciences we understand that innovation carries risk. The example we often use when teaching is drug development; ideas go through ethics committees, informed consent processes, mountains of red tape and regulated, rigorous systems. Roughly 90% of drugs still fail once they enter clinical trials even after all of that. Scientists aren’t reckless with it, innovation is really difficult, uncertain and full of failure, even when people are taking it seriously. A failed drug gets withdrawn from further trials, a failed product gets redesigned (oh look, iteration), and a failed app can be deleted. Johnny really can’t be.
I don’t think that what schools need is anything close to grand experimentation, it should be the ordinary unglamorous and difficult job of looking at what students are actually experiencing, checking whether the learning has substance, adjusting or stopping what isn’t working and keeping what’s great. I’m talking about iteration and it requires properly thought out professional judgement. Teachers with expertise know this, and they read the room, read the student, and they adapt.
Education is always going to be in beta simply because schools are full of the nuance and the human differences associated with children, teachers and interacting relationships. What worked before might not work well now, and what looked beautiful in a planning document might crumble when students actually experience it. Ordinary improvement and the hard work to enact it doesn’t need to be inflated into “innovation” just because the word looks good when it’s put on the website.
If we’re asking students to learn in a new or significantly different way then there is risk, and whilst it might be brilliant we can’t assume it’s going to be better than what came before. We need evidence and proper trialling rather than treating innovation like another branding opportunity. We understand this in science: you can’t go all in without evidence, you can’t do it without guardrails and certainly not without ethics. So if we’re going to borrow the language of science and talk about pilots, trials, evidence and experimentation, we should accept the responsibilities that come with it. Iteration should be the norm and innovation is something we should be careful with.
If the results aren’t good when you try something new, you have to stop. You can’t ethically keep going and roll it out across the whole school. You stop, change course, or admit that the idea sounded better than it worked. That’s okay, you tried something and it didn’t work, but you had enough confidence in what’s right for the kids to admit it and change course rather than plough ahead regardless. Leadership excellence right there. I also want to point out that with this drive for innovation it can be neutral with results too and you’re not just affecting the kids, teachers feel it, they’re going to comply at their own detriment, and so if there is additional work and investment from them, and no actual value for the kids, they’re unlikely to be thrilled about it.
If you’ve got to be the school doing the thing before everyone else then that’s a pretty precarious position to take and it could be educationally really stupid. We shouldn’t ever be trusting a sales pitch to tell us what to do and where to go in education; if all these people cared that much and were so good at educating, they might probably be working in a school, huh? We need to be a little more critical about where we are buying ideas and fads from.
The people you actually want in your school (the thoughtful, ones who understand learning, ones parents would want teaching their kids) can tell when something has substance and when it’s performative, they smell a dog-and-pony show a mile off! They might not say it in the meeting, they’ll smile and nod but they’ll know. If we’re using a child’s education to make ourselves look brave, modern or visionary, we’re really not serving them. We’re actually using them; we’re using our position, authority, teachers’ energy and students’ time to make ourselves look good. Gross! I find that tough to swallow.
I want the best marketing a school can have to be having its students being properly educated (and I’m not just talking about attainment scores and exam results). If we take care of the education then the reputation will take care of itself. It’ll take time of course and it might not photograph particularly well, but people do notice when teachers do their jobs well and when the learning has substance. They also notice when their child doesn’t need as much tutoring as the kids in the competitor school!
Don’t come at me with ‘fortune favours the bold’ because ‘bold’ seems to feature quite heavily in the Darwin Awards too, cause I still don’t think we should be using children’s learning as the place to prove how brave and clever we are. We know a fair bit about what works in education, so build on it, tweak it, edit it and try new things, but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater to be first and look cool.
I’d much rather see schools digging the foundations well and making the learning journey one of substance than chasing being first at the expense of being good, whilst also putting the time and effort into making sure kids graduate as well-rounded and decent human beings; we need far more of those.
Kids don’t need schools to be innovative; they really just need them to be good.
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