Hack Your Classroom: Week Nine - Making future-focused innovative teaching infectious!


Welcome to the last official post for Hack Your Classroom!

First up, a great big thank you to everyone who participated either by blogging and sharing or by simply joining the conversation via Twitter. It has been heartening to see so many teachers willing to reflect so openly and publicly whilst sharing and inspiring lots of folk along the way. It's impossible to say exactly how many people have participated, but the number of people I have encountered on and offline up and down the country (and across the world) suggests the reach may have been greater than one might suspect.


So here we are, a term into hacking our classroom and developing and encouraging future-focused teaching. So, what do I mean when I say 'future-focused innovative practice'? I mean everything we have covered in the #hackyrclass curriculum and then some - developing a growth mindset, getting to know your learners - hacker style, design thinking, maker culture, blending learning, universal design for learning, handing the power over to the learners, free range learning and students developing robust self-direction plus all those other future-focused skills such as complex communication, critical thinking, collaboration and basically anything that helps students (and teachers) to become adaptive experts. The innovative part comes in because I believe it can't just be about looking back to the tried and true, we also need to be willing to try the new along side the proven pedagogical approaches. We need to willing to take risks and see our responsibility to extend our students beyond National Standards, NCEA or even University Entrance and more about helping students to help their future selves and our future societies and economies.

So what? What now? For me the biggest hope of something like this is that it can provide a trigger or plant a seed for ongoing innovation and sharing. So how might we encourage the #hackyrclass and growth mindset to continue to propagate? For a starter, if that everyone of us takes the responsibility of purposely infecting a handful of others around us to start questioning their practice and to start sharing their practice we could expand the amount of educators engaging in future-focused innovative practice with relative ease. Think of it as viral marketing of awesomeness.

Source: http://www.sanketj.com/2013/03/viral-marketing-pointers.html
However our major challenge will not be continuing to encourage the converted to whom we mostly preach to, or those who encourage and support us with the confines of our conference, meet ups and online echo chambers. It will be the challenge of engaging the others - the unaware, the disinterested, the disheartened and even the 'happy oblivious' who have been lulled into a false sense of security bought on by good or even great National Standard and/or NCEA attainment.

So, what are your suggestions? How can you/we lead the charge and lead change from the ground up? How can we make future-focused innovative change less daunting and more delightfully infectious?

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