Wow! Watching Dr. Cross's video about the three myths of behavioral change was an eye-opener. I totally fell for the demonstration of how much trash was around the train stop in a week as being more influential. I guess that it goes to show that different people see things differently. Just like I have to tell my students when it come to horizontal transformation in algebra, "sometimes things are a little backwards from what you think they should be." I can see her points though. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." That saying fits her statement that information isn't enough to create change. There has to be a real "why" that the student can see so that it is influenced to make a change. The same can be said about trying to influence other teachers in our schools. You can tell them about all the different ideas that you've learned or read about, but that won't really do much to get them to try them. We need to change our behaviors first so that we can then start demonstrating our ideas. If we start getting good results from our innovations, then others may feel comfortable about trying them as well. The more people that try it out will result in the growth of the implementation. That's how change works.
With my innovation project, I would like to change the approach typically used in a classroom to teach our students. I am seeing first hand how the typical "normal" way of teaching isn't working for my students. It doesn't matter how many different ways I try to explain the same topics, my students just don't understand and retain the information. I want to try a flipped classroom approach, but there are social norms that need to be busted on all sides. My students are very much attached to their cell phones, but if I were to ask them to use it to watch a short math video, I'd probably be looked at like I was growing an extra head. When it comes to making it a full organizational change, you then have to bust the norms of teachers who have been teaching for just about as long as I have been out of high school. Teachers know in the back of their mind that traditional teaching isn't working, but it's hard to find an alternative that someone has already tried out (Hello social influences).
In order to encourage change in our organizations, we are going to have to be willing to make sacrifices. I'm sacrificing a lot by just doing this master's program. It's really difficult handling teaching, being a wife and mom, and school all at the same time. I run on very little sleep just to try and do everything for all of it. We will have to be willing to sacrifce time at school to help out our coworkers on things they need to know about in order to try the innovation ideas. We have to take the time to research and develop new methods to try get our students back active in our classrooms instead of being bystanders.
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