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Innovation in Schooling: Taking Inspiration from Where Good Ideas Come From

Posted by Jonathan Martin on 10/03/10 • Categorized as Best Educational Practices,Professional Development

Like many  participants here at CP, I find myself fascinated by innovation in our schools, in two ways: how can our schools be more innovative in the way they facilitate learning, and, even more importantly, how can our schools facilitate more innovation in the life-long mindset, habits, and actions of our students?

These topics are fascinating for me not just because of their importance (schooling must improve, and our world desperately needs our students to become life-long innovators for its vexing problems!) but also because of their complexity: I know I am embarked what will have to be a life-long learning project to grow in my understanding and leadership in these issues.

Today I want to try to take a few lessons from the forthcoming (Oct. 5) book by a favorite author, Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  (I am quoting from the advance reviewer’s proof.)

One very fun thing about the book for CP fans is its enthusiastic embrace of Twitter as a locus for innovation:  Twitter is a “thriving platform [which] invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as [or much more than!] they are protected.”  Johnson himself is at @stevenbjohnson.

How can we promote greater innovation in our schools and in our student learning?

Explore the adjacent possible by enriching your environment with contemporary concepts and tools.

Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts– mechanical or conceptual– and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

Johnson reminds us that innovation is always incremental; we can only do new things tomorrow because we did new things yesterday; yesterday’s improvements make tomorrow’s possible.   But if we are not engaged with, and surrounded by, recent improvements, we cannot push forward to the future.

Environments that block or limit those new combinations– by punishing experimentation, or by obscuring certain branches of possibility, will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.

Maybe the above is self-evident, but it nevertheless is so important as to be not ignored.   Our learning environments must open themselves to the world and boldly embrace the new and the cutting edge, and must incorporate cutting edge tools and processes.

“Liquid Networks” are much more innovative than closed, atomized, or individuated environments. Johnson’s most compelling message may be to discard the notion that innovation happens in isolation as the result of solitary genius: it is anything but.

I have said this my self in the past, and the issues of failure and experimentation get a great deal of interest in Home education families and groups. Where they are seen as a positive experiences.
The issue for schools is that they are institutions which must provide results to prove that they are performing. This is not exactly conducive to experimentation.
When reading Steve Johnsons book I would suggest Principals have a look at the ways in which HE children interact in liquid networks. They may find things there which help them within the class room.