“Still” Leading Innovation Cultures

images Today on Facebook, Michelle Cordy shared a link to a    recent video featuring Simon Breakspear, a speaker at  the Ontario Leadership Congress Spring Symposium  2015.  As I have a tendency to do, I veered from the  initial video to the various related links on the side tabs.    There I found this 2010 video from Simon Breakspear, where he focused on the topic of Innovation and how we, in education, need to ensure that we are preparing our students for their future.  If you have 45 minutes, I would highly recommend that you watch it as he is an effective presenter who incorporates humour and data to make his point.

He is passionate about innovation for learning and how other sectors are embracing innovation for change. Keeping in mind that this was recorded in 2010, his information about the number of Twitter users and other social media platforms is outdated and I’m sure that today if he asked about iPhone use, the response from the audience would be greater.

Breakspear challenges his audience of educational leaders to embrace innovative classroom environments where inquiry and grassroots ideas are encouraged and supported ~ where teachers model lessons after TedTalk styles (18 minutes or less) of presentations and where protocols are in place to support rich cognitive dissonance.

I loved everything that he was saying and yet at the same time, I became frustrated and somewhat saddened at the fact that we’ve been sharing this same message for at least 5 years and yet many of our learning environments have not evolved at all.  I wonder what it will take for more educators to embrace innovative practice.  I wonder how we can support our educational leaders to be more innovative.  When will we truly appreciate “positive defiance and amplify what is going well” in places of innovative practice?

I wonder when we will reach our Innovation tipping point in individual schools, in a community of schools, and finally in our school board.

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The need for change is obvious ~ our students are arriving at the doorsteps of our schools with a different toolkit and we have a moral imperative to prepare them for a future that is very different from our current world.

 

I’m hopeful that five years from now we will be celebrating more innovative practices throughout the world of education (classrooms, leadership, etc.).

I can’t help but wonder if we’ve just become more innovative in sharing the message about how we need to be more innovative….