Elliot Washor: Thoughts on Innovation Each year our schools fail to graduate about a million young people and many of those who do stay in school are bored and minimally engaged in challenging learning, are performing poorly, and have limited prospects for successful postsecondary learning and work. Their situation is as much attributable to a deeply flawed school design as it is to faulty execution, so it is unlikely that yet another school improvement plan will yield any significant change in their prospects. Given the escalating expectations for high school graduates, getting better at implementing the traditional school design is not nearly enough when doing differently, very differently, is so desperately needed. Reflect for a moment on how many aspects of schooling are taken for granted in the vast majority of schools in this country. Real innovation typically entails a deliberate and creative remaking of many, if not most, of those system regularities.
Education Speak: Defining Innovation According to Merriam Webster, it's defined as: 1) the introduction of something new, 2) a new idea, method, or device: novelty. This week in Doha, Qatar, the Qatar Foundation is holding the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). Earlier this year, the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the US Department of Education held a $600 million competition for the Investing in Innovation Fund, or i3 grants. When considering innovation and our work at Envision Schools, I have been reflecting on two of my favorite educational thinkers/writers: Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and publisher of Education Sector, and writer of the blog Eduwonk.com. Then there's Elliot Washor, co-founder of Big Picture Learning. I'm not sure if these two writers are often quoted together but their following words about innovation really resonate and have stuck with me. Last month, Rotherham wrote this in a blog, The New York State of Mind, about New York's Equity Project Charter School: Improvement vs.
Is K–12 blended learning disruptive?An introduction to the theory of hybrids Download the full white paper By Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Heather Staker May 2013 The Clayton Christensen Institute, formerly Innosight Institute, has published three papers describing the rise of K−12 blended learning—that is, formal education programs that combine online learning and brick-and-mortar schools. Introduction to sustaining and disruptive innovation There are two basic types of innovation—sustaining and disruptive—that follow different trajectories and lead to different results. Disruptive innovations, in contrast, do not try to bring better products to existing customers in established markets. Theory of hybrids Often industries experience a hybrid stage when they are in the middle of a disruptive transformation. How to spot a hybridHybrid innovations follow a distinct pattern. Hybrid models of blended learning In many schools, blended learning is emerging as a hybrid innovation that is a sustaining innovation relative to the traditional classroom.
What Do We Mean by "Innovation"? in•no•vate - v. To begin something new: introduce. in•no•va•tion - n. 1. The act of innovating. 2. -- Webster's II Innovation is the spark of insight that leads a scientist or inventor to investigate an issue or phenomenon. In the world of education, innovation comes in many forms. In the Office of Innovation and Improvement, part of our mission is to identify, support and promote innovative practices in education. So how can we responsibly promote untested, unproven, but innovative practices? First, we practice truth in advertising. Second, we make our criteria for "innovative practices" transparent. Address an important challenge in education. Third, we encourage all OII grantees to put in place rigorous, experimental evaluation designs so that, over time, we can learn if these interventions are effective. Fourth, we plan to showcase OII grantees that have demonstrated success through rigorous evaluations.
Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from Just a few minutes ago, I took this pictureabout 10 blocks from here.This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford.I took this picture because this turns out to bethe first coffeehouse to openin England in 1650.That's its great claim to fame,and I wanted to show it to you,not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tourof historic England,but rather becausethe English coffeehouse was crucialto the development and spreadof one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years,what we now call the Enlightenment. But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse importantis the architecture of the space.It was a space where people would get togetherfrom different backgrounds,different fields of expertise, and share.It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex.This was their conjugal bed, in a sense --ideas would get together there.And an astonishing number of innovations from this periodhave a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.
1 Thing Successful People Always Do What Is Innovation? It all comes down to dots. In his famous commencement speech, Steve Jobs said: You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Sir Richard Branson has a mantra that runs through the DNA of his companies. In his manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin wrote how students today are educated in “collecting dots. Helping a Client Connect Dots Recently, this came to light when I was speaking with a client who was noticing things needing correction and frustrated that employees were not seeing, and addressing, the same things. I responded stating it’s not a flaw of his seeing things and wanting to improve them that was the problem. I concluded that this was the single difference between the innovator and the ordinary person: one saw the dots and connected them while others 1) didn’t see them or 2) if they did, they didn’t explore, question, or connect any of them.
LUMA Institute | We Equip People to Accelerate Innovation Patrick Whitney on Reframing Design Thinking -- and Beyond By Reena Jana - April 11, 2013 Patrick Whitney is dean of Chicago’s Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology a graduate school focusing on researching and teaching design methods. He is a luminary in the ever-growing field of design strategy. His work focuses on design’s role in transforming not only products and services, but also companies and markets. And he is researching how companies and designers can better manage design strategy with effective methodologies. I recently spoke with Patrick as he was gearing up for the annual IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference, which will take place from May 14-15 in Chicago. RJ: "Reframing" seems to be a theme at the conference and also in the innovation landscape in general. Patrick Whitney: The conference is a strategy conference. They seek to produce new things that are acceptable and reframing the conventional view of their current offering seems to be one of the key ways to do that. PW: It’s hard to say. PW: Yes!
8 Ways To Coax New Ideas To The Surface We need to face the issue of where great ideas come from. Their foundation is deep insights about customers--that part we know. But how do we get from insights to ideas? This is where we step into the process of invention. As businesspeople, we tend to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints. Not much, it seems, because we have tended to see business as a largely analytic endeavor, with relatively little attention paid to its more creative aspects. Research suggests that breakthrough feats tend to emerge from eight different ways of illuminating new possibilities: challenging, connecting, visualizing, collaborating, harmonizing, improvising, reorienting, and playing. 1. Challenging assumptions and defying convention are often the first steps. 2. Making connections between seemingly unrelated ideas is also often at the heart of creative engineering. 3. If managers, on the other hand, think only with their spreadsheets, how much use of imagination can we expect?