If you’ve been following the current presidential campaigns, when it comes to education, you’re likely to hear a lot of candidates support increasing "innovation" in schools.

For instance, said GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina during The Seventy-Four’s April education conference in New Hampshire:

“‘What doesn’t work are big bureaucratic programs from Washington, D.C. What doesn’t work are people spending money on mandated programs, either at the state or federal level,’ she said, saying instead that the focus should be on innovation at the local level,” according to The Seventy-Four.

Well, a new survey taken at the most local-level possible on blended learning has indicated that in Ohio’s traditional and charter schools, teachers have a desire for innovation but need more support.

A poll produced by The Learning Accelerator and the Clayton Christensen Institute, two non-profit organizations that advocate blended learning in schools, analyzed both public and charter schools in the state and found that charter schools are implementing blended learning less frequently than public schools despite supposedly being the more innovative institutions of the two. Further, in both traditional and charter schools, “educators polled said they need training to make the most of technology,” according to The Hechinger Report.

The report makes four recommendations to constructively encourage innovation in schools through building support for teachers, according to The Hechinger Report:

• Create or identify an entity or network(s) to help coordinate blended-learning efforts
• Train school leaders on iterative innovation processes
• Make high-quality professional development more available and easy to find
• Provide more resource support for blended-learning efforts

In other words, while innovation is important, it Is not something that just happens. Teachers need to support in order to implement new things like blended learning and new EdTech in their classrooms.

Read the full story here.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

10/21/2015