Striking the Right Balance Between Innovation and Improvement
Perhaps it’s time that the debate about how we create the conditions for educational success for all students – through both innovation and improvement – became a little more innovative.
Writing in Education Canada last year, Ben Levin made an interesting distinction between innovation and improvement as they relate to education. Noting that “too much focus on innovation could distract us from what is both possible and desirable in order to pursue goals that may be desirable but are not very possible”, he suggested a balance between the two, erring on the side of exploiting what we know (improvement) versus exploring what we don’t know (innovation).
Striking the right balance between innovation and improvement is important for a host of reasons – advances in the science of learning with corresponding implications for pedagogy; finding ways to meet varied and complex student needs, and adapting teaching to the learning styles of an increasingly diverse student population; preparing students to meet the challenges of a complex, diverse, uncertain global world.
Many factors can hinder education innovation. For example, compliance with externally imposed data-driven accountability mandates favouring short-term gains on narrow measures of performance is not conducive to allowing teachers to explore different pedagogical approaches in their classrooms.
In general, being innovative is equated with new technology in the business world – designing a new application for the growing number of digital devices on the market. It seems that innovation today is all about the quest for the next big App.
Similarly, innovation in education, tied to vague notions of 21st century learning, is often viewed as the use of technology in schools. As innovations go, technology in schools does not have a stellar track record.
Many factors can hinder education innovation. For example, compliance with externally imposed data-driven accountability mandates favouring short-term gains on narrow measures of performance is not conducive to allowing teachers to explore different pedagogical approaches in their classrooms.
This may be because, as Ron Canuel observes in his blog post, efforts to use new technologies in the classroom have focused on equipment and infrastructure at the expense of the inter-relationship among pedagogy, curriculum and technology. For example, since 1998, Alberta has spent nearly $2 billion on technology for schools, mostly for hardware with a small percentage of these investments allocated for teacher professional development.
Ensuring optimal conditions of professional practice are in place to allow teachers to effectively use new technologies to truly enhance teaching and learning is critically important. This includes providing access to up-to-date equipment and other technological resources, ensuring equitable student access to technology, increased technical support, and provision of appropriate, ongoing and timely professional development and training to enable teachers to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change and utilize new technology to effectively support learning.
Teachers also need time to experiment with technology, and they must be supported in using their professional autonomy and judgment to determine the best use of new technology to support learning. And as Hargreaves and Fullan put it in Professional Capital, we need to focus on curriculum and pedagogy as the “drivers” for learning, with technology as the “accelerator”.
Teachers also need time to experiment with technology, and they must be supported in using their professional autonomy and judgment to determine the best use of new technology to support learning. And as Hargreaves and Fullan put it in Professional Capital, we need to focus on curriculum and pedagogy as the “drivers” for learning, with technology as the “accelerator”.
All of this needs to be grounded in a bold vision of the future of public education in Canada – what kind of Canada do we want, and what kind of education system will get us there?
I recently heard Stephen Murgatroyd speak on the subject of technology in the classroom. He summed up the challenges we face in this way: How do we leverage current and rapidly emerging technologies to increase the quality, depth and meaning of adult-student interactions in education, and to increase student engagement with learning, knowledge and understanding so as to encourage their passion for learning?
Perhaps it’s time the debate about how we create the conditions for educational success for all students – through both innovation and improvement – became itself a little more innovative.
