I just read Kim Cofino’s absolutely fabulous post about the absence of real innovation in education. Much of her post is a summary of Tom Kelley’s talk at the Hong Kong Summit. But her summary and additional insights are great. I highly recommend that you read her entire post.

Kim asserts that innovation doesn’t “mean just adding more technology to the classroom [but] thinking differently about learning in its entirety.”

I concur with Kim–dramatic change and innovation will not (cannot) occur by incrementally improving our existing practices. We need to see differently and invent the future instead of constantly reinventing the past.

True to form, I believe this kind of innovation has to start with our goals (the end!) in mind. That is, we have to constantly ask ourselves what we really want learners at our institutions to know and, even more importantly, to be able to do? Are the educational experiences we’re providing for them enabling to do the things we really care about? If an outsider who had never seen an institution of higher education before dropped on to one of our campuses, what would they think was most important to us? I’m afraid they might conclude that test-taking and throughput were among our highest priorities.

Kim suggests that embracing project-based learning and student competency portfolios are good places to start, to get us unstuck and on the road to innovation. I agree. However, while adopting these and other new approaches, we must stay doggedly focused on why these things matter–they matter because they will help learners become what they really need and want to become.

So how do we get there? In Tom’s talk, he warned against the “Red Queen Effect” in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass and reminded us that, “if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” This bias toward action was reaffirmed in a quote I came across this morning from Frank Tibolt: “We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.”

Once again, I ask, “What are we waiting for?” Time to get to work!