Week Seven - Where's the Innovation in Education Coming From?

Terry Heick's archived blog posts caught my eye this week, and I was exited to see this title among them.  Knowing that Mr. Heick is not always interested in citing sources in his blog's wise musings, I felt this topic would still be broad and rich in considerations, and worth a perusal.

Mr. Heick begins by usefully narrowing the focus of this broad topic, establishing four essential underlying considerations. Determining content to be delivered and how to deliver it are the first two concerns.  Assessment techniques, and how best to adjust all other considerations based on assessment data, rounds out the list of central questions.

Mr. Heick next suggests that innovation is best when it arrives from a broader awareness of education's aims, not as a solution to niche gaps and problems that have presented themselves.  Mr. Heick's interest in disrupting traditional thinking about educational practice and value informs his insistence that change come from the aim to improve students' sense of self and preparedness for their futures, before listing sources of innovation in education.

First, he links innovation to content, suggesting that the educational value of knowledge, skills, and competency requires a range of instructional possibilities that would unbundle traditional senses of content and curriculum.

Second, he ties innovation to learning models, where mobile learning, self-directed learning, and social / connected learning modes are increasingly possible and fruitful because technology opens innumerable doors to beneficial change.

Third, assessments themselves have experienced some growth and utilities innovations arise.  Mobile technology, adaptive learning systems and algorithms, and visual data technologies can provide new techniques for determining students capacities, progress, and growth.

Finally, response to assessment is an area of largely untapped potential, in Mr. Heick's view.  He notes the growth in data-based efforts to reform and conform schools, he hopes that these innovations will continue to refine their utility and make more room for teachers to use their experiential sense of each student, and students overall, in improving their delivery and students' reception of learning.


My response to this week - this is the type of categorical thinking that serves Mr. Heick's strength as a big-picture operator.  His disinterest in particulars can be frustrating when his topic lends itself to particular suggestions and output, but this rumination on areas where innovation will serve education in general makes sense of the vast notion of innovation and helps me focus my sense of how teachers, and teacher leaders, can narrow their definition of innovation in ways that ease implementation and sharing of new possibilities in digital learning and teaching.