Interview

EDUCATORS
Should Innovation
Be a Standard?
By: Thom Markham
Several years ago, at the height of the
testing mania, I heard a comment that
still resonates with me. In response to
a call to reinvent learning and make
it more creative, a tall teacher
stood up and shook his head.
“There’s no way to do that,” he
said in a resigned tone, “It’s a
standards-based world.”
Among all the commentary
about standards, this statement
always stands out to me as the
least true. The world appears to
be a dynamic scene of constantly shifting
problems, creative response, idea generation,
and haphazard events that yield a million different
opinions on how to proceed. The new
standard is no standard.
The underlying question is more challenging:
What do we do about standards in
a world where, increasingly, people live a
highly personalized existence built on lifestyle
preferences and a set of information
sources tailored to their needs? And when the
chief skills center on the ability to adapt, collaborate,
solve, be flexible and resilient, and
move on successfully? What standards unify
us in that world?
The standardized test, in short answer or
multiple choice formats, will not survive
the 21st century. The new standards need
to be about process, not content. Most core
content can be downloaded these days; it’s
the how that is crucial. So it will be necessary
to design standards for thinking, feeling, and
invention. And think about grit, perseverance,
and resiliency. How would you assess
them?
Let’s start by naming the process. I’ll use
the term innovation, and suggest that innovation
be instituted as the new standard for
education. That means what it says: no one
graduates unless they can demonstrate basic
proficiency in innovation. So how might we
begin to hold innovation in our minds?
Innovation is not about tech. This is a necessary
first step. Innovation refers to thinking
and seeing the world differently in the global
age, not more gadgets and apps. It’s about
reinventing deep assumptions about national
borders, equality, opportunity,
religious division, and the host
of issues that need resolution.
Innovation can’t be the exclusive
domain of STEM programs.
Innovation implies creativity and
knowledge. Creativity is the topic
du jour, mostly because it is a healthy
and natural response to the stifling orderliness
of the educational landscape, which
looks like a formal English garden set in the
middle of the Amazon. But a deeper vision of
creativity is necessary that values knowledge
as well as artistic impulse. Personalized paths
Innovation should be
instituted as the new
standard for education.
That means what it says:
no one graduates unless
they can demonstrate
basic proficiency in
innovation.
to learning, with varied outcomes depending
on personal goals and inclinations, are
inevitable. But not having to read 12 plays of
Shakespeare or take Algebra 2 will result in
knowledge gaps, so eventually a necessary
body of knowledge, appropriate for the 21st
century, will need to be identified.
Innovation begins with openness. ‘Openness
to experience’ is one of the big five personality
traits. Openness is associated with
creativity, curiosity, humility, empathy, and
collaborative skills. An open mind friendly to
divergent thinking is a prerequisite for innovation.
In practical terms, that means asking
questions, failure, and persistence become
key traits to be nurtured in early grades and
rewarded in upper grades. That implies a
radical realignment of elementary outcomes,
Thom Markham, founder and CEO of
PBL Global, is a speaker, writer, psychologist,
and internationally respected consultant
in the critical areas of inquiry based
education, 21st century skills, project
based learning, and innovation. He is the
author of the best-selling Project Based
Learning Design and Coaching Guide:
Expert tools for innovation and inquiry
for K-12 educators and the forthcoming
Redefining Smart: Awakening Student’s
Power to Reimagine Their World.
away from stringent requirements for testbased
knowledge and far more emphasis on
developing healthy psyches.
Innovation becomes visible through design
thinking. Inquiry-based classrooms and project
based learning have suddenly established
themselves in mainstream education. These
are extremely promising trends. Given the
times, there is absolutely no reason, other
than lack of will or imagination, that every
student should not have been engaged in
deep, reflective, extended problem solving
many times during his or her school career.
But there is not yet a system for teaching
and honoring innovation as a core outcome.
That outcome is captured by the term design
thinking, in which students engage in creative
problem solving through design challenges,
whether the challenges are technical,
scientific, or social policy issues. Through the
process of design, every student can learn the
new basics: How to brainstorm ideas, create
and prototype solutions, share ideas, take and
offer constructive feedback, and critique and
reflect. Again, this need not be confined, as
it now is, to engineering and science. Design
thinking is a way of reinventing the world
and making visible the results of a very deep
process of creation.
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