Giving Compass' Take:

· Innovation usually has a positive correlation, but not all innovation is productive and innovative. Thomas Arnett analyzes the different approaches to education innovation and explains that changes should encourage blended learning and expanding impact.

· Is edtech helping with education innovation? What resources and tools are being used to expand the impact of schools and education? 

· Read more on the evolution of education.


Innovation is the key to real and lasting progress in education, but it isn’t easy to get right. In principle, innovation allows schools to push past time and resource constraints so teachers can accomplish more with their students. But not everything pursued or passed off as innovation actually expands educators’ impact in meaningful ways. Many “innovations” have neutral or negative effects on student learning when the hassle of getting them to work outweighs the incremental benefits they offer. This is one reason why the word “innovation” often has a sour taste among educators.

Innovation is the key to expanding a schools’ impact possibilities frontier. But blended-learning programs that add complexity and friction to teachers’ lives with only marginal improvements to offer in return, fall short of innovation’s promise. Not everything that glitters is gold, and not all innovations are truly innovative. To avoid chasing fool’s gold, school leaders need to carefully weigh how much an innovation expands the impact of teachers compared to its associated costs in dollars, time, and effort.

Read the full article about education innovation by Thomas Arnett at the Christensen Institute.