The Innovation Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity
George Couros
It has been a while since I tackled the blog, and since I am taking a book study course where blogging is required, I only saw it fitting to revive my old medium and share my thoughts with the world.
Enjoy my thoughts...
Jon
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"Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow." - William Pollard
Being married to a teacher and librarian, my life at home revolves around sharing stories of school. Jodie and I also share stories of our experiences as students, which for us the most recent ones date back more than thirty years. We graduated in the late 1980s, and our school years saw technology advance from purple dittos and film strips to TRS-80s, the Apple IIe, and eventually early Macs and PCs printing in dot matrix and saving to 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. Social media involved printing banners on Print Shop.
To us, the internet was non-existent and when we discovered it in college the experience required going to the computer lab and logging on to a VAX or Telnet station. This was even before the familiar "You've Got Mail" became part of the cultural landscape.
We are digital migrants. We were on the pioneering front of the computer age when technology became more about communication than computation. This is also when we first started teaching.
Reading Pollard's quote, I have to ask what our teaching lives would be like without learning and innovation. We have always been innovators, and being librarians, we thrive off of innovation. That is not always the case with many in our profession.
Jodie had a teacher whose class revolved around lecturing from the same, curling and fading yellow legal pads of notes year after year. The same notes Jodie heard were likely heard by her cousin, ten years senior, and later heard by her brother, eight years junior. I am sure this teacher was quite successful, notching a solid career at St. Charles High School. However, he obviously had the mindset that was good for Carla in 1976 was good for Jodie in 1996, and Cooper in 1994.
I had a similar professor in college. I was part of a freshman program called Integrated Humanities. We lived together and had core classes in our complex - English, History, and Religion. History and Religion were my favorite classes. Professor Patrick Hutton (who would later become my advisor in the History Department) was engaging and animated, making history what I love about it - a story, a conversation, an experience. Religion was with Professor Richard Sugarman, who can best be described as a cross between Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, a wise rabbi, and an NFL linebacker. The man would chew Nicorette in class and then duck out for a smoke immediately after class. I took four courses with him. He was amazing.
Professor Metcalfe filled in for Professor Hutton for the second semester of freshman year. Metcalfe was Canadian (I believe from the Maritime Provinces) and was the University of Vermont's go-to expert on Canadian Studies. I found him interesting, but then again, I entered college knowing I wanted to major in history.
Like Jodie's high school teacher, Metcalfe relied on aged legal pads full of notes and his class was heavily lecture, test, and paper based, the latter on topics HE assigned.
Noelle, a classmate and long-time friend, asked "Professor Metcalfe, are we ever going to write about topics WE want to write about?"
Noelle was deflated when he curtly replied "No, I don't think so."
Perhaps it was arrogant for him to assume that the way he always did things would be sufficient for tomorrow. My friends and I were blessed to have professors who saw innovation as necessary. My high school mentor, Bill Holiday, is still teaching in his late sixties and you will never see him reading from aged notes. He sets up Skype visits with students in Belgrade, collaborates with students in Dublin, and engages students in the local history society, where all things historical about Southeastern Vermont are explored and shared.
He will never be tagged as a teaching relic. It's that innovation and learning that has never left him.
It also inspires me.
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