This week, I asked my cohort to analyze different unit planning models. This is a challenging part of the graduate classes, when teachers are learning the nitty gritty craft of creating units and lessons from scratch.
I walked over to the group analyzing the design thinking model.
“I don’t think I could do that in my first year of teaching. It just seems like the class would get too chaotic,” a pre-service teacher said.
“I don’t know about that,” another responded. “If students are more engaged, maybe discipline will be less of an issue.”
“Maybe, but I think I prefer the traditional model.”
“As a student or as a teacher?”
“Honestly, I think I’d rather teach in a traditional model but I’d rather be a student in a design thinking or PBL unit.”
“Which do you think your students would prefer?”
“I see what you’re saying, but I feel like we should start out teaching the way we are used to seeing and then later we can try new things. After you get a few years under your belt you can start making changes.”
“Why not try new things in your first year? We’re going to be new teachers. People are going to expect us to screw up. So we can treat the whole first year like an experiment.”
It was an interesting, slightly contentious exchange. I could sense the discomfort. However, it was a good kind of discomfort, because it tapped into some important questions: Why do teachers tend to teach in the same way that they were taught? What is the danger in this? Why aren’t teachers more willing to take creative risks? What if teachers were innovative from day one? What would we need to do to make this a reality?
Innovative from Day One
Confession: I have always bristled at the word innovation. I have always preferred, “creative” or “curious” or “imaginative.” Innovation often has a hyper-techno, futuristic connotation. But I think innovation is the right word here. The idea is to do things differently. Yes, it involves doing something new but it often includes trying out ideas that are vintage and classic. It means mashing up two or three ideas you find intriguing. Innovation is less about technology and futurism and more about experimentation and imagination.
This type of innovation often begins with awareness. People experience stages from consuming to creating, where they go from awareness of something to copying, to modifying, and eventually to making. Most of my current graduate students are coming from a traditional K-12 environment followed by a lecture-driven college experience. This notion of learning through making is appealing. But it’s also weird and uncomfortable and confusing.
This is where I have made a mistake as a professor. Right now, my students are learning about unit planning in a somewhat traditional, gradual release approach. It’s highly interactive and student engagement seems strong. However, I can’t help but wonder if the class should look different. What if we modeled this as a true project-based classroom? This last year, I taught my social studies pedagogy course around the design thinking framework, where they had to research, design, and implement a specific product. I’m wondering if a similar approach might work here.
I would love to take this a step further. Perhaps we could integrate this course into a PBL lab school experience where they could participate firsthand in a different style of pedagogy than what they experienced. Here, they could study a different teaching approach in realtime and they could discover what works and what doesn’t work. They would practice what AJ Juliani calls “intentional innovation.”
Beyond exposure and experience, students also need the permission to make mistakes. So many of my students are risk-averse. They tend to hedge their bets and avoid creative risk-taking. They learn to stuff the “what if?” questions and turn their backs on the wild dreaming that naturally takes place in this pre-service phase. But what if we expected mistakes? What if we built mistakes into our courses? One of the things I love about design thinking is that the testing and revising phase is all about mistakes and iterations. If a student says, “I’m afraid this won’t work,” we can say, “On some level, it won’t work. But that’s okay. Eventually it will.”
At some point, many new teachers will run into prevailing systems and existing school cultures that will scoff at creative innovation. They will sit in data meetings that focus entirely on student achievement while ignoring things like authenticity, creativity, and critical thinking. If we say, “start out traditional and then take creative risks later,” I worry that they will never take those risks. They will quit dreaming. They will follow someone else’s script and deliver someone else’s scripted curriculum.
I am convinced that one of the best things we can offer pre-service teachers is the chance to be innovative before they have even stepped foot in their own classrooms. This happens when we embed creative risk-taking, divergent thinking, and a maker mindset into the entire pre-service teacher experience.
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