Smelling the Roses: My Issues with Relentless Innovation in Teaching

Until the start of this year, I had taken a break from Twitter. I was tired of feeling like a half baked educator with nothing good to bring to the table. I would log on and scroll through countless pictures of impossibly pretty things and feel so guilt that my students were just not getting the same calibre of education. I didn't have 'magic moves' or interactive text books. I was a failure.

Turns out, there's a lot of different teacher communities on Twitter. Now, I have discovered ones that move more at my pace and share things that resonate with me more. My own little echo-chamber! However, this got me thinking about the potential risks of new teachers entering the profession and seeing this overwhelming content on their Twitter feed. It's so easy to get sucked in to a belief in a false correlation between pretty social media output and classroom prowess. That's scary. Because this mentality can permeate practice and do more harm than good.

The desire to innovate is innate in us as teachers. We are constantly striving to better our practice for our learners, and explore strategies to engage them and facilitate learning efficiently. This is good practice, and is reflected in the shift towards research-led practice in ITT. Nevertheless, this desire can become counter-productive if it is paired with the instant gratification complex of 21st century productivity, and lead teachers down a path of superficial and meaningless pedagogy.

The analogy I think of is like getting on a train. You get your first couple of posts up and you get likes. Maybe you used an app or you got students to do some sort of post it note activity or graphic organiser that photographs well. You get positive attention and reinforcement. And, of course, as social media is designed with human pleasure centres in mind, you like that. You're on the train now. And it starts to pull away from the station. But your seat is not secure, and you worry that you will become old and stale and become a has-been teaching stereotype: a Professor Binns. You need to come up with something else, to push further, to innovate further. The train picks up speed, and you find yourself working out, rather than how you can innovate in a lesson to enhance learning, how the learning can provide a platform for your innovation. This is the point it all goes wrong.

The thing is, innovation implies a burst of inspiration followed by instant results. But that's just not how learning works. The same innovative idea may only work in certain contexts, whether that may be subject, key stage, attainment level to name a few. It may need tweaking and refining. Importantly, it will most likely need embedding into schemes of learning and everyday practice, to become an effective learning habit for students. That doesn't happen overnight. And results (real results rather than anecdotes) won't be seen overnight. Sure, it's pretty clear if something works or not, but if it doesn't, that doesn't mean it won't ever work, and if it does work it may well need refining. In short, success take time to see. The issue arises when you bring in innovation after innovation, or mistake the word innovation for new, or technologically advanced, rather than simply good teaching and strategies. Sure, innovation can be those things, but it isn't only those things.

I can use my current situation as an example. I am working on revamping our Media curriculum. I've shared a few posts already discussing this. My most popular tweet is one of a learning journey curriculum map I made, as a starting point for reorganisation. It's not, in my opinion, particularly innovative, but it is a tool to help me do the real valuable work. But it's pretty, and slick, and is an easy 'like magnet'. Does this mean I decide to throw down tools and spend hours making all my presentations beautiful, and map out everything even if I don't need to (and it makes those presentations harder to share, and doesn't add any learning value), just to demonstrate I can use the software and get that social media high? Of course not. That tweet was the culmination of months of reading research, looking at what works in other subjects, and exploring teaching strategies that match the weaknesses we often see when teaching. That stuff may not have a pretty picture attached to it, but it's far more valuable. The end product, this time, just happens to be pretty.

(I do like to design my presentations and slides with a bit of finesse. I'm not vouching for the plain white template, but when you spend an hour animating a presentation for no learning purpose, it does feel a little contrived. It's all a balance.)

The same can be said for the curriculum plans. The strategies that are overwhelmingly cited as impactful may not look visually impressive in a snapshot, but the trick is in way in which they are integrated into the curriculum. Knowledge organisers, retrieval pyramids, dual coding, TLAC questioning: all are incredibly innovative through being implemented and becoming routine in the classroom. They then need to be refined once implemented to complement the learner. That takes time.

And that, ladies and gents, is why I decided to get off that train. In my early teaching career, I thought part of being a great educator was coming up with a 'life changing' (loose term) principle, strategy or resource every couple of weeks. I thought getting work photographed and put on social media was they key to success, to proving myself. But it was ultimately fruitless, and when you find yourself thinking about new ways to do things just because you feel you need to for your own benefit, or because it looks better, rather than because it's beneficial to your learners, you know you need to take a step back.

So I did. I got off the train and I stopped to smell the roses. I really stopped and I thought about what students need in my lessons, what they thrive on, and what the research says about addressing areas I have identified as weaknesses. My Twitter account lay dormant, and I read. And I listened. and I observed. I discovered that the real teaching and learning substance I needed was in the regular conversations with regular teachers about the everyday things they were doing. So, I went back on Twitter and started those conversations. I removed people who made me feel inferior, whose classrooms seemed to be home to that innovation façade on a weekly basis, and I focused on what mattered: the students and their learning. My experience improved, and my teaching and curriculum planning found a new lease of life. I found my mojo again. Turns out, it was hiding in a pile of retrieval practice and modelled responses!

And so, to present day. My 'innovation', for want of a better term, works in two waves: I focus on pedagogical research while designing or tweaking curriculum at any level: be it lessons, schemes, or whole year plans. I give those research-based strategies time to work, while noting refections and evaluating where future tweaks and amendments are needed for different contexts. That's a long term plan, as in years long. Once the overhaul is largely complete at a general level, it needs a few cohorts to try it to aid the refining of such practice. And introducing new innovation on top of that, unless completed in a controlled and trialled way with clear benefits to students, is a distraction and is not needed. In other words, no innovation for innovation's sake.

Instead, I focus on the second wave, which has two parts. The first is subject knowledge enhancement. Pedagogy is key, but subject knowledge can also enrich our teaching. By enhancing our subject knowledge, we open the gates to content we can then apply our pedagogical principles to. And, by furthering knowledge in our subject, we can explore more effective teaching methods, and be more discerning when exploring them. The second is discussion. Research doesn't have to come from books, and there are no better practitioners who know the same context as me as the ones who are in my school, teaching the same students as me. Discussion can also be wider, on Twitter, through teach meets and conferences, and through blogs. It all furthers experience and knowledge of what strategies are worth exploring and refining further.

My way isn't perfect and won't work for everyone, but it's how I plan on taking my practice forward and doing right by my students. After all, it's a shame to speed past without smelling the roses.