Strand 7 TBTS: Imagination and innovation

Imagination and innovation: Thinking Behind the Strand

Creates enriching and engaging learning environments to support all students—and the identities and perspectives they represent—by imagining and innovating practices beyond the status quo.

As people, contexts, and technologies change, teachers are preparing students for worlds we haven’t yet built, problems we haven’t yet encountered, and societies we haven’t yet experienced. Thus, as teachers, we must be innovative, thinking beyond the status quo and the here-and-now, into realms teeming with bold, expansive ideas solve problems, ask new questions, and reach deeper in new directions. Classrooms, learning, and children are dynamic, although we don’t always teach in institutions that appreciate or allow for it. True education requires and offers opportunities for imagination and innovation for teachers and students. An innovative classroom hums with the combined energy of collaboration and imagination, where teacher and students explore together and uncover new means of applying, testing, and synthesizing ideas and information. As teachers, we must pull together what they know about the content, their students, and the world, consider future what-ifs and possibles, and imagine ways to create vital and intriguing learning environments.

Beyond “the way we’ve always done it”

Especially early on in our teaching, when we feel under pressure or challenged in the classroom, teachers fall back on the teaching practices they know best—often, those we experienced as students. Researchers call this the “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975). This apprenticeship of observation is also the reason everyone assumes to be an expert in how schools should best be run and how teaching and learning should best take place. Nearly everyone in the United States has years of experience as students in classrooms. These years of being on the receiving end of schooling inform policy makers and educational critics, as well as parents, creating an invisible force that pushes on schools and teachers to recreate schools and classrooms that are familiar and comfortable to those who successfully experienced schooling in the past. It is this invisible force to maintain the status quo that prevents the lessons of powerful teaching that occurs outside of school and innovative research from making their way into education policy, schools, and classrooms. When we revert to pedagogies from our past in schools, we are more likely to reach only students who are receptive to those pedagogies and leave many students to struggle (remember, not all students were successful in schools of the past either). While it can be comforting to stick to what what we know, the same-old practices don’t usually work in classrooms with a diverse group of students, because each complex individual student requires something different. At times, acting on our imagination and innovation takes guts. But the payoff is worth it for you and your students.

Creativity and innovation

As teachers, we must recognize that learning and teaching are creative acts. Learning expands us and should propel us into imagining new possibilities and creating new versions of how we understand the world and ourselves. Sometimes we may realize a learning situation needs “something else” to make things click, but we can’t figure out what that is. It can be a struggle to come up with a different way than what we’ve already tried. In these situations, we can turn to the learning experts in our lives: teaching colleagues, educational resources, community educators, and our students themselves.

By turning outside of ourselves and our own experiences to our co-learners and colleagues, we open pedagogical doors to more opportunities and options for teaching and learning, including content and approaches we were not yet aware of. Seeking out our own coaches and supports as we do this is key to figuring out what’s working, how it’s working, with whom it’s working, and why it’s working. Through this intentional exploration with others and examination of “what happens if…”, what started as alternative ideas can become core to our teaching and learning environments.

An innovative educator sees opportunity in challenging situations and in conflict. These become places to collaborate on creating solutions together with students and colleagues. Embracing innovation and creativity means that there will be times when we model imaginative thinking for our students, we may inspire one another to think and act in alternative ways than “how it has always been done,” and when our students will do the same for us. It also means that we must get comfortable with making mistakes, with uncertainty, and with starting something over from the beginning. If we frame failure as part of the learning process, we help our students take up that same intellectual risk-taking in their own learning. Teaching and learning will never be the same process for everyone.