As I was reading through the “What If” statements in Innovator’s Mindset, I started asking myself a different question…"Why Not?”. Why do those statements have to be something we can only wonder about. As innovators...as educators, we should look at that list and ask ourselves: “Is this currently happening? If the answer is “no”, then WHY NOT? Are we promoting “risk taking”... why not?: What we need to teach our students, in the absence of a crystal ball, is how to adapt. We can’t predict the future, so we need to teach them to be agile and course correct. They need to learn that things will never go perfectly, hardly go as planned...so “now what?”. We can only teach this by encouraging, modeling, celebrating and giving space for risk taking. Not only for our students but for our lead learners (the adults). We all need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Life is messy, but I argue that there is magic in that mess. It’s where we learn, develop and grow. It's that productive struggle that comes with just jumping. We owe it to ourselves and our students to make risk taking a priority.
should know, is how to navigate resources, synthesize and use information. This is important to teach our students, but we must do the same. We also need to be very comfortable with being co-learners with our students...to learn along side of them. In fact, I argue that we need to be open to learn FROM them. I always come out with new knowledge from every workshop I present at and every classroom I teach in. We owe it to ourselves and our students to be life long learners. We need to continually be questioning ourselves, our ideas, our actions and our purpose...WHY NOT?
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3/13/2017 03:33:24 pm
Great thoughts on why not. I always like to add "...we succeeded." to the end of "What if...". I also like the question, If you could do anything and knew you would not fail, what would you do? Allow time to reflect and choose something within the parameters. Then follow up with "Why not?"
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3/15/2017 11:46:01 am
Great post! I feel your frustration because we see things the same way. I'm on the same mission as you. There are many reasons (excuses) that teachers will provide as to why they many not want to change their practise. Stepping outside of comfort zones, loss of control, a lack of awareness, because it's too hard, etc... With every passing year, the struggle will get that much more challenging for teachers with this mindset. The pace of change is accelerating, and it won't be long before the ideas of the innovators will take hold. It will be sink or swim. Cheers, David.
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