Daily Innovations

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind.  They've included:
• Grade level meetings about kindness and empathy
• PBIS and RtI team training days
• Some difficult student behavior issues
• Some great Educator Effectiveness meetings
• The first home football playoff game in two decades
• An engaging PD data about data
• A visit from former-NFL player LeRoy Butler about bullying
• Our first student dance of the year

But let me talk about something completely different for a moment.
In-between other craziness right now, I am a reviewer for proposals for a high-profile national conference taking place next Summer.  40 different highly innovative workshop proposals that each required close investigation and rating.  Proposals that other educators and leaders had poured their professional careers into, waiting for coveted spots based on the reviews of people they have never met.  These educators have made innovation their life's work. 

Innovation itself is an interesting concept.  In medieval times, if you were an "innovator," it meant you were a heretic because you were adding something "new" to a concept (i.e., a religious tenet).  "Innovation" meant prison or worse for the accused.  Today, we honor innovators.  Steve Jobs & Jony Ive (Apple) ~ Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt (Google) ~ Jeff Bezos (Amazon) ~ and so many more.

Two thoughts about innovation:

1.  My favorite book about innovation is entitled Better by Atul Gawande.  Mr. Gawande is a surgeon, and the main point of his book is that everyone thinks innovation is waiting for some disruptor to step in and solve our problems.  99% of the time, that's not how it happens.  Most of the time, innovation means improving daily practice, one step at a time, until our skills are just ... better.  The book is filled with examples over the past centuries that detail how small, consistent innovations have made life better.   

2.  Once, I was asked the following question:  "What does full implementation of innovation mean to you?"  This question haunts me in a good way.  This means a school where every educator is committed to trying something new and improving practice every day because our students need us to be ... better. 

Last week, LeRoy Butler told our students to work hard for their teachers because their teachers love them, are the smartest people around, and give all this knowledge and love for free.  The good news is that our students do the same for us!  Our students help us improve our practice on a daily basis (and they give us this gift for free as well).  Every time we improve our game, they grow in achievement, which in turn begs us to up our game again.  None of us can be the same educator we were yesterday.  We have to be ... better.