5 Keys for a Collaborative and Innovative Culture in Schools
5 Keys for a Collaborative and Innovative Culture in Schools
Although a terribly frustrating time for many, the covid-19 pandemic opened the door for creative thinking and innovation. Without administrators and districts peering over our shoulders, teachers were able to try new methods in a way that would not have previously been permitted in many instances. Teachers were on their own islands designing methods to survive.
If we want to meet the needs of learners, we cannot return to our old ways. Teachers must continue to have this ability to address the needs of learners in new and innovative ways.
While it’s nice to believe that education policy will place learners and methods in a neat little wrapped up box and serve all learners equally, educators know this is unrealistic and untrue. We need to provide more personalized and interactive learning experiences. Schools need to become more collaborative and innovative spaces.
Over the course of the past 10 years, my colleagues and I have worked to develop a creative and innovative culture among teachers in our middle school. Our work has led us to have great success, including the creation of our school-wide Academy program.
What have we learned?
How did we create such an atmosphere?
Where can others begin?
We found these top five aspects to be key in creating such an environment.
Autonomy
Flexibility
Creativity
Open Minds
Trust
Autonomy
First and foremost, administrators must recognize their influence is key to innovation. We were fortunate to have administrators who supported and encouraged new ideas and experimentation. As teachers, we had the freedom and autonomy to experiment with new ideas and use our classrooms as labs. We were allowed to dream and ask the questions, “why” and “what if”.
Do not get me wrong, we were not educating without any constraints. As a social studies teacher, I had certain content and skills expectations, and my students were expected to master them. However, I could experiment with teaching methods, sources, and tools to help them learn.
If my administrator had constantly been looking over my shoulder and controlling my lesson plans, I would never have had the confidence to try new ideas. And frankly, my lessons would have been created more for my administrator than my students. Who are we here for anyway?
On some level, teachers must have the freedom to explore new ideas and try them in their classrooms, even if those strategies are an epic fail. And if they are an epic fail, so what? Worst case scenario is that we are modeling life for our students.
Flexibility
Teachers must be flexible with their curriculum and their time. One complaint we often hear is, I cannot try that idea because I have so much content to cover. Honestly, content is no longer king.
That ship sailed long ago and was reinforced by the pandemic. Teachers must be flexible in how they approach their content. Can we incorporate reading skills within social studies? Can teachers team-teach to incorporate skills together with an integrated curriculum?
I often collaborate with my team’s science teacher. Since much of my content is geography-related, he and I have conversations regularly on both content and skills we are teaching in order to use our time with students more effectively. We reinforce each others’ lessons.
When he teaches aspects of weather, I collaborate on the topic of hurricanes. He instructs on the science while I use the time to incorporate geography skills with latitude and longitude to track hurricanes. Oftentimes, I teach a little science along the way, and he teaches a little geography. This is flexibility. The subjects go hand in hand, and this is ok.
Teachers also must be flexible with time. I also often hear teachers complain of the time they will “lose” when we try to design integrated units or innovative programming. We must release any notion that “more time” in a particular subject area is necessary.
Instead, we can ask ourselves-
Can we teach in a different way to maximize time?
Can we use a flipped classroom model?
Can we teach basics online and use in-person time for project-based learning?
We cannot be bound to any old methods and traditions if we want to grow and improve. We must always have the flexibility to mold and change what we are doing to better suit the students’ needs.
We can be flexible with content, schedule, technology, and teaching methods.
Creativity
Creativity is a muscle. If we don’t flex this muscle, it weakens. The more teachers are able to use creativity themselves, the more it will transfer to the students.
Innovation requires creativity, no doubt. If you do not allow teachers to dream or imagine, you will never have an innovative school. Dream the impossible dream.
One of my favorite activities at work is to sit down with colleagues and dream a little, “what if we could build a spaceship that actually traveled into the atmosphere?” Rather than rolling their eyes, my colleagues jump on board and say, “huh, what if we could? what would that take?”
One of us will shoot it down after a few minutes, but end with “but what if we could-” so we actually then try it. And with today’s technology, we could take the students on a spaceship in the metaverse and even travel to Mars.
We may struggle with some constraints. Or need to be reined in with some of our ideas. But, creativity and our willingness to imagine solves a lot of problems.
Faced with the constraints of school policies, many teachers have lost their creative flex. If there is no point to dream and reimagine, we lose our interest and become stuck in the required motions of the machine.
Open Minds
In order to build conversation around new ideas and curriculum, teachers and administrators alike must have an open mind. We cannot be holding tight to traditional models of content, schedule, and instructional methods. If we are holding tight and not open to change, we are perpetuating the factory model of education that will fail society’s future needs.
I have run into challenges particularly with teachers who felt pressure to accomplish content goals by the end of the year. Their focus is on the narrow trajectory of their course content. Also, I have had conversations with administrators who could not see a larger vision than school as a content factory.
Minds can be closed to methods and concepts. Of course, a fear of change exists as well. Will I be able to keep up with the new ideas? Will my students learn what they need to learn?
In my experience, teachers need support to play around in the sandbox. They need the time to imagine. They need confidence to explore.
Without open minds, education cannot expand or transform. Educators and schools who are stuck to our traditional model will soon find themselves left out of the conversation and behind the times.
Trust
Only when educators are trusted to meet the needs of the students in their classrooms, can we transform education.
When I was designing a new program from the ground up, I had an administrator who trusted my team as professionals to create and build. His only questions were, “Is it rigorous?” and “Is this what’s best for kids?” If what we were doing met the bar, we were good to go.
Administrators everywhere must trust teachers as the experts in our classrooms. Teachers work with the students daily. Teachers know what students need, and they are creative enough to adapt lessons to meet the needs of a diverse set of learners.
In addition, teachers must have trust in each other. Although disagreements are inevitable, we must trust in each other’s abilities, ideas, and efforts to act in the best interest of students. If we do not build trust within our teams, some teachers resist speaking up and sharing innovative ideas that could change the path to success.
In addition, failure must be acceptable. How many times do you think the researchers and scientists failed in their understanding of the virus while developing the covid-19 vaccine? How many times did doctors and nurses fail in their attempts to treat the patients with the virus?
These failures allowed them to pivot and redirect their approach to develop successful approaches. As educators, we often revile failure in ourselves. Yet, in order to innovate, we must be able to accept our own failures as well as those failures of our colleagues.
Our failures will lead us to success.