This is a pretty important point, given that education seems to be the slowest field to innovate. Or more accurately, schools seem to be inordinately slow at innovating their cultures and structures to adjust to what we know about teaching and learning . To help answer that question, albeit in very general terms, I offer this quote recently encountered in one of the books I am volleying between at the moment: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steven Johnson.
“What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wise and diverse sample of spare parts – mechanical or conceptual – and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations – by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain branches of possibility, by making the current state so satisfying that no one bothers to explore the edges – will, on average, generate and circulate fewer innovations than environments that encourage exploration.”
So what specifically is it about schools that limit their ability to innovate? Please share with the rest of the class…..
Edunautics 