Organizing for innovation in Denver public schools stimulating empowered problem solving through design thinking

Abstract

Our current U.S. K-12 education system is constructed on an outdated nineteenth-century model that is no longer equipped to prepare students for success in the twenty-first-century knowledge-based world (Mehta, Schwartz & Hess, 2012). As such, the field needs innovation that improves the quality of and access to learning. This capstone explores how to foster innovation in a school district, and the enabling conditions and barriers to success. I came to Denver Public Schools (DPS) charged with designing and launching DPS’s Innovation Lab. The goal for the lab is to stimulate conditions for innovation across DPS by developing a systematic process through which stakeholders--students, educators, families, community, and central office staff--foster solutions to critical challenges, with the most promising ideas nurtured from concept to scale. A long-term aspiration for the lab is to catalyze a shift in the existing institutional power structures to spur bottom-up innovation. Key findings surfaced through an analysis of my project results. First, the external education landscape, especially accountability pressures, significantly influences innovation within DPS. Second, DPS can improve conditions that better support innovation, but the district faces institutional resistance. This second finding is supported by four contributing discoveries: (a) demand exists for the lab’s goals, but there is a lag between demand and changed behavior; (b) capacity for creativity and innovative problem solving can be built through the design thinking process, but persistence is required; (c) it is possible to prototype elements of the lab model, but competing priorities present obstacles to translating prototypes into a coherent model; and (d) distributing decision-making to empower members across the community requires a shared vision and trust across the system. Finally, laying a foundation for adaptive change is slow going, uncertain, and requires persistent adaptive leadership. These findings suggest implications for DPS and the broader sector: (1) develop a strategy to promote conditions that foster innovation, (2) recruit and build the innovative capacity of adults in the system, and (3) structure the Innovation Lab model to promote sustaining innovation and space for external disruptors.