Looking forward
“It is easy to sit up and take notice. What is difficult is getting up and taking action.” – Honore de Balzac
It’s far easier to see the need for change than to be the catalyst for one. Our educational system is one rooted in tradition and history, and it has not changed at the same rate as the world around it. In order to prepare our students for the future, we each need to feel empowered to identify and promote innovation to alter the status quo in our schools. We need to find new and innovative ways to make learning more personal and engaging. Doing that, however, means that we need to make a concerted effort to be lifelong learners ourselves, and to stay aware of both the needs of our students and the possible ways that we can use technology to meet those needs. It also means that we need to have a certain level of comfort with discomfort. Change isn’t easy. It requires vision, dedication, perseverance, and communication.
In order to be catalyst for change in my own district, I need to lead by example. I need to take chances, try out new technologies and new methods of teaching, and look for new ways to introduce disruptive innovation into my classroom rather than relying on the sustaining innovations of the past. I need to be unafraid to fail, and to learn from those failures, so that I can find better and more effective ways to reach my students. I need to be open with my colleagues and administration about what I’m doing, and sharing my trials and errors in the hopes of inspiring others. Most importantly, I need to be proactive. As Clayton Christensen said in Blended, “If we simply wait for the future to become the present…little will change”(Christensen, 2015, p. xix) . It is my hope that the plan I have created looks to the future, and will harness the power of a disruptive innovation for the good of my students.
References
Christensen, C. M. (2015). [Foreword]. In M. B. Horn & H. Staker (Authors), Blended: Using disruptive innovation to improve schools (pp. xv-xx). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
