Techlearning blog

Start fishing down the hall is the answer to the question I am so often asked: "how do I get teachers to embrace technology in their classroom?"

When I began teaching, I found myself struggling to get my students (my scholars) to connect and engage with our first required text, The Old Man and the Sea. I followed the unit plans and ideas from the former educators but nothing worked because the scholars weren’t grasping the text beyond mere recall, which wasn’t nearly good enough. So, I went fishing down the hall. Literally, I went fishing down the hall. I flipped over a table, dragged it to the hallway, and called my class out there.

With nothing but a rope and a student on our “boat” table, I sent a large group of students to act as the marlin down the hall. With a drop of my hand, they were fishing down the hall. No matter how hard the student fisher tried, the “marlin” pulled the boat down the hallway, around the corner, and all over in much the same experience as the fisherman, Santiago, in the book.

What happened? The students understood. They connected, if only for a brief time. And I found myself in the principal’s office and speaking with my department head. Why? Because they were eager to discuss this activity because they embraced a culture of innovation: the ability to engage in both risk-taking behavior and creativity (Byrd and Brown, 2003).

It was because my principal (Dr. Amburgey) and my department chair (Mr. Graddy), strived to create a culture of innovation and that my first “risk” and failure was embraced that I continued risk-taking, focused on being creative, embraced change, tried new things, and continued to learn and grow. If these two leaders along with my technology coordinator Dr. Carey didn’t embrace this culture, I never would have had students create video games for certain pieces of literature nor would they have created digital stories for their narratives. I never would have created Wired Discussions nor would they have collaborated with other schools and formed mentors with pre-service teachers using various technologies. I never would have had students blogging and podcasting. I never would have moved my class completely digital and into CyberEnglish. In other words, I never would have created a rich learning environment where students were collaborating, creating, connecting, playing, and most importantly, learning!

So, when I answer Start Fishing Down the Hall when asked how to get teachers to implement technology into the classroom, I’m telling school leaders that it is their responsibility to construct a learning community with a culture of innovation where educators embrace adult learning, risk-taking, collaborating, and inventing. .

Embrace Risk-Taking

There is somewhat of a negative connotation with the term risk. While there are multiple explanations for this, I often find that many in society fear risk-taking because of the potential for failure and teachers are a prime example of this. However, this isn’t always the case. Disney’s Meet the Robinsons highlights this problem in the character Lewis. Through his inventions, he found himself failing only to lose faith. That is until he meets the Robinsons and their theory of Keep Moving Forward: failure should be considered a path to success, failures should promote learning, and failures should motivate us to keep innovating.

The Robinsons created an environment that school leaders should note as there is no faster route to stagnation and death to teacher innovation than an organization that shuns risk-taking especially during this time of great change. If School 2.0 is where schools want to be, educational leaders must accept that one of their primary roles is to embrace educators taking risks and establish a trusting environment where potential failures are seen as paths to success:

So much of what we do for clients is new, innovative, breakthrough. And, when you are in this area of high creativity and innovation you are always dealing with risk because you are trying things that haven’t been tried before. So much, I think, of what my job is in leading the agency is making it comfortable to take a risk (Lazarus)

School leaders often fear this because it lacks predictability and the correct way, which are hallmarks of many schools. This attitude reinforces the view that teachers are not capable of meeting these challenges and must implement other people’s solutions through teacher-proof materials, teaching scripts, and other methods that minimize the scope of their decision making. A view Ronald Heifetz accurately sums up as “a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you treat teachers that way, give them foolproof ways of teaching, you’ll get fools for teachers. No one will want to enter the profession but fools.”

The problem with this thinking goes beyond the scope of just education; this fear is the antithesis of creativity and goes against the realities of life:

Most situations in life don’t have a single right answer. In my experience, the most effective actions arise when we live the question, ‘What do we want to create?’ The key to all this is pretty simple – believing that every person has the capacity to create(Senge).

If this is going to change, school leaders must grow comfortable with ambiguity, rethink teacher assessment to foster risk-taking, and promote learning by doing, which all but ensures that failures will occur. However, the difference between an innovative culture and a stagnant one is whether these failures are embraced as paths to success or rejected as signs of incompetence. This is why it is also critical to shift the conversations away from failure so that teachers become independent, self-accepting learners:

Leaders affect change by shaping the conversations in their organizations. Changing the quality of conversations (what is talked about & how it is talked about) is both a means of professional learning and a primary way of affecting the quality of professional learning (Sparks, 2003)

As John Gardner proclaimed, leaders must tap into the human potential:

What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.

When this occurs and leaders begin to tap into the innovative teachers gracing their hallways, schools have begun to transform the culture. And, if schools are going to have sustained, systemic buy-in to School 2.0 from educators, risk-taking as a value and an everyday norm must be a reality.

Through this embracing of risk-taking, the school culture truly begins to see the power of adult learning in a true learning community:

If we shift school cultures to support adult learning, professional development is experienced as a personal journey of growth and discovery. In the best cases, adult learning includes an emphasis upon self-direction, transformation, and experience. One learns by doing and exploring… by trying, by failing, by changing and adapting strategies and by overcoming obstacles after many trials. One learns by teaming – sharing failures and successes as well as tricks and techniques that work (McKenzie, 2002, p. 125)

Photo by Alex Osterwalder

Model Innovation

But, getting educators to take risks is not an easy task. I contend that modeling is one of the surest ways for leaders to create action and instill confidence in an organization. There just is no excuse for schools leaders not to set an example for what the organization wants to achieve. This is especially true for risk-taking!

This year I witnessed first-hand the power of modeling from several school leaders in my building that has sparked risk-taking and creativity throughout the building. Our principal began exploring various web 2.0 technologies for more effective and efficient communication. From these explorations, he began blogging and integrated RSS into the school website. This use of participatory media demonstrated a number of vital organizational beliefs to educators: a commitment to instructional technology, an understanding of the importance of the philosophy of web 2.0, a belief in life-long learning, the value of risk-taking, and the disdain for stagnation.

How do I know this? Well, it created a buzz, a ripple effect. Teachers began talking to me about blogging and web 2.0 and soon discovered curricular and instructional needs that would be met with these tools. No fear. No apprehension. Because of a leader's model, there was already a belief that the organization believed in this.

The same thing happened with our associate principal who took an enormous risk when she moved our all school workshop to a wiki platform to foster enhanced collaboration and a more sustained implementation of the learning that day. This risk was rewarded with a mass of educators, departments, and organizations exploring how wikis could enhance collaboration and sustain their initiatives.

I could list numerous examples such as the ones above from these innovative leaders but the sum of it is they show that by modeling innovation through creativity, collaboration, learning, and risk-taking, those they lead will follow suit.

Are you Fishing or Stagnating?

Papageorge provides another way to look at leaders and innovation:

“Leaders of innovation look after their innovations as gardeners nurture their plants. Gardeners do not tell a plant to “grow”! They focus on the environment around the plant. They make sure the soil has the right nutrients; the plant has sufficient water and that insects do not destroy the plant. If they nurture the right conditions, the plants will grow. Naturally. By establishing an innovation-friendly environment, or Context, the leader “incubates innovation and it will flourish. Yet, all too frequently leaders concentrate their energy on the details of a specific initiative with little regard to creating the right environment for innovation to flourish.”

The question then becomes for school leaders is your school environment embracing a Culture of Innovation and Fishing Down the Hall. If not, what are you waiting for?