Innovation Takes Time

Innovation doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes time.

Images from WIX

Revision is something that I am all too familiar with as a writing teacher and a student.

With that in mind, when I first wrote my innovation proposal for my principal and academic coordinator, I was extremely passionate about my idea.

When reflecting back on those moments and after a few helpful advice, I realized that the true outcome of my innovation proposal was to plan an innovation project that would help students become more successful in learning.

I wanted to create a plan that was going to help struggling students to develop their content skills during tutorials.

First, I had to think about how I would innovate a time slot of twenty minutes. This was the difficult part to plan, so I had to create part of the plan for students to access lessons from home. A blended learning environment would lend more time for one on one time with students.

This idea came about creating my innovation plan that would help students develop skills at home as well as one on one time with the teacher as a guide to help students to solve real-world problems. When I created my plan for innovation, I also had to create a literature review that would support my plan. Writing my literature review was a process to find research that dealt with blended learning in a tutorial setting. This was a struggle to find current and relevant research that could convey my plan successfully

Research can do so much in encouraging others to follow a plan of innovation, but to really have a plan of innovation, there has to be a heart in it. The heart of the matter behind my innovation plan came from my digital story.

In my digital story, I explained the struggle I went through as a high school student struggling to understand concepts in my geometry class and having a tutor that took time to create goals to become successful. Tutorials was a personal part of my learning journey. To be able to explain that I was a student had my struggle and saw the value of tutorials from my own experience was cathartic. My experience pushed me to open up about a subject that was relevant for teachers and students to understand. My digital story showed the real value of my innovation plan.

images from WIX

After developing my plan, literature review, and proposal, I gave the proposal to my team first. I had to have their support before going forward since we were going to be the one to do the test run. I was a little apprehensive about providing a project about change. The one mistake I made from presenting this was that I didn’t have an opportunity to show my digital story. I think misstep didn’t quite move my team. As they were overwhelmed with the information provided and they were unsure about the plan itself.

I took the feedback from my team with a small amount of hope. I found hope in when it was time to create the UbD and 3 Column Table that allowed me to create a plan from a skill in our content area that students were struggling in last semester. Designing the skills and incorporating COVA was definitely a process that provided an opportunity to be creative. My designs for the tutorial task was enjoyable because I was able to creatively problem-solve.

Realizing that my innovation plan comes with layers, I definitely needed to create a plan that would help me create a 4DX/Influencer model that would create a more focused and clear goal for my innovation plan. This was part of my innovation plan that I definitely lacked when I first introduced my plan to my team. The 4DX/Influencer model being the missing piece will allow me to reintroduce my plan to my team and allow me to see my vision more clearly.

Image from Wix

Unfortunately, my plan does need quite a lot of new revisions. When developing my innovation plan, I didn’t encounter the fact that my grade level content was going to get new learning standards by the state. With these new learning standards, my innovation plan would need to be revised and reconstructed to fit our new standards. This also made our data on the old learning standards irrelevant for my plan. In the effort to find a solution to this new problem, I decided that this year’s data scores would be more concise as they are tested over the new state standards.

This semester has become the time to reevaluate my steps and plans. This provided a fortunate opportunity as our school has decided to lead with adding technology tools to help facilitate learning as well as implementing CFAs (common formative assessments) that allow teachers to differentiate instructions and lessons. Starting next semester, we will implement small group instruction. With these new plans, I was able to include this with my new proposal.

I’ve taken my new proposal to my principal which was well received and he added some great advice. The advice given was that my innovation plan would need to have a quantitative measurement between a controlled and experimental group. I would conduct my innovation plan and one of my teammates would conduct a regular tutorial, and we would collect quantitative from our CFA data from both groups.

Adding these steps was a great idea and would definitely be beneficial to my innovation plan. I am excited to start next semester with my innovation plan as well as reintroduce these plans with my new team. After collecting the data I need, I hope that I can take this plan to introduce this idea to my campus in the next school year. I have plans to first start with my digital story which really explains my “Why” in my innovation plan. Also, I want to recreate a new 4DX model for my campus overall goal to help give them a focus to create their own goals for their content classes. My next innovation project is in the air as I have so many plans and ideas that I definitely need to sit down and create new steps that can help reach my new goals for my campus and community of learners.