Todd Stanley 
Table of Contents
Why don’t teachers use innovative teaching methods? I listened to a recent podcast with educational thought-leader Tony Wagner. He talked about how the information age has become a thing of the past, and what we really need to be doing with our students is showing them how to be innovators. I 100% agree with this assertion. When you can use Alexa or Siri to find most information in a moment’s notice, there is no longer the need to spend time in school memorizing content. We should be using this time in school to teach students how to think and create.
Of course the fundamental problem with this is in order for students to be innovators, their teachers need to use innovative teaching methods. When you walk into most classrooms, especially the older students get, what you are met with is a traditional looking classroom with the teacher in front of the students who are all lined up in symmetrical rows pointing toward the front.
How Do Students Learn Using Innovative Teaching Methods?
The teacher is giving information to students who sit passively and take it in, occasionally applying some of it to problems, an essay, an assessment, or other. And you want to know what; everyone knows this is not the best way to teach. Why do they know it? Because it is not the best way these teachers learn themselves.
If you were to ask them what the most transformative learning they participated in, I can almost guarantee it was not in this sort of setting. It was something where they got to be active participants, hands-on, involved in the learning proces
This begs the question of why do many teachers teach this way if they know it is not the best way for their students to learn? The two answers are two of the most uninspiring ones known to mediocre work known the world around; it is easier and it is safer. Let’s unpack each of these lame reasons.
The Difficulty of Teaching & the Pressure to Use Innovative Teaching Methods
I know people say this all the time, but teaching is a difficult profession. It is not just about the learning for your students, it is the management of them as well. And the older students get, the more difficult it becomes to manage (unless of course you are a kindergarten teacher, who should all be given medals of honor).
Elementary teachers typically will have the same 25 to 30 kids all day, in middle school there might be two teachers sharing a group of 60 kids, but high school teachers have upwards of 150 students, rotating through every 45 minutes or so. It can be very difficult to manage so having students in neat rows, talking at them makes it much easier to manage. Of course what they don’t know is that you can manage a classroom that does student-centered learning.
Student Learning can be Messy
Innovative, student-led learning can be messy which can seem to be harder thus not as many people are doing it. We all, teachers included, are afraid of the unknown, so teaching in a way that no one else seems to be doing can be a scary prospect.
I remember when I first started teaching, I had done my student teaching with someone who was very innovative in his teaching methods so I had a wonderful model to learn from. And yet when I taught my first class, we read the text book, answered questions at the end of the chapter, and took a pencil-to-paper test at the end of the week.
It was not like I had been shown, it was not like the methods that the most inspirational teachers for me had used, but it was easy. I was just trying to keep my head above water and this traditional classroom setup was my life preserver. I could hang onto the text book, the lectures, and the worksheets while I tried to figure out how not to drown in the management of being responsible for 30 kids.
How to Make Classrooms More Student Centered
It wasn’t until a few years later that I figured out how to make my classroom more student-centered and then student-driven, but I needed to build the confidence in order to be able to do so. I needed to feel safe before I was willing to take a risk.
Let’s say a teacher is willing to take that risk though and is willing to give an innovative method a try. There is already the degree of difficulty of not knowing. Now let’s add to it the fact that other stakeholders, some of which are very important to the process, are challenging this way of teaching. The parents are up in arms because the other kids aren’t learning like this, administration questions whether students are being prepared for the test, and neighboring teachers are complaining about the noise coming from the active classroom.
I once had a colleague who was a math teacher that used a lot of innovative and authentic methods for teaching mathematics. When you walked into his class, very rarely was he up in front giving instruction. Instead he gave students real-world problems that needed math in order to be solved and challenged them to come up with a way to figure it out. Students were encouraged to write directly on their desks with dry erase markers and create the math through their inquiry rather than solve imagined problems.
Mentorship vs Teaching
I couldn’t have been happier as his mentor teacher. He was teaching math in the most organic way possible instead of the artificial way we present it to students where they don’t understand the context of why they are learning this. And yet parents complained the entire year.
Why? Because it didn’t look like the classroom they had been taught in when they were kids. The crazy thing was, that was probably twenty years ago. You wouldn’t want a computer that was twenty years old or a phone that is even five years old. People wouldn’t settle for this. And yet they demand that school looks the same as it did when they were there, just as their parents demanded it look like it did in the 1950s.
In order for teachers to be innovative teachers, they need to know they can try something and make mistakes, and that they will be supported when others question this practice. I was lucky in my career that not only did I have principals that encouraged me to use project-based learning and have a student-centered classroom, they asked me to teach others and spread the ideas. Is it easy?
Seeing the Classroom Through the Lens of Innovative Teaching
At first it will seem very difficult because it is not what you see in a traditional classroom. But in my experience once you get more comfortable with it, it does become easier because students are doing a bulk of the work and you are not shackled to the front of the classroom having to fill space with your words. Is it safer? Absolutely not. But then that is where the best learning takes place, when students and teachers are taking a risk.
If we play it safe, we get safe results. If we take a chance, there is no telling where we can take it. Teachers and schools know this. Now they just have to be willing to be innovative knowing that they will be supported
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