Creating spaces for change?

I spent a day last week in a school full of dedicated, passionate teachers, all interested in trying to figure out how to make their school the best place for students—now and into the future. These teachers were devoted and energetic and smart—and terrified and exhausted and overwhelmed. In a world without enough time to keep up with the demands of the present needs of students, parents, school leaders, community members, how on earth will teachers make a change to something different? After all, there may not be general agreement about exactly how schools should change to meet the demands of the future or exactly what those new schools will look like, but there is widespread agreement that schools do need to change somehow. The question I’ve become curious about isn’t even about what schools in the future should look like, but what schools today need to look like so that they can develop into schools for the future. How do we create schools as spaces where teachers to be able to experiment and make changes?

The key problem here is that teachers have neither the time nor the permission to make real changes. Schools are busy places, and teachers are devoted to the students they have right now and don’t want to take any chances on messing up those students’ lives in order to try some new fad. Parents, too, are pretty devoted to the school experience their children are having now and are not interested in sacrificing any quality their kids might have now for some future gains for other children. And yet, if we don’t want more of the same, and we also don’t want the inevitable risks that come with innovation, we seem pretty stuck.

People notice when someone tries something different and it falls flat. We can recognise a failure when we see it. Can we also recognise the time after which continued success, in the same way, will also be a failure? If cars today had the same safety features, gas mileage, and performance as cars 100 years ago, what seemed like success at the time might strike us as a big problem. It’s possible, though, that we might not notice at all that cars hadn’t changed much in all that time; it’s hard to see—and regret—innovation that doesn’t happen anywhere. If schools today are still educating some percentage of our children work in yesterdays’ jobs and live in yesterday’s society, maybe there’s a hidden failure there to which we should turn our attention. And it’s not just teachers who need to have their attention turned in this way; it’s all of us. Parents need to be more supportive of innovation, even when it doesn’t work. Principals need to support teachers to have new ideas and then get out of their way as teachers try things out. Community members need to be less reactive to the stories the press puffs up about chances teachers have taken that haven’t gone very well.

But all of this needs to be done inside a context where real children spend their time—not a social science experiment. We have to be smart as we are being bold, have to be cautious as we are being creative. These are hard mixes; even at companies where there’s plenty of time and money to spur innovation, there are all kinds of barriers to doing things a new way. I’d love to hear from those of you, reading this, who have some interests in this area—whether you’re school leaders, parents, teachers, community members, or students. What makes it possible to keep innovation going where you are? What do you wish you had more of? How could we think of ways you could get what you need? This is a hard thing we’re trying to do. It would be easier if we were thinking about it together.