Innovator's Mindset - Week 3 Reflection

Innovator’s Mindset - Week 3

A group of us aspiring innovators at Forest Hills have joined the second installment of the Innovator’s Mindset MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  The author, George Couros is the instructor of the course!  It has been my commitment to post reflections from the book, twitter chats and webinars each week. I wrote this up last week and had intentions to add some personal reflections but the week got away from me. Here is last week’s installment:

Image acquired from: http://immooc.org

Innovator’s Mindset Reflection Week 3

Chapters 4-7 Summaries:

Chapter 4 focuses on how relationships between school leaders and educators should be built upon trust.  The author states, “if innovation is going to be a priority in education, we need to create a culture where trust is the norm… In some cases that may mean we, as leaders, have to extend trust to our people before they’ve “earned” it.  

Three things leaders do that inhibit innovation:   

1. Use the word No
2. Holding off on trying something new because it might put pressure on others
3. All concerns of equity for all classrooms, hold back great teachers from excelling in their classrooms

Three things leaders do that encourage innovation:   

1. Promote competitive collaboration
2. Develop school teacher rather than classroom teachers
3. Know and care about each individual you serve to the point where you can make suggestion tailored to their personal growth.

Chapter 5 examines how we begin the process of recognizing what requires innovation. Perspective is the key component to recognizing what needs attention.  In education our end-users are our students.  We need to view our “product” from the eyes of our students.  For many of us, this might be difficult to do.  Perhaps taking a professional day to shadow a student would serve us all well.  Sitting down and talking with our students about how they experience school can help as well.  Complete the same assignments you give to your students.

Chapter 6 investigate the concepts or engagement and empowerment.  This chapter in particular provided substance to a thought that I have been mulling over for some time.  We often speak of engagement in our district and the term feels quite hollow to me personally because engagement seems to translate to entertainment for many.  Entertainment is a primarily a passive activity and requires little effort or grit.  Learning require grit and resiliency.  Rather than striving for engagement our ultimate goal for our learners should be empowerment.

Chapter 7 sets the stage for pursuing a learner empowered classroom. This chapter identifies 8 key ingredient to a learner centered classroom: voice, choice, time for reflection, opportunities for innovation, critical thinkers, problem solver-finders, self-assessment and connected learning.

Contributed by Kyle Mack @ProfKyleMack