How to Become an Innovative Teacher

Introduction

Teachers are constantly facing many challenges in their careers. Most teachers ask, “What are the strategies to help every student learn?” To make teaching more complex, every teacher is facing a class of students who are different from one another. We face students who differ in intelligence, ability, interest, prior knowledge, learning style, motivation, locus of control, self-efficacy, and epistemological beliefs (Kuzgun & Deryakulu, 2004). Being able to help impact more students in the classroom not only helps improve the students’ mental well-being (Lister & McFarlane, 2021) but also leads to better teachers’ mental well-being (Harding et al., 2019).

Innovative teachers constantly look at challenges from different angles. They define problems, stay committed to finding the root of the problem and use a variety of approaches to solve the problem. For example, they look for ways to teach so that it caters to the individual needs of each student most efficiently. Therefore, we need to innovate to meet new challenges and improve our job satisfaction. In this write-up, we will discuss a few ways that we can do to become more innovative teachers.

Look for Crisis

Crisis (or problem) accelerates innovations (Brunkard, 2022). When we embrace problems, we might see the opportunity to do things differently and solve the problem more effectively. A crisis need not be like a COVID-19 pandemic affecting the world. Finding a problem can be personal, such as our defining the challenges we face as a teacher. As such, we are embracing our challenges as we work towards our vision as an educator.

For example, as a teacher with dyslexia, I find it difficult to focus on various task whenever I have to organize school events. After 3 years of teaching, I decided to focus on what I do best to overcome the challenges so that I can achieve my vision as well. I volunteered to be the overall in-charge of the annual sports day 7 years ago. Then I started a sports leaders group where I empowered all secondary 3 students to take charge of organizing the various sports events in the school. I knew I am good at motivating students and I always hope to prove to students that anyone can be a leader. The students-led sports day turn out to be the best sports day the school have ever conducted.

Everyone of us want to be a valuable member of the organization we work in. As a teacher, we want to be useful to the future generation. The more impact we see, the greater is our motivation in the job. For example, if we believe that young children should be developed as self-directed learner, and if we could see students becoming more self-directed, we are more likely to be motivated to do more.

Be committed to finding the root of the problem

At the Design Education Summit 2023, Singapore, the Minister of Education, Mr Chan Chun Seng, shared that having good design means pursuing problem-solving. We need to be committed to examining the root of the problem, and then innovation will be practical.

As facilitators of Inclusive PE (IPE) workshop, we constantly reminded teachers to use various ways to understand the students better. Understanding the problem’s root would help them find the right strategies to help the students learn. If the strategies do not work, the next step is to dig deeper to understand the students better.

For example, a student with Special Education Needs (SEN) might have lower self-esteem due to poor learning experiences and being laughed at in class. He might have shown reluctance to try in PE lessons because of the fear of failure. If the we do not understand the student’s difficulties, we might think that “the student is not motivated to try because he has SEN”. The commonly misused strategy for this SEN student could be to ask a buddy to constantly remind him to follow the instructions.

Safe Learning Environment Inspires Creativity

Often, people need to be more innovative, not because they are not innovative, but because they may not feel safe to be innovative. For example, a trusting culture in the school would motivate teachers to innovate in their practices. When we feel supported, we have greater confidence to do what we believe. On the other hand, if we are judged whenever we do something different, we would prefer to follow what has been done previously or what we think we are expected to do.

In the Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) workshop, we told the participants to try out strategies in their classroom and share their reflections with the rest of the group a month later. We would share our “failure” experiences to instil the idea that there is nothing wrong with failure.

The safe environment helps the participants dare to “follow their heart” and do what they think is suitable as they created many innovative ideas. Everyone had richer learning when the participants came together to share their experiences.

Be committed to our beliefs

We noticed that teachers often teach similarly to the rest of the department. Their actions may not be what they strongly believe in, but what they think the school leaders expected them to do. Whenever Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) assessment was done with teachers, we often saw that teachers’ beliefs and practices were not aligned.

When we observed the lessons of one teacher from a particular school, the lessons were mainly teacher-directed. For example, teachers told the students what to do from the start to the end of the lesson. Once, we showed a teacher how we empowered the students to discuss and solve their problems using a Game Concept Approach (GCA) (Tan et Al., 2002). After watching the lesson, the teacher became motivated to empower the students and shared that she was amazed at how her students could lead in collaborative learning. She also shared with us that she had always believed in student empowerment but did not dare to do it because nobody empowered students in her school.

We observed similar situations in another school where two teachers collaborated with us. Both teachers, too, shared that they believe in giving students autonomy and building a collaborative culture. They were not doing it because nobody in the department had done it, so nobody knew how to do it effectively.

Practice makes Perfect Creativity

Every teaching approach is just like any other skill; we require less effort when we practice a lot. When less effort is required, we can focus on other skills, like asking questions to students or consolidating diverse answers from the students. We need to know that to conduct an impactful and engaging lesson; we must be committed to practice each teaching approach till we become competent. Because when we feel competent in the current practice, we would be motivated to try new things (small steps), according to the Knowles Andragogy Model (Knowles et al., 2015)

In innovation, quantity leads to quality (Cobb, 2022)

In the school, collaborating with other teachers often led to more innovations. Rather than worry about our differences, we should always embrace the diverse experiences and viewpoints of the other teachers. By listening to diverse perspectives, we can choose the ideas best suited to our needs. Moreover, ideas begets ideas (Christine, 2011). More ideas will flow when we come together to share their ideas. We can then build on each other’s ideas to improve our ideas.

Collaboration with other teachers also helps us in our profession learning. In group learning, we often have to share our perspectives. When we share our perspectives, we articulate our prior knowledge. Research has shown that activation of prior knowledge improves learning (Bartlett., 1995).

References

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Christine B. (2011, July 18). Ideas Beget Ideas — The Creative Process. From Hook to Book. https://christinemareebell.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/ideas-beget-ideas-the-creative-process/

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