Yesterday, I presented a new keynote for the NJAIS Innovation Symposium, The Keys to Fostering a Culture of Innovation! Students who S.A.I.L. The purpose was to help teachers facilitate and inspire student innovation. As I prepared for my keynote, I had to think about how teachers who perhaps didn’t define themselves as “innovators” might go about inspiring students to be innovative. First, I defined innovation as finding solutions to problems. Then, I propose that the main role of schools, who want to foster a culture of innovation, is to focus less on getting students to come up with “solutions,” and instead to focus on ideation and the problem-solving process. The role of schools should be to accomplish the following- champion student ideas, frequently involve students in the process of innovation, help students think of solutions for problems they care about or impact them, and get students to spend time researching and investigating problems, failures, and solutions.
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