12/12/2020 by CS&A Guest |
Thought Leadership
Innovation is Not (Always) a Dirty Word: 4 Lessons
by Mike Goldstein
For some heads of school, the word “innovation” triggers mild fear.
For others, it triggers full-on panic.
Why?
Isn’t innovation a good thing?
Well sure.
Sometimes.
But sometimes “innovation” is code for “I want to force my pet idea on the whole school.” X new curriculum. Y new pedagogy. Z new requirement.
And sometimes “innovation” is code for “We’re going to arrange a lot of meetings and process where eventually nothing gets done, leaving people exhausted and dispirited.”
How does a head take the best of innovation — testing new ideas and keeping the few that really drive better results for students — without the worst of innovation?
I founded a small charter school in Boston, Match, which became known for “innovating” instead of replicating (opening more campuses). In 2012, New Schools Venture Fund named Match the “Entrepreneurial Organization Of The Year” for a whole handful of innovations. That was nice. We also had buckets of innovation failures. If someone gave an award for that we’d have won that 10 times.
Here are four lessons about innovation I learned along the way.
1. Double and Triple Down on Promising Ideas “Already Happening In The Trenches”
Ideas come from two places. You can notice something good already happening and want to pour gasoline on it. Or you can get “ideas from elsewhere.” Sometimes a staff member dreams up a new idea after drinking eight lattes. Sometimes a parent or donor hears about something being done in another school and wants to bring it to your school.
The first type of innovation has a wonderful quality — at least some evidence of success in your living, breathing context — that the second type lacks.
Match started as a high school. Our kids arrived to 9th grade at a 5th grade level. We recruited volunteer tutors. (In fact, one Devereaux McClatchey was one of our early tutors; a student he tutored — in law, no less — is now president of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association).
Anyway, we noticed “something good happening in the trenches” when the volunteer tutors were plugging away.
Problem was, the tutoring dosage we could get from volunteers was way too low. Students might each get an hour a week if they were lucky.
Our innovation? We got rid of the volunteers. We built out a whole dorm and ripped up our budget and our schedule so that every child could get two hours a day of tutoring from full-time recent college grads.
That idea succeeded. It later replicated to Houston, then Chicago, now New York City and beyond as its own spun-off, Gates-funded nonprofit.
Is tutoring innovative? Obviously not! “Innovative” seems like such a fancy word for this. But our deployment, dosage, and organization-wide commitment was unusual…and arguably innovative. All we needed to do was stare at what really happened in a typical student day, find something that worked, and then multiply it 10x.
2. Innovation Versus Individual Teacher Choice
What happens once you have a great idea, that you really really want to happen? You must choose between trying to win over teachers to be “early adopters” — to choose your way — or to say, “The hell with it, we’re all in on this, we’re all doing it. Let’s go!”
I used to favor the latter. I’ve changed.
Particularly in the American context, I think it’s possible to “win” that battle in the short term, but rarely in the long term. In an essay for American Enterprise Institute, I wrote:
When we think of programs, practices, and products that are (chosen) for teachers — there are three possible outcomes.
Full implementation
Total avoidance
Half-baked implementation
It’s unlikely that something for “all teachers” is precisely what a typical individual teacher wants, so often he or she doesn’t do a full implementation.
Meanwhile, teachers probably can’t overtly reject it — can’t openly say “I am never taking these laptops out of the box” or “I’ll just skip that staff meeting, because I can tell you right now I will never use this RTI approach to math remediation.” So “total avoidance” doesn’t happen so often either.
What remains? That last one, half-baked implementation, is, I contend, the dominant response.
All headmasters agree: Half-baked implementation is worse no innovation at all. Individual teacher choice is often needed for authentic implementation.
3. Securing Innovation: Changing Teachers or Building Teachers?
If veteran teachers should be free to reject certain innovations, then what? Yes, you try to win over the willing ones, and then if they’re delighted they’ll win over their colleagues? But what about when the innovation will require everyone to be on board?
Around 2010, many charter school headmasters realized they needed to develop their own teacher training programs for new teachers. That way, teachers wouldn’t arrive already resisting the new ideas. Headmasters would spell out exactly their innovative ideas in advertising their training program. If a 22-year-old liked those ideas, she could apply. If she didn’t like those ideas, she wouldn’t.
For example, at Match, our founding principal, Charlie Sposato, believed in an unusually high amount of 1:1 teacher proactive outreach to each parent. Not newsletters. Not occasional 20-minute conferences. Constant phone calls. True partnership.
For a while we tried to persuade teachers this was a good idea. We even got some Harvard economists to do a randomized control trial to show the benefit of these teacher efforts. The experiment succeeded. But it didn’t persuade. It was very hard to convince veteran teachers to change their daily routine.
So we created our own small Graduate School of Education. That way we were free to teach parent communication as part of the core curriculum, as well as other innovative pedagogies.
4. Try To Absorb The Risk Yourself
I was such an ass as a young school leader (possibly still am but that’s another story). When my “innovations” failed, I was quick to blame others.
Teachers sometimes fear innovation for good reason — new ideas often fail! So even though they may have great ideas, they are afraid to speak up.
As a head of school, sometimes you can take the risk away. Something like this:
“I’m looking for 20 new ideas to improve our school. I imagine this as a pipeline. Based on feedback, we’ll probably try five of the ideas in a very small way. Maybe 0-2 will stick…that is, our faculty and/or students will love them. Great. What’s important here is I want as many ideas as I can get. Do not fear if your idea is not chosen to test, because it’s probably because I didn’t quite explain it with the right nuance, or if your idea is tested but judged not to work, because I probably won’t get the execution details right on everything. Any idea you contribute is a win. That our school will only get a few to “stick” is on me, not the Innovator who brought us the idea.”
Here’s a concrete example.
When Match started our graduate school, of course by definition nobody had ever heard of it. Why should a 22-year-old not only pay us tuition but forgo admission to a well-known grad school like Vanderbilt or Harvard? So we innovated. We came up with an unusual way they could pay their masters degrees. By creating an unusual tuition system, we absorbed the risk ourselves.
When done in the right way, with the right intentions, innovation can be truly — you guessed it — innovative.
Mike Goldstein is an education entrepreneur.
Matt Candler 3/24/2021 at 11:44am
Delighted to see the wisdom and humility from MG. Thanks to you and Dev for laying this out and sharing lessons learned. Super doable. Or try-able?