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© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
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TEST YOUR INNOVATION QUOTIENT 20 Questions To Ask By: Holly Chesser, SAIS Published: December 2012
At the Learning Forward 2012 Annual Conference this year, Howard Gardner, in a thought leader lecture on his new book Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed: Education for the Virtues in the 21st Century, closed with this remark, “I haven’t come up with the answers, but I think I have the right questions.” With this quote, Gardner highlights an important step in the process of instituting positive and essential change in education: asking the right questions.
In Grant Lichtman’s introduction to his book The Falconer, he writes, “I want us to spend more time teaching how to generate and recognize elegant solutions to the many problems facing our world.” In the model that he advocates to help move students from passive learners of old knowledge to active creators of new solutions, he begins with step one, “The Art of Questioning.” In Lichtman’s blog The Learning Pond, chronicling the stories of 63 schools across the nation that are undertaking the innovation process, he highlights schools that are committed to reevaluating best practices in education. Some have hired or discovered within their ranks “de-‐facto Chief Innovation Officer(s),” champions with academic experience and political savvy to get things done. Others are working to bust silos and reassess the traditional hierarchies that sometimes stifle innovation. And, most importantly, many schools are instituting a “test-‐fail-‐retry mode,” looking at failure as merely a guidepost to achievement. While Lichtman’s blog is an invaluable resource to read about innovative and model practices, employing solutions comes only after studying and understanding problems. Any school wishing to institute change must begin first with the process of questioning who it wants its students to be and what roles the school -‐ its administration, faculty, parents, and the students themselves -‐ can play in their becoming. Consider the questions below as a possible starting point for discussions in your PLCs, faculty meetings, informal conversations in the hall. And remember, every great solution began with a question.
© 2012 SAIS www.sais.org
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SAISconnect http://saisconnect.sais.org
Test Your School’s IQ (Innovation Quotient)
1. What process do you have in place to institutionalize faculty ideas? If someone comes to you with an idea, what happens to it?
2. Is your school essentially conservative or disruptive? 3. Does your school seek to produce the next entrepreneur or will that individual emerge
despite his or her education? 4. Do your administration, staff, faculty, and students possess fixed or growth mind-‐sets? 5. Does your administrative team lead by example or positional authority? 6. Can you identify the “fast horses” in your school, and do you leverage their spirit and
energy? 7. Are your divisional leaders kings and queens of their own castles, or do they work together
in a united kingdom? 8. Does the College Board and college admissions dictate your school’s curricular decisions or
is student learning the central stimulus? 9. Are you students inspired by wonder or motivated by grades and compliance? 10. Does every member of your school’s community (administrator, staff, faculty, student, and
parent) know the mission of the school? 11. On a scale of 1 – 10, how would those individuals rate the face validity of the mission?
Have you quantified that number? 12. Does your faculty collaborate within their disciplines, with other disciplines, and among
divisions? 13. How many of your faculty members write their own curriculum or their own textbooks?
What is the percentage of your faculty members using textbooks? 14. What type of leadership training model does your school offer for its faculty? 15. How many of your teachers sit in on each other’s classes? 16. How often do administrators and faculty members visit other schools to learn about best
practices? 17. What percentage of time do your teachers spend as the focus of the classroom? Is the
space student or teacher centered? 18. Does your administrative team engage in 360 feedback? 19. Is the traditional structure and school calendar inhibiting your efforts to design innovative
teaching and learning experiences? Are you re-‐evaluating your schedule/calendar to ensure it meets the needs of your students?
20. Does each member of the school have a growth plan focused on implementing the school’s mission?