I have been trying to catch up with episodes of George Couros’s excellent Innovator’s Mindset Podcast. Of course, I had to revisit the episode in which I was lucky to appear. While listening to it, I began to realize when I was talking about my favorite teachers. They were actually the ones who allowed me to experience personalized learning. This is nearly 40 years ago! In 1997, the movie of the year was Beverly Hills Cop 2, and the biggest song of the year was “ Want to Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston. Specifically, Mr. Vollrath, who I talked about in the episode, realized that it was not the ability to spell a word but to know what it means and use it in the proper context. As I write this post right now, I am still not the best speller, but there are tools that can assist me with it. I see red lines in Google Docs that alert me if I misspelled something. It’s like he understood the WHY of the words, which was not the spelling but the understanding of the words and the abi
One of the great stories of Innovation shared in Innovator's Mindset is that of Blockbuster and Netflix. A part of the story that I’d like to reflect on is the failure of Netflix. Most of us didn’t know about it because we didn’t have a personal interest in Netflix, yet. The graph below is taken from a series that Derek Bennington did at Chief Innovator. As you can see Netflix was not an instant success. They lost money for years before they began to grow.
In a meeting four years ago, our assistant superintendent for teaching and learning Dr. Dana Monogue began by drawing a curve on the board similar to this:
She noted that the gains in our district had flatlined. Yes we were one of the highest performing district in the state now, but we weren’t preparing learners for tomorrow. She put forth the challenge that we needed to change our model before we lost touch with the workplace of tomorrow and saw negative gains.
She next drew a second curve that represented a shift in practice, an attempt to innovate.
As you can see by this graph and the Netflix graph, they begin with loses. That day Dr. Monogue told us something I had never heard an administrator say before. She communicated that our test scores might go down at first, but that’s ok. She let us know that she believed that short term losses are what long term success is built upon. Innovation requires a commitment to your goal and sticking to it.
It is one of those moments that I cling to as an educator. It told me that my administration trusted me to be an agent of change, my failures didn’t define me, and they knew learning was more than just a score. They understood that to innovate one must lose before growing.
Comments
Post a Comment