What a 4-Year-Old Can Teach Us About Innovation

During my career in education, I had the privilege of studying or working with some of the brightest minds in education. Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, Andrew Hargreaves and Margaret Wheatley, to name just a few, influenced my thinking and helped shape my teaching and educational leadership strategies.

Yet one of my most memorable lessons came not from a distinguished leader in education, but from a 4-year-old boy.

It happened one day not long before I retired as a superintendent with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in Ontario, Canada, when I visited a kindergarten classroom. There, I found four children seated at a miniature conference table with their teacher, Gloria, clearly engaged in some very heady work.

“Well,” I said. “What’s going on here? This looks fascinating!”

One of the young lads looked up at me and said, “It is fascinating! Why don’t you come join us?”

Intriguing Questions

I certainly couldn’t refuse such a friendly invitation, so I folded my body up into one of the tiny plastic chairs until my chin almost rested on my knees, while Gloria explained what the students were doing.

“You see the chart over there?” she asked, pointing to a whiteboard. “That’s our wonder wall. Whenever the children become curious about something — or are wondering about something — they write it down. Then we see if anyone else is interested in the topic, and develop learning activities based on their interests.”

I glanced at the wonder wall and saw it included some intriguing questions I’ve often wondered myself, such as, “How do my eyeballs stay in my head?”

On the table in front of the children were large sheets of paper with pictures of different body parts. Gloria pointed to a picture of the intestines and asked the young lad if he knew what they were called.

He tapped a finger against his forehead in anguish and said, “I used to know this!”

Mind you, it couldn’t have been that long ago, because he was all of 4 years old. But just then, he remembered.

“I know it!” he shouted. “It’s the intesticles!”

It was certainly an answer I’ll never forget.

Learning Inverted

What captivated me most about the wonder wall, however, is that it turns the traditional concept of teaching upside down. Rather than the teacher telling the students what they were going to learn, Gloria let them take the lead, allowing them to follow their own natural curiosity and developing the lessons based on their interests.

To me, the wonder wall is a powerful metaphor for how we must begin to push for transformational change not just in our schools, but in our businesses and our broader communities as well.

This is why my visit to the kindergarten class that day inspired the title of my book, co-written with Jane Daly, The Wonder Wall: Leading Creative Schools and Organizations in an Age of Complexity. The book explains how optimum learning and innovation in our school districts is not just dependent on the people within them, but on certain conditions within our school district environments that bring out the natural brilliance of our students, teachers, volunteers, administrators and community members.

Creativity Everywhere

How do we create environments that enable innovation, individuals and organizations to flourish?

At the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board where I worked, we set up an initiative called Lead the Way. The purpose was to inspire, throughout the district, that idea that creativity resides in everyone. The more successful we were in fostering the creativity of all our staff and the broader community, to unleash each member’s unique creativity, then the more success we would have in reaching and inspiring all of the students in our schools. It was a journey of transformation.

To this end, we organized seven or eight Lead the Way events each year, open to all employee groups, the broader community and, of course, students. At each one of these events, we profiled creative initiatives ongoing in our schools and community. We made sure the events themselves modelled the creativity we sought — we had a bus tour, a flash mob, a conference in four theatre acts, an Idea jam and more.

The first time we put out a call to our people to present their creative initiatives, you could almost hear the crickets chirping. It dawned on us that people didn’t associate the amazing things they were doing in the classroom and in our administration departments with creativity. And to many, creativity lay in the purview of the arts.

But once we established the idea that creativity lies everywhere and in everyone, the projects began to pour in. We were overwhelmed by the quantity and the quality. Detailed submissions came from across the district.

Teachers with project-based learning and outdoor environmental schools, custodians, educational assistants, community volunteers and parents were working on a range of fascinating initiatives. The subject matter spanned the entire curriculum, including leading scientists profiling their work to students; volunteers setting up model train clubs, knitting clubs and coding clubs; and tradespeople offering innovative partnerships with schools and students.

Over 10 years, the result was a cultural shift as schools and departments increasingly allowed more autonomy for teachers and staff to create learning environments that fostered innovation and creativity.

Passionate Pursuits

One example occurred under the leadership of teacher Chris Hiltz with the support of Principal Jennifer Offord at Fisher Park Middle School in Ottawa. A group of teachers — Eliri Morgan, Tanya Ovens and Sarah Forsyth — set up a project-based learning initiative built on the ideas of Genius Hour. The results were astonishing and, in several cases, life transforming for students who finally had an opportunity to explore and learn about the topics they were passionate about. Several examples can be seen on my website.

One student, Emerson, talked to me about the profound impact Genius Hour had on her. She had had little success in school until this opportunity arose in 8th grade. For her project, she explored her passion for fashion and created a mannequin dressed in articles of clothing that represented each of the decades of the 20th century. She then created a printed booklet describing each of the articles of clothing and explaining the historical context.

Emerson described to me how, for much of her school life, she felt as though she had been “stuck in an elevator.” No matter how hard she pushed the buttons, she couldn’t get off. The success she had with this project allowed her to explore her brilliance for the first time and to feel the excitement of having her moment in the sun while presenting her project. “It was like I took off my makeup,” she said.

The Genius Hour project was so successful that the team was awarded a grant of more than $20,000 by the Ontario Ministry of Education to enable the staff to share these remarkable stories and best practices with other schools and districts.

This tangible support for innovative approaches is critical in communicating to our leaders and to our staff that brilliance lies at every level and in everyone. Our job is to set in place the conditions under which this brilliance will emerge.

Learning Conditions

Just what are those conditions for creative learning environments?

In The Wonder Wall, we identify four conditions that we consider critical to any learning environment that wants to foster the unique brilliance of their people.

STORYTELLING AND LISTENING. Research shows that when we hear a story, rather than a lecture, more parts of our brain are activated, and we better retain and understand the information. Moreover, sharing our personal stories helps build understanding and empathy. Any learning culture that wishes to unleash creativity needs to make space for peoples’ stories to be told and heard.

MOVING BEYOND DIVERSITY TO INCLUSIVITY. If we believe that every person is creative and has ideas and knowledge to contribute, then we must include and value every individual and encourage them to express their ideas, regardless of rank. This includes forming partnerships in the greater community.

MAKING IT PERSONAL. As we saw in the Genius Hour example, when the environment allows students and staff to pursue learning and projects that they are passionate about, extraordinary results can happen.

CELEBRATING. A celebration isn’t just an event, it’s an attitude. When we create learning environments that encourage experimentation and risk, joyfulness and playfulness, we encourage people to unleash their natural creativity.

Likely Pushback

The journey to supporting creativity among students, faculty and administration, and across the district community is not always easy. It requires a lot of work, a lot of time and, actually, a lot of creativity to make the extraordinary happen.

In addition, you should expect pushback. Some people fear change and innovation. Others mistakenly believe a lack of rigor surrounds creativity and that embracing it will lead to lost productivity and intangible goals that can’t be assessed.

Educators have several methods to secure buy-in. Start by demystifying creativity and inviting naysayers into the conversation. The rewards and benefits will be remarkable as students and adults alike, through exploration of their interests and passions, get to learn and grow from discovering their own creative capacities.