Conference Agenda

Innovation has become an almost unquestionable educational good. But, from its earliest inception, educational innovation has been associated with problems of implementation and diffusion (Rogers 1962). This international symposium revisits the educational innovation agenda and tackles important questions related to its implementation. How does innovation relate to inclusion, improvement or belonging, for example, in the pursuit of equity? How should the language around innovation differ across contexts? What is the potential for innovation after COVID-19?

The first paper reports the outcomes of a Canada-wide play-based learning initiative by interviewing educators on their play-based learning innovations meant to increase engagement and well-being among marginalized groups of students. The second paper highlights the importance of context and framing language when promoting innovation by comparing two inquiry-style professional development projects in the UAE and Peru. The third paper discusses how, despite opportunity for educational change from COVID-19, “micro-innovations” still conform to conventional school demands, as shown by findings from the US, Finland, and Estonia. Drawing on classic and contemporary innovation theory and empirical research focused on school-wide and network-based innovation efforts, this symposium seeks a deeper exploration of how educational innovation sits within a broader portfolio of educational change purposes and strategies.

Context: In 2022-2023, The LEGO Foundation funded an international group of school networks to support and promote play-based learning for vulnerable and marginalized or minoritized young people in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using some of this research and development funding, a University of Ottawa team developed a network of 41 schools across Canada to develop play-based learning initiatives for minoritized students in the middle years, and network them together to deepen their practice. This project has provided an opportunity to examine different and varying approaches to developing play-based learning innovations that increase engagement and well-being among the groups of students in question.

Focus: Improvement addresses how to implement proven best practices whereas innovation is about introducing and initiating next practices (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2012). Innovation isn’t a clear-cut alternative to incremental improvement, either (Hatch, 2022). But even these are simplistic and exaggerated oppositions. Enhancing students’ engagement and well-being can be achieved by taking multiple directions of educational change. Among the 41 schools in the network created by the University of Ottawa team, each school appeared to adopt a defining theme as its focus for change in each case. This paper reports the findings from 12 in-person case studies of the 41 schools about the directions that different schools adopted and the implications of these directions for enhancing engagement and wellbeing for all students, particularly the most marginalized.

Methods and Data:

Data from over 50 hours of recorded and transcribed individual and focus group interviews with the playful learning teams in each of 12 project schools, spread across 5 Canadian provinces.

Findings:

• Each school adopted an overriding theme in developing its play-based innovations.

• Themes included innovation, inclusion, identity, belonging, high school transition, well-being, engagement, and community.

• Not all these themes had an obvious or automatic relationship to improving equity.

• Each theme could be but was not always an entry point into the others.

Implications: Educators, researchers, and policymakers need to have a deeper understanding of varying educational strategies and entry points and the relationships among them. Not all will automatically lead to equity. Some may contribute to synergy, but in other cases, the opportunities afforded by one theme may incur costs to others. This paper will help educators clarify and refine their school-based educational change strategies in relation to their overall goals.

Context: This paper compares two four-year research projects that involved the pursuit of positive school-based change through collaborative inquiry-style professional development (Deluca et al, 2014). One project, Creating Communities of Innovation, involved a collaboration with the GEMS network of schools in the UAE and led to a framework called inquiry-driven innovation (Dawes Duraisingh & Sachdeva, 2021). The other, Creating Communities of Inquiry, was a collaboration with the Innova Schools of Peru, and resulted in a white paper that emphasized the importance of simultaneously promoting inquiry, autonomy, and collaboration across a system to promote “deeper learning” (Dawes Duraisingh et al., 2023).

Focus: The paper explores the degree to which it mattered that the UAE-based project was squarely about promoting innovation, while the Peru-based project was not, despite building on and overlapping with the UAE-based project. It examines the evolution and importance of the ways in which key terms were used and understood in both projects; why innovation was a desirable term in one context but not the other; and how differences in the framing of the work helped shape what educators thought they were doing, what they did, and how they did it—and yet in other ways did not seem to matter.

Methods and Data: Both projects amassed prolific and varied data: documentation of educator thinking and practice over time; longitudinal surveys; interviews and focus groups; and classroom observations. This paper involves taking a bird’s-eye view of the arc of both projects, while drawing on specific data analysis from each.

Findings:

• Context matters: the resonance of the word innovation in terms of inspiring or promoting school-based change depends on what is politically or pedagogically expedient or possible in a specific context. Factors include the relative tightness of school systems, established pedagogical norms, cultural expectations, the personal work demanded of educators, and prevailing education policies or discourse at the local, national and/or international level.

• Promoting pedagogical change involves both clarifying and expanding what key terms like innovation or inquiry mean, how they relate to one another, and what the implications are for practice – in ways that make sense locally.

• An inquiry-driven pedagogical approach was central to both projects, as was fostering purpose, autonomy, and collaboration among educators. While innovation can be a galvanizing concept, in and of itself it is unlikely to be sufficient for promoting meaningful and lasting change in schools and is perhaps just one among many potentially useful concepts. Care also needs to be taken with regards to equity—including what is demanded of teachers and by whom, and who is invited to innovate.

Implications: Conversations about innovation in education must be sensitive to context and consider the relationship between innovation and other key concepts and aspirations. There are also puzzles regarding how frameworks, tools, practices, and professional learning approaches developed in one context can be framed and adapted in ways that meet the needs of stakeholders situated in different times and places—including the most appropriate framing language to promote and inspire change.

Purpose & Objectives: The school closures brought on by COVID-19 exposed the inequities and problems in schooling and fueled hopes that education could be “re-imagined.” Despite these hopes, work on school improvement and educational change has shown how ambitious plans and visions often fall short of their aspirations. This presentation builds on this work to explore how some of the same institutional forces that sustained the “grammar of schooling” – the key structures and practices of conventional schooling – in the 20th Century (Tyack & Cuban, 1993) may affect efforts to develop innovations that aim to “disrupt” and transform education in the 21st Century.

Focus of Inquiry & Methods: To better understand the challenges and possibilities for changing schools created by these institutional forces, this presentation draws on two studies that document some of the changes that educators have made in their practice following the return to in-person instruction following the COVID-19 related school closures. The first project involves interviews with 12 high school educators in New York City who were engaged in a continuous improvement project to increase graduation outcomes of 9th graders who were in danger of dropping out. In the interview, the educators were asked to describe practices they developed during the school closures that they sustained following the return to in-person learning. The second project asks a small group of 4-6 policymakers, researchers and educators in Finland and in Estonia to describe “innovative” changes in classroom and school practices following the return to in-person learning (data from interviews in Vietnam and Singapore will also be analyzed during the fall of 2023).

Findings: Respondents were able to describe some specific changes that schools had made and were sustaining. These included the development of new structures such as “weekly wellness groups” in which teachers met with small groups of high school students to discuss concerns about their health and well-being in New York City and an “independent day” in which students in some Estonian upper secondary schools are now able to pursue, one day a week outside of their school buildings, a series of university courses, internships or other projects of their own selection. These examples constitute what we call “micro-innovations” – new resources, services, structures, and practices – that support learning of certain topics, with particular groups of students, in specific situations, at particular points in time (Bransford et al, 2006). Notably, these “innovations” fit into the conventional school day and conventional school demands rather than “disrupting” them. These examples point to the kinds of specific changes that can be made in schools and illustrate the enduring challenge that more radical visions for educational reform and “innovation” may be the least likely they to fit the affordances of conventional schooling and to take hold on a large scale.