Digital Leadership and Scaling Innovation

The Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum is a comprehensive and exciting challenge for school leaders. The Curriculum has been introduced as a means of preparing our students for a world that is increasingly digitised and automated.

Digital technologies provide students with opportunities to: 

• Use design thinking

• Be innovative developers of digital solutions and knowledge

• Become innovative creators of digital solutions

• Become effective users of digital systems 

• Become critical consumers of information conveyed by digital systems

• Engage in authentic learning challenges that foster curiosity, confidence, persistence, innovation, creativity, respect and cooperation

• Be regional and global citizens capable of actively and ethically communicating and collaborating.

School leaders have a great responsibility in developing a culture in their school that creates the environment for this critical learning to take place.

School leaders have two challenging tasks. First they must understand what is possible in digital teaching and learning. Secondly and most importantly they must take the next step of scaling up the fantastic innovations and creativity in teaching that they observe in their inspirational individual teachers – building an agenda for change and innovation that can have an enormous impact in a school.

How do you scale up to lead and innovate?

You really have to think about this and as a leader consciously work on it.

The trick to achieving sustainable change in schools is to learn how to scale innovation - how to take a great idea and have it reach every leader, teacher and student in the school.

Acknowledging the work of THNK (school of creative leadership) and the THNK community it is useful to think of scaling innovation by considering 3 main categories: Emergence, Networks and Waves. Keeping all 3 in mind as you seek to scale your innovations is definitely a sound idea.

Emergence is about keeping your eyes wide open for all the things that your teachers are doing as a collective. Hop onto it and as the good leader that you are, make sure that you design openness into the system and design rules for interaction, which allow successful behaviour to surface and spread.

Encourage (without stifling) target setting; emergence; and balancing control. Foster an ecosystem by bringing people in – expand to adjacencies, encourage the followers and engage the crowd. Experiment to improve and use the data to inform everyone how they are doing and keep moving forward.

Networks as a way of scaling innovation cannot be ignored.

Your job as an innovative leader is to take advantage of the properties of networks, the structures and technology supporting networks, and the social conditioning that exists with network members.

Networks have hubs and amplifiers – target them. If existing networks have gone to sleep, activate them. Encourage networks to jump across each other and infect each other with ideas. Aim to develop from this cross fertilisation, not another network, but a much larger coherent community and keep moving forward.

Emergence is a little like waiting to catch a wave. However the Wave category of innovation is not about that at all. It is about you taking the reins and exerting strong and powerful leadership.

The very powerful wave approach to innovation is about creating, nurturing and sustaining the wave and steering it in the direction of your entrepreneurial vison. You as the leader will unleash the wave, have others catch it, ride it and create a movement. You will synchronise all efforts and the wave will build to a crescendo always moving forward.

As we said at the beginning of this blog it is definitely a good idea to mesh all 3 approaches to scaling innovation.

For many years the Leading a Digital School Conference has been addressing the issue of how to scale innovation.

This is an invitation to attend the conference to add to your growing knowledge of what is possible with digital teaching and learning, and join the network of like-minded school leaders eager to take the best of the ideas presented and scale them up for the benefit of all students and teachers.

The conference is being held at the Crown Conference Centre, Melbourne on 25, 26 and 27 August 2016. Register now at: www.iwb.net.au/digital

Just one of many critical issues for schools – the need and opportunity to rethink schooling

Leading a school in an age of disruption driven by technology is not easy. There are so many critical issues that schools are facing and need to be tackled.

In this blog we want to confine our thinking to one issue only – the need and opportunity to rethink schooling.

The need

Sounds desperate. But we are not desperate! Some talk about the issue of rethinking schooling as if we had never started. This is silly. For years keen educators all over the world have been exploring ways to rethink and improve schooling. We are not just starting now, much progress has already been made in transforming schools. What we need to do is to continue this work, moving at a faster pace than ever before, just to keep up with all the other changes in society – especially the immense opportunities afforded by the huge advances in digital technology.

Rethinking schooling does not mean that schools will disappear any time soon. It means that at every opportunity we will leverage all of our resources, knowledge and skills to make the contemporary schooling experience, challenging, stimulating, relevant and future focussed.

The opportunity

What role does and can digital technology play in this exciting movement? How can our schools continue to evolve? Digital technology is making many things possible now and our quest to continue to transform schooling is greatly enhanced.

Global collaboration and cooperation by school students is now commonplace and growing. No longer do students need to be confined to their four classroom walls. Team work, group work, sharing and collaborative problem solving, bring a refreshing new look to many classrooms, all made possible by the advances in digital technology.

No longer does the teacher need to be the expert. A myriad of technologies available provide diverse knowledge sources, a phenomenon which has drastically changed the role of the teacher in progressive schools. The potential for organising a classroom differently, is now very high.

Technology offers schools the opportunity to customise on a large scale. This is a far cry from the uniform learning practised in more traditional schools.

Standardised assessment has driven what we accomplish in schools for far too long. Technology changes this to the extent that it encourages students to forge their own direction, pursuing their own interests. Individualised lesson plans, specialisation and specialised assessment are the result.

Technology has shifted the need for knowledge to be stored in the head. Because of the explosion of knowledge and technology, knowledge can now reside outside of our heads in external resources and our reliance on these resources is great. In short, with technology, we can know and get through a lot more.

The knowledge explosion makes it very difficult for a school to cover all the important information students may need for the rest of their lives. Covering an overcrowded curriculum is nigh on impossible. The nature of learning has to change and thankfully the explosion of technology allows it. Students must now learn how to learn and search for the information and resources they need. A very different kind of interacting in the classroom emerges.

By its very nature technology fosters a more hands-on, activity based schooling experience, allowing “learning by doing”, in contrast to passively learning by simply acquiring knowledge. Creativity, making, robotics, imagining, hypothesising, simulation and augmented reality experiences are more possible and come to the fore.

We cannot underestimate the value of digital technology in developing students with analytical minds. One time complex problems are now made simple earlier in a child's development. Through technology, our students experience the joy of understanding concepts that were once out of their reach, allowing them to engage more fully with their environment and the things that truly interest them - and they are capable of doing this at a much earlier age.

Sustaining the change

The opportunities to change by leveraging technology clearly abound. However the trick to achieving sustainable change in schools is to learn how to scale innovation - how to take a great idea and have it reach every leader, teacher and student in the school. Scaling innovation will feature in our next blog.

If you wish to learn more about how to leverage technology to rethink schooling, why not attend the 2016 Leading a Digital School Conference to be held at the Crown Conference Centre, Melbourne on 25, 26 and 27 August 2016? Your colleagues will be more than happy to share their experiences with you.

Will Richardson at Leading a Digital School Conference

Will is an author, speaker, publisher, consultant, parent and co-founder of Modern Learning Media/Connective Learning.

Keynote Address 22 August 2015 - Educating modern learners: the opportunities and challenges of schooling in the connected world

Summary and thank you.

Will you have described our new learning environment as:

• Dynamic
• A kaleidoscope of colour and movement and knowledge
• Allowing us to: connect, network, engage in self-directed learning and to create.

All of the above is freely available outside of school. But what about inside school? No! Not always! Perhaps not often!

The picture you paint of what happens inside schools is a bit dismal. Not your fault! Compared with the picture painted above - it is!

You ask: How can/should kids learn in school?

And you suggest: Our job is to create an atmosphere/conditions where students want to learn.

Thanks for reminding us that we do "know" what these conditions are (we told you here today), but often we ignore them and do something else entirely.

Thank you for provoking us into questioning our current practice and structures so that we may continue to seek to change learning "inside schools" into the awesome, rich and passionate experience it can be.

Lee Watanabe Crockett at Leading a Digital School Conference

Lee is President of the Global Digital Citizen Foundation.

Keynote Address 22 August 2015 - Present tense and future perfect

Summary and thank you.

Lee thank you for a fascinating, very humorous and highly polished presentation about the exponential growth of technology and what it means for the future.

As you say: "slightly disturbing"!

What I think is also disturbing is school as an information delivery system competing with many other efficient and smart information delivery systems.

Schools will win this competition only if:

• They innovate
• Allow and foster curiosity
• Are grateful for the past
• Have an eye on the future and above all
• Give themselves the freedom to dream.

Your idea of us dealing with the tyranny of the urgent while focussing on the future as a way forward, is an incredibly big, but important challenge for all of us. 

Phil Stubbs at Leading a Digital School Conference

Phil is Education Director at Verso Learning.

Keynote Address 21 August 2015 - Making learning irresistible

Summary and thank you.

Phil thank you for presenting an alternative response to Flipped Learning. May be it's not an alternative response though - in your words what you had to say is probably better expressed as a cautionary tale.

A cautionary tale drawn from the work of some of the best educational thinkers in the world (November, Fullan, Hattie and Dweck).

You have demonstrated well that there is no one way to flip a class - as you say there are 50 shades of flip.

I really like your idea of what I call an alternative resource to flip the learning.

• Developing content to provoke and activate learning
• Allowing talking, sharing, a multitude of voices and hypothesising and then
• Analysing the spontaneous student response or voice
• To inform the next provocation.

Phil with your range of quality ideas and passion for learning you have certainly helped us to flip our thinking.

Jon Bergmann at Leading a Digital School Conference

Jon is a teacher, author and flipped learning pioneer.

Keynote Address 21 August 2015 - Flipping your class: reach every student in every class every day

Jon Bergmann in action

Summary and thank you.

Jon it is amazing that it all started with 170 videos after you and Aaron Sams asked a very simple question: What is the best use of face-to-face class time?

I believe you have resonated with all of us today.

You are right about homework. We are sending kids home with the hard stuff! Let's bring higher order learning activities back into the classroom to be facilitated by the experts - the teachers.

I wonder what our delegates think? I am sure you will hear from them over the course of the day.

Thank you for giving us sound practical and theoretical reasons and advice about why it is worth considering "the flip" - in a nutshell it has huge potential to improve learning.

A most engaging, informative and humorous keynote Jon - thank you for challenging us to flip "one lesson" and to make up our own minds.

Mal Lee and Martin Levins at Leading a Digital School Conference

Mal is an Education Consultant and Researcher at malleehome.com and Martin is Director of Information Technology at the Armidale School, NSW.

Martin

Keynote Address 20 August 2015 - BYOT and the digital evolution of schooling

Summary and thank you.

Challenges, challenges, challenges! Thank you Mal and Martin for provoking us.

A paper based school with paper based technology! Are there any? Are you teaching in one? Is your continued existence on line? Has your school normalised the digital?

Mal and Martin have unashamedly reminded us that:

• Schools are organisations
• Organisations are transforming
• Therefore schools must transform and continue to transform or their viability will be jeopardised.

Thank you for the very useful model of school evolutionary stages.

• Paper based
• Early digital
• Digital
• Early networked
• Networked
• Digital normalisation.

Mal

Your thesis is that on the whole, schools must move through all of these stages to sustain progress - and it takes time!

I am sure the delegates here today have already plotted where their school lies in this staged model and your powerful message to them is move, move through the stages, you cannot afford not to.

Thank you for this meaningful and insightful analysis and the work you continue to do in understanding the importance and power of the eco-system in which we all operate, an eco-system that goes beyond the digital.