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My definition of innovation is new approaches to old problems. I think innovation in a broad
sense can be a lot of different situations. It can be a teacher who has been tackling
the same material for years and years and years and needs to find a new way of approaching
it. It can be teachers who are faced with the same problems in the classroom unrelated
to the material, it can be about the social issues that they’re dealing with, the cultural
issues that they’re dealing with; just bringing new vision, new technologies, new ideas to
the same things that we’ve been tackling for a while.
Teachers need to find a balance between breakthroughs, there are two different types of breakthroughs
and two different ways we think about the word breakthrough. One is what I call accidental
breakthroughs; and that is a satori, a revelation, an epiphany, something that arrives to you.
And you can't do anything to create that moment; you can only be open to the idea that it may
arrive whether you’re ready for it or not. The other type of breakthrough or the other
way we think about the word breakthrough is what I call the hard work breakthrough. And
that is something that you need to overcome obstacles for, meet challenges in order to
create the shift that you want to see made. And these are two very different ways of understanding
what a breakthrough is but despite the differences between them, the similarity is how important
what comes after the breakthrough is. So some people experience a breakthrough and decide
to ignore it, project it, try to return to a previous state. Other people experience
a breakthrough and embrace it, rejoice it, try to build on it, and try to share with
others. I think teachers need to find a way to balance
those two types of breakthroughs for their students. When you’re a child you are pre-programmed
to have accidental breakthroughs. Everything about being a child is about having those
moments where the paradigm shifts, where your world is flipped upside down. That’s what
being a child is. The first time you take your first steps, the first time you hear
your first music, everything changes; it happens constantly.
When you’re young what is harder to understand is the second type of breakthrough which is
the hard work breakthrough. When you’re young it takes a lot to learn that sometimes
you can't create a shift, you can't make something happen unless you work really hard, unless
you overcome obstacles and challenges. But when we grow older those two positions
start to reverse themselves, and I think for adults whether it’s because of training
or experience, we learn the lesson that most breakthroughs only occur from hard work, and
we learn how to work really hard. And then we start to only value the breakthroughs that
have resulted from hard work, so we only pay attention to the ones that we’ve overcome
the most obstacles for, and we tend to disregard or ignore the accidental breakthroughs, and
we don’t consider them important. It’s really hard to be a 51 year old businessman
and wake up one morning and realize you were always meant to be a ballet dancer. It’s
a lot easier to just ignore that and go back to live as normal. And I think that teachers
need to give their students the skills to be hard workers and to meet challenges and
overcome obstacles with innovation, with new approaches to these old problems and old questions.
But in doing that teachers also need to teach their students that you have to also continue
to stay open to the idea of accidental breakthrough. You can't only bunker down and work hard and
not understand that there will be moments that are out of your control where everything
is thrown open. And that’s--that’s what I believe is what being a teacher is.