What Everyone Needs to Know About Innovation

Have you ever wondered why educators are reluctant to make changes?  Whether it is changing instructional methods, changing educational mindsets, or changing what our classrooms look like each day, many educators stick to the same formula and don’t let go.  This mindset is ironic because we live in a world that is completely the opposite.  We live in a society where change occurs daily.  Yet as educators, we stick to what we are comfortable with everyday and avoid change. 

In my session “What Everyone Needs to Know About Innovation” at the 2016 Battelle for KidsConnect for Success Conference at the Ohio Union, we are going to change.  We will examine innovative educational practices and programs and break down how they originated and became successful.  Attendees will learn that creativity isn’t something that people are born with or inherit.  Creativity is a mindset that can change lives by building self-confidence and following certain protocols to create change. 

There are many resources available to help anyone become innovative.  We will examine resources such as George Couros’s (@gcouros) book TheInnovator’s Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent and Lead a Culture ofCreativity and The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley to learn more about how to be creative and innovative and how easy creativity will come to you. 

Everyone wants to be great at what they do.  It all starts with confidence and a desire to be great.  Developing that confidence will fuel your creativity.  Using creativity to find ways to offer innovative instructional practices, programs, and mindsets in classrooms and buildings will get everyone a step closer to being a great educator.

Sometime before you attend my session “What Everyone Needs to Know About Innovation” on June 13^th, watch the video below and ask yourself, “What can I do differently to be a change agent and help people?” 

How To Tell If You Love What You Do

Anyone who is a connected educator knows, once you get started using different resources and tools to stay connected, it can be hard to stop.  Participating in Twitter chats, Voxer groups, utilizing Facebook and Instagram to connect, blogging, reading blog posts and education articles, attending conferences and attending EdCamps to name a few, all take time.  But like anything else in life, when we want to be good at something, we need to get involved, practice and devote the required amount of time necessary to be successful. 

When you invest the time, focus, passion and energy to be successful, you demonstrate to yourself and others what you value.  When I first became an administrator and began to invest time in learning more from others so I could improve, I can honestly say it became addicting.  I continue to spend hours upon hours investing my time in chats, reading blog posts, asking questions, and connecting with educators from around the world.

While my time management isn’t the best and the balance between my growth and personal life constantly needs adjusted, the people closest to me identify why I do what I do.  They see my passion and love for what I do.  They can see what I want to help my students and staff become.  Its not a question of whether I love what I do everyday.  For the people closest to me, the question is, “How can I love what I do?” or my kids say, “Whatever I do in my life, I want to love it as much as Dad loves what he does.”

As an educator, do you love what you do?  Your answers to the questions below may help determine if you do:

Is getting better a priority for you?

Do you want to get better?  Do you feel a need to get better?  If you love what you do, you make getting better a priority in your life.  In education, we not only want to get better for ourselves, we look to get better so others can be great.  We make getting better a priority in our lives because we love what we do.

Do you invest time to get better?

If you want to get better, as stated above, you have to put the time in.  If you love to workout, you find time to workout.  You plan for it each day.  You make the time.  If you want to be a better educator or a better leader, you need to invest the time to get better.

Are you consistently investing the time to get better?

If you love something, you consistently invest time to improve.  You don’t do it once and then wonder why you didn’t get better.  When I was younger, I used to be a pretty good golfer.  I practice and played everyday.  When I occasionally play now, I know I am not that player anymore.  Why should I expect to be?  I don’t consistently invest the time to be good.  If you love what you do, consistently invest time to grow as an educator.

Does getting better drive you in your craft?

People who love what they do are passionate about their craft.  People who love what they do have an enormous sense of pride about getting better and being the best.  People who love what they do know “why” they want to get better.  As Eric Thomas says, You need to have a “why” to love what you do.  Your “why” will drive your passion and pride.  When you have that drive and others see that drive, everyone knows you love what you do.  It’s not an act.  It’s genuine.

Do you enjoy helping others? Does it excite you?

When you love what you do, you know helping others get better only makes your field stronger.  In education, when we help students and staff, it makes culture of education in our buildings, districts, and learning network stronger.   When you love what you do, you give back to others.  At that point, people who love what they do realize it is not about them, it’s about others.

Do you reach out to others to get better?

People who love what they do have no problem asking others for help.  They know others can help them grow.  Successful people build a network to get better.  None of us can be the best in anything without help from others.  When you love what you do, you make it a point on a daily basis to let others help you grow.

Are you giving your craft everything you have to offer?

Loving what you do means you bring everything to the table each day.  As educators, it doesn’t matter what your job description or position is.  Our students, parents, and communities deserve our absolute best each day.  

Are you willing to change and encourage others to change when necessary?

You always here the line, “Change is scary,” or “People fear change.”  When you love what you do, you don’t fear change, but look forward to it.  When you love what you do, you invest the time to change and innovate to improve yourself and others.  When you love what you do, you realize change is a part of the process towards overall success.  You model change so others the people around you will change for the better.  When you love what you do, you help improve the culture by your willingness to change and visualize the benefits of doing it differently than before.

If we are going to make a difference in the education field, we need to love what we do.  I find it hard to believe that when people get into an amazing field like education, they don’t have some type of love or passion for the field and want to help students.  If you read these questions and don’t believe you love what you do, you have two choices: You can look to do something else with your life or you can find your “why” and invest the time to begin to love what you do again.  If you choose option one, don’t feel ashamed.  Go find your passion and what drives you.  If you choose the second option, as a fellow educator, I need you start today.  Please invest the time to get better and make it a priority to love what you do.  Not only do you owe it to yourself, but also you owe to all of the students’ lives you touch each day. 

What questions do you think people need to ask to know if they love what they do?

Ultimate Guide: Best Instructional Practices for Student Growth

If teaching were easy, everybody would do it.  OK, maybe not, but there would be a lot more teachers who stay in the education field and not leave after a short time.  In fact, there is new federal data that says 17 percent of new public school teachers leave their jobs after four years.  As I read this, it forces me to wonder, how many of these teachers were employing the best instructional practices during their time in the classroom?  Were they using practices that made their time in the classroom a more enjoyable experience?  These two questions can determine if a teacher is going to be successful or not.

Let’s take a look at some of the best instructional practices to use that will help teachers and students.  While many of these practices are based on John Hattie’s work Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning, there are some fundamental methods that should be used daily in every classroom.

Learning Targets That Come to Life

Create learning targets that mean something instead of just posting learning targets.  As my friend and peer Mike Acomb would say, “Make your learning targets come to life for the kids!”  Learning targets need to be addressed during a lesson and embedded in the lesson.  Students shouldn’t have to memorize learning targets.  They learn the targets through the lesson itself.  Let your targets act like a GPS for your students to guide them in the right direction.

Student-Led Learning

Empower your students.  Let them lead their learning.  Teachers need to facilitate class, not teach class.  There will be struggles in the beginning as students and parents aren’t always comfortable with this type of learning environment (remember, we didn’t learn this way in school either).  Continue the journey.  Our students deserve it.  We are all lifelong learners.  Let’s teach our students at the earliest age possible the benefits of exploration, research, collaboration, and hard work.

Feedback

Our students need to know where they stand on a daily basis.  “Excellent”, “Great job!”,  “88%”, or 8/10 are not examples of feedback.  Feedback is information given to a student that fosters growth.  It can’t happen weeks after the assessment or lesson.  It needs to be as instantaneous as possible.  Utilize tools such as Plickers, Nearpod, Google Forms, Padlet, and TodaysMeet to get instant feedback that can be used in school.  Give our students feedback they can use to get better.

Don’t forget about students giving feedback to educators.  Students should be able to give educators feedback on a daily basis to let the teachers and administration know where they stand.  Are we giving our students the most effective learning environment possible?  Let the students tell us.  RemindHQ is a great tool to use to do this.  Educators can allow students to text back using this texting application.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are practice.  Plain and simple.

Let students practice before their assessments.  Don’t punish them while they practice.  Let them explore and figure out what they need to know.  Homework and quizzes are practice.  Create a culture of practice in your building and classroom.  Let students prepare without worrying about failing.

Engagement

When it comes to engagement, there is a simple question to ask, “Would you want to be in your class?”  Don’t base your class on what has been done in the past in education; make your classroom something new.  Use different resources to make your class engaging.  Allow students voice and choice.  Make your classroom something your students have never seen before.  You have a better chance of engaging students that way than sticking with traditional teaching practices.

Alternative Assessments

Why do we still assess the same way we always have? Why can’t we allow students to show what they know in different ways?  Great questions without great explanations to support them.  Allow students to try something different.  Your classroom and building culture will improve.  Let’s look at different ways to assess: allow students to make videos, allow them to complete projects, allow them to present, or ask students how they can show what they know.  Taking tests each week doesn’t create lifelong learners, it creates memorizers.

Making Blended Learning Just “Learning”

The term “blended learning” needs to go away.  Blended learning should be a part of learning.  As building leaders and teachers, we need to embed learning in the culture of our school.  We do this by using a wide variety of resources to produce student growth.  We need to professionally develop our students and staff to effectively use the resources each day.  Finally, personalizing your learning environment allows students to use the resources in which they learn the best.

Personalized Learning

As discussed earlier, allow students a voice and choice.  The teacher isn’t always the smartest person in the room in today’s classroom.  Limit the amount of direct instruction and develop new ways to deliver content to students.  Become a learner yourself and find ways to connect, collaborate, build confidence and create to positively affect your teaching. 

Relationships

A positive classroom environment is invaluable.  Positive educator and student relationships outweigh content knowledge.  Content knowledge can always be learned and mastered.  Relationships are built on respect and trust.  Develop great relationships with students and you have foundation for best instructional practices.

Compassion

Our students lead different lives than we did.  Whether that is for the best or not, it is a reality.  As educators, we need to respect that.  We need to identify our students’ live and work with our students.  We aren’t in the business of teaching our students life lessons; we are in the business of educating students for life.  Compassion isn’t a sign of weakness; it is a sign of respect towards our students. 

Using the best instructional practices in school is a lot of work.  If we take the time to become better educators and use the best instructional practices we can, the workload will lessen.  Student will be more productive and maybe, just maybe, more teachers will remain in the business of educating students.  As educators we need to become more knowledgeable in the best instructional practices to make our jobs easier and more rewarding.  Its time for a change, let move our practices from better to best.

7 Facts About Modeling as a Leader

We’ve all heard the saying “Walk the walk and talk the talk” and John Maxwell’s famous quote, “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”   As leaders, we need to abide by these wise words everyday.  Modeling what you want to see in your organization or building is critical for the overall growth of the culture.

Every effective leader has the intentions of modeling of what they want to see in their organizations.  The problem is, once things get busy, we lose sight of our intentions.  It is too easy to fall back into our daily norms instead of surging ahead with our original goal of modeling what we want to see each day from our staff.  Great leaders make sure modeling is a focus on their everyday practice.  They do this in many ways:

Great Leaders Who Model Have a Plan and a Vision

Well of course they do!  They model the plan and vision each day.  Leaders focus their modeling on where they want their organization to go.  Don’t model what isn’t important to your organization.  Streamline your platform to give your staff a clear picture of what you expect from them.

Great Leaders Who Model are Accountable

Leaders want their staff to be accountable.  If we want to see that each day, as leaders, we have to be accountable too.  In any organization, there are daily situations that arise that create a detour in our schedules.  As a leader, it is important to avoid these pitfalls.  It is important to hold yourself accountable and set out what you planned to do when the day started.  If we expect our staff members to handle adversity in that way, then we should model that behavior on our end.

Great Leaders Who Model Take Pride in Educating Themselves

If you want your staff to continue to grow, then as a leader, you need to do the same.  Having a constant push to get better and learn more ways to help students and staff starts with pride and want.  There are an abundance of resources available for leaders to grow each day (even if your not technology savvy or using social media).  Use the resources and share with your staff and others.  Others will see your lead and follow.

Great Leaders Who Model Get Out of Their Comfort Zone

We can’t preach to our staff to take chances if we as leaders are not going to do it ourselves.  Try doing things differently with your meetings or with school programs.  Your staff and students will notice.  If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.  As leaders, we need to incorporate more inquiry into our decision making process and ignore the fear of a new initiative not being perfect at the onset.

Great Leaders Who Model Build Relationships

Building relationships within your organization increases trust.  Staff will be more open to what is being modeled when trust exists.  When relationships exist, leaders can ask others for assistance with modeling the initiative and to carry the torch to help others.

Great Leaders Who Model Lean on Others

As a leader, it is important to identify talent.  Find the people on your staff that can help you model your expectations.  Using others to help you model will only make your building stronger.  There is a reason staff EdCamp professional development days are some of the biggest growth opportunities for staff members.  They love learning from each other.  Let the power of peer-to-peer self-development help you help your staff.  Let your staff help you model the great practices and programs in your building.

Great Leaders Who Model Are Visible

Increase your visibility in your organization and you will see more great practices in your building.  Seems simple enough.  This allows you to see the different practices and share them with the rest of your staff.  Visibility allows for conversations and feedback to take place too.  Being visible throughout your building shows others that you value having a presence in the building and that it is important to you.  Getting out of office will hopefully encourage your staff to step out of their rooms and share great practices with staff and build relationships with students.

Leaders need to set the bar.  We need to show others the way.  That’s part of what makes a strong leader.  It also helps make a strong organization.  Leading by example sets the tone for the culture and climate of your organization.  I believe Albert Schweitzer said it best, “Example is not the main thing in influencing others.  It is the only thing.”