Another aspect crucial to driving innovative teaching and learning in schools was sufficient investment in computers and other technologies to enable more active, student-led learning across subjects.
Speaking about his first teaching job as a ninth-grade world history teacher in 2003, Professor Reich said how he was struck by the opportunities computers and other technologies gave students to be able to connect with each other, classrooms and the rest of the world.
“I was struck by the opportunities that computers gave me to take responsibility from learning off my shoulders as a teacher, on to the shoulders of my students. To have them connect with one another, to connect with other classrooms, to connect with the rest of the world – it was a powerful transition for me as a teacher,” Professor Reich said.
A few years later, Professor Reich started a company called EdTech Teacher and took what he had learned from theclassroom to other schools. His aim was to help teachers to rethink teaching practices using technology so students could own their learning by connecting with one another, and to resources globally.
Professor Reich said he focused on working with teams of teachers, teacher-leaders and school leadership teams to track what was happening differently for schools that went from having a few teachers doing extraordinary things with technology, to widespread systemic change among the teaching staff.
“Wherever you sit within the Nord Anglia family, we need to think about what are the concrete steps we can take to have innovation go from being neat things that happen in a few isolated places that look great and go really well but don’t affect what’s happening for all the 53,000 students in your system, to changes that scale and become sustainable.”
“Launching Innovation in Schools”, an online teaching course offered through MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab, offers a model of teaching best practice to propel innovative learning and teaching in schools. Professor Reich says the model for driving innovation in any industry is to “innovate through iterations”; to quickly put forward ideas, act on them, evaluate, improve or change and keep moving forward.
“The core thing we have to understand is that we’ve moved away from ‘ready, aim, fire’ to ‘ready, fire, aim’. You shoot things into the world, see where they land and then you figure out how to move and get closer and closer to your target. This [is the] idea of innovation through iteration; lots and lots of cycles, cycles that build on one another that spiral and grow.”