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LaRosa, Michael

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    Helping Teacher-Created Ideas Survive and Thrive
    (2017-05-01) LaRosa, Michael; Higgins, Monica C.; Scott, Irvin; McMahon, Molly
    How might we encourage educators’ ideas and innovative approaches, and support the survival, sustenance, and growth of those ideas and innovations? This essential question is relevant and important for the U.S. education sector given continued calls for innovative instructional improvements coexisting with the difficulty of stewarding change in school contexts. A strategic project situated in IDEO (a design and innovation firm), The Teachers Guild (one of its entrepreneurial ventures), and the Design for Learning studio (one of its organizational groups) investigated this essential question. This capstone illustrates that while innovation may be sparked productively through enterprising, influential, early visionaries, leaders and organizations aspiring to broad, positive social impact in the education sector must: (1) attend explicitly and regularly to socioeconomic inclusion and racial diversity; and (2) engage public education agencies as they enroll the preponderance of our nation’s children. This may require adaptive work from educators and their organizations to achieve. Regular, intentional practice can scaffold this adaptive work. Internally, shared stories and aspirations can establish guiding purpose. Externally, stakeholder visibility and financial resources can set and sustain the momentum of this adaptive work. Rather than employing externally-facing accountability and financial incentives through top-down directives (as in Race to the Top or No Child Left Behind), jointly crafted stories and aspirations should instead provide the motivating intention. This capstone further illustrates that the stimulation, survival, sustenance, and growth of education innovations may be enhanced by: (1) enhancing educators’ sense of self-efficacy; (2) bolstering educators’ capacity for story-driven leadership; (3) focusing policy attention toward relationships and connection rather than toward systems and content; and (4) utilizing concrete techniques that facilitate innovation-oriented change, such as linking educators across usual educator roles and across typical system boundaries. The Design for Learning studio’s and The Teachers Guild’s experience reinforced that stories and data-driven evidence are not dichotomous, but complementary—stories provide an engaging entry point to later evidential data. Further, designing innovation programs for individual educators may yield meaningful personal impact but likely attenuated sector-level impact. In contrast, designing collaboration across roles and schools reduced barriers to and accelerated teacher-driven innovation.