The optimal adaptivity corridor and teacher creativity

Last week I attended the annual Manaiakalani Principals' wānanga, always a fantastic event, and the biggest yet. During the morning Dr Rebecca Jesson presented, with her usual array of evidence informed commentary and provocation, one of many aspects of this mahi that I absolutely love. In her presentation. she presented this model of professional growth.

I'd not seen this before, and before it disappeared into distant memory I wanted make sense of it, and contextualise it within my 'creativity' paradigm. What I'm about to say isn't a claim to 'correctness', but me trying to check that I have this right. I may not have!!!

When new teachers first begin, they try to innovate, but don't yet have the sorts of structures and routines that are good practice sufficiently embedded so that their innovation can 'grow wings and fly'. The result is the 'frustrated novice'. 

However the net result of developing the sorts of structures and routines necessary, but not pairing this with innovation or creativity, is the 'expert at routines'.

Professional growth along the 'optimal creativity corridor' occurs when the development of expert routines is paired with growing innovation or creativity.

My first 'reckon' on this is that in teaching (maybe most professions?) most teachers make it as far as the 'expert at routines', they introduce a little innovation or creativity (yes I know that these are technically different things) into their practice. They follow the red arrow on this next diagram.

I would like to suggest that, with an extant workforce, the more desirable path is one where as those routines are embedded, there is a growing amount of innovation and creativity that appears in teacher practice. The red arrows below are my attempt at describing what I think is perhaps the optimal pathway. 

Perhaps in an ideal world new entrants into the profession would simply head straight up the 'optimal adaptive corridor'.  My suspicion however is that this is not as likely in teaching. We enter the profession because we want to help, and once we see that we start  to make a difference, perhaps we become increasingly risk averse, for fear of losing the gains we have started to make. 

After all, innovating, being creative, requires a degree of risk taking (that's why its development is one of our areas of strategic intent at Hornby High School,) and by definition when we take risks there is the possibility of failure. But as I have said to our staff in the past: "you know what? That's okay!!!!".

This 'just enough' student progress paradigm may be the equivalent of the Bounded Rationality Model in decision making, in which we tend to gather what we think is 'just enough' information before making a decision.

(Source: https://open.lib.umn.edu/principlesmanagement/chapter/11-3-understanding-decision-making/ )

I am suggesting that maybe we see ourselves making what we think is just enough of a difference, and we stop innovating at that point. What we want (I reckon) is the 'Creative' model, but notice that this requires that you 'have time to immerse yourself in the issues'.

Anyway, I digress. We have an extant workforce, we have our Manaiakalani kaupapa, at Hornby High School we increasingly see the need, the driver, for creativity, and my contention (unsupported by any evidence) is that these all come together if/when we drive teacher creativity. How do we do this? I have arrived back at my current OCD: what are the deliberate acts of leadership that will create and nurture creativity in our kura? I've already written on a number of those, and here's another one ... the Manaiakalani Innovative Teacher programme.

We do our tauira a huge service when we support and nurture teacher professional creativity, and MIT is an outstanding way to do that, an outstanding vehicle to do that. 

It was a pleasure to sit and listen to presentations from this year's MIT teachers from across the motu. Their mahi was wide ranging and varied, but the commonality was teachers who were prepared to be creative, to try new things. What's more the MIT programme offers time for these teachers to immerse themselves in this stuff, that time to slow down. to engage in Peter O'Connor and Claudia Rozas Gomez' 'Slow Wonder'.

Our Manaiakalani kaupapa, our 'Learn Create Share' pedagogy, shouldn't just apply to our rangatahi.  These need to be a mindset, a way of being, for everyone in our kura, regardless of their 'formal role'.

I do think most teachers want to indulge their creativity in order to improve things for their learners. I just 'reckon' that we are a very risk averse group of people, because we think the stakes are too high to fail. Problem is the stakes are too high not to try.