Can We Spark Innovation?

Today I'm thinking about the digital tools I've been using lately with varying success. I'm also thinking about David Warlick's recent apology to teachers. He apologizes to teachers for talking about them to administrators and others invested in improving schools/education. Does he really apologize? His apology is for talking about teachers and "getting them to teach differently" with administrators and others-- or for reporting out conversations he's had. I think that's how he words it. I can't help but wonder about those conversations. What does he see? What do teachers and others tell him? Why does he feel guilty about telling?

What's the subtext here? One subtext is that teachers are not performing up to snuff (again). Teachers are not learning or making use of instructional technologies consistently in their classrooms. Another subtext is that teachers are unwilling to change how they teach. Are we? I'm not, but don't we have an entire segment of the profession that is or that is resistant to change?

In his post, Warlick says that we need (at least) these three things in order to teach differently:

• Time to plan, collaborate, research, assess and adapt, build, and innovate (I tell them 3 to 4 hours a day — everyday).
• Classrooms that are equipped for learning in an abundant information environment, rather than an information-scarce environment (This means wifi, a laptop in every teacher and learner’s hand, one or more projectors in each classroom, and access to the emerging technologies that channel contemporary literacy).
  
• Permission to safely innovate and facility to engage in professional conversations about the changes needed for relevant education.

One comment to his blog read joked about the plan time; no kidding , we need it. Will teachers take it? Will they be paid for it? I wonder. Without a major overhaul of the schedule, is it even feasible or is Warlick evangelizing from the ivory tower? A working high school teacher in my district starts school at 7:10 a.m. and finishes the contracted day 2:40. The half an hour after school is designated as "common plan time." How often is that used in that way? Not often enough. On that point I agree. Teachers need common planning time. They also need structure, support and supervision in order to insure such time is used wisely.
Outside of our contracted day teachers work many hours assessing students, grading papers, communicating with parents, planning lessons and the like. My school parking lot is still 1/2 full at 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon. Can you add 4 hours of common planning time to that schedule? What about family commitments? Three or four hours of common plan time everyday brings to mind utopian thinking to me. What is realistic? What can teachers take responsibility for?

In terms of equipment, I heartily agree with Warlick's recommendations. He is a visionary. If I were teaching in heaven I would live his vision. All of my students would have laptops, digital cameras or other multi-media devices with fire wires at the ready to download, upload, share and present. The reality is that my school was just rewired or retrofitted. We now are wireless school wide. We don't have enough working laptops to go around; I bring my own and share with students. We still have teachers on campus who don't have speakers or sound cards in their computers. We have teachers who don't even have working computers. With a faculty of over 200 teachers we have less than 50 LCD projectors. Equipment realities are hard to overcome in tight budget times and in large, urban school districts.

Lastly, in terms of permission to innovate. We need it. Most teachers have it though I think teachers are so used to being mandated and accounted that even when they have "permission" to innovate they fear they will be reprimanded for not following a prescribed curriculum. Part of having the permission to innovate, I think, is taking the responsibility to learn--to learn best practices that make use of new literacies to engage students in meaningful learning. Rare are the teachers who read professionally, construct instructional rationales, or feel comfortable defending their practice. When I say rare, I mean that at my school I can count on one hand the teachers that talk to me about the professional books or articles they have read within the last year. I have however met many teachers at conferences or meetings who regularly engage in this type of study and dialog--they simply don't exist in my current reality. In talking with instructional support personnel recently I was dismayed to hear that one support person felt that the magic of teaching has been lost. He related that teachers now seem unwilling to craft or design instruction, unwilling to do it for themselves or to research/read how to do it for themselves--they've lost their spark in this person's words. Innovation takes spark. Perhaps Warlick's conversations are just the spark some of us need to move us beyond rhetoric and into action.


Warlick, David. "My Apologies" 2¢ Worth. 4 December 2007. 6 December 2007. <http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2007/12/04/my-apologies/>.