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How Innovative Schools Are Finding Success Tim Wilson Endicott College Introduction             The need for truly transformational education reform has been continually building in my mind as my experiences in education grow.  I have always had the idea that there was a better way to learn than what in the industrialized method that nearly every school is modeled around, but I didn’t yet see a path to what that different system would look like.  In March of 2015, I was lucky enough to be in attendance at the Innovate conference at Graded School in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  The coordinators of the conference were careful to make sure that Innovate was not just another tech conference.  I was introduced to some of the techniques and practices that innovative teachers and administrators are utilizing that are the next stage on from just using technology because it’s ...

I've just finished reading How to Innovate: The Essential Guide for Fearless School Leaders  and I am reminded of the statement that came up at the Innovate 2015 conference at The Graded School here in São Paulo that I wrote about earlier.  In the panel disscussion on the first evening  Denis Russo Burgierman  Editor-in-Chief of  Superinteressante , Brazil's leading monthly magazine, made the point that innovation is a process.  It doesn't just happen as a good idea pops into your head and away you go.   From the reading I see that this is very true.  The movement that happens due to the innovative idea happens when structures are put into place to allow for and encourage the following through with.  I've worked with many teachers and admin who have innovative ideas but no culture within which to flourish.  This is probably the most difficult portion of becoming an innovative school.  The process and suggested exercises that Brown ...

In reading "How to Innovate: The essential guide for fearless school leaders" I had an idea when reading the chapter on Rethinking Your Space and this line in particular: "Your vision, in addition to the constraints of realities of your physical spaces, can lead you to develop innovative solutions later in the school design process." What if I started a collaborative blog or Google Doc with all of my friends from the around the world in their different schools and asked them to contribute to different categories of best practices, scheduling, use of space, curriculum... to create the visionary school that I know we all have been working towards (or complaining about how our school is not there). What if we gave these plans to an architect still in University as their final project?  We would be providing the student with a real world opportunity to be designing for and the strong possibility of the project being built.

One of the most important ideas to consider from How to Innovate: The Essential Guide for Fearless School Leaders , is the constant asking of both "Why" and "What if".  We are far to often bound as teachers and school leaders to preconceived notions of what school should be, how we allocate our time, when and where learning should happen, who should be doing the teaching and who the learning.  Many times these notions come don't come from written policies but from our past experiences in other schools or when we were in school.  If we are to truly begin to change how our schools work we must continually ask "Why" and then creatively "What if". -Why can't a teacher who does not teach during the first 3 periods on Thursday come in at 10:00? -What if we included into our professional development expectations a personal wellness provision, and that teacher uses that morning time to go for a run in the park -Why do we separate new languag...