Dear Sandy,

I always appreciate your insight into issues of education and innovation — and am particularly impressed that you were able to work in some post-it notes (even in an email)!

Figuring out what we mean by “innovation” is key to making sense out of this word that is buzzing around with increasing frequency. I wish I could see the thought-bubble that appears whenever people talk about innovation in education. I could almost guarantee that there would be a very different picture in each one. That’s not a bad thing — but it does mean that taking a few minutes to make sure we are clear about what we mean will keep us from just talking past each other.

The elements in your “post-it notes” could be used to label approaches as being either innovative or not. However, I think we would quickly find that every one of your elements is in fact innovative in different ways.

Innovation happens from the ground up and from the top down. It happens incrementally and radically. So we might be better off considering your elements as a spectrum on which we could plot the various innovations to help make sense of what’s going on. I’ve taken a shot a drawing this below:

To test this out, I plotted 3 different innovations: flipped classrooms (i.e., when students do “homework” in the classroom and watch lectures at home), the Common Core, and Khan Academy. Flipped classrooms turns out to be an incremental, how-focused, ground-up innovation with medium impact. The Common Core is radical, what-focused, top-down, and has large impact. And Khan Academy is radical, how-focused, ground-up, and has a large impact.

If we could plot all the educational innovations that showed up in everyone’s respective thought-bubbles, we would start to see some trends. For example, we would likely see few radical innovations at a large scale. This is particularly unfortunate since radical innovation is what we need the most. So why is that?

I think it boils down to two issues. First, education has a culture of being very comfortable with the status quo, even if it is dysfunctional. And radical innovations can be uncomfortable.

So in education, we resort to what I call “pencil sharpening innovation.” When you sharpen a pencil, it becomes easier to write. The easy and immediate impact of sharpening the pencil makes us think that if we just focus all our energy on sharpening we will keep getting better. The problem is that at some point the pencil is as sharp as it is going to get, and no additional sharpening will ever turn it into a pen, or a word processor, or Siri.

At some point we have to decide to stop tweaking the existing model and move to a model that will provide exponential benefits. In education, it’s more comfortable to keep sharpening existing practice than trying to leave it behind for approaches that have the potential to be transformative.

The second issue is that it is too difficult to bring innovations to scale in education. We are shamefully slow at recognizing and diffusing new approaches that make an impact. Other industries have found ways to mobilize much more quickly around the adoption of innovation than we have. This may be due to the fact that we don’t have easy channels through which to share innovations between and among the 100,000 K-12 and 7,000 higher education schools in this country. The Department of Education will soon be launching an “Example Engine” — a place for educators, parents, and researchers to see some of the radical innovations taking place in schools. We hope that will begin to accelerate the ability to take innovations to scale, but clearly more will need to be done.

So what should we be doing to increase radical innovations at scale in education? And how do we measure whether an innovation is actually making a difference? It’s possible to have an innovation that is widely adopted, but doesn’t actually transform learning. How do we move farther faster? I hope you have some answers!

Richard