Innovation schools the challenge of “baking the cake” of change
Seek and keep looking for these dissatisfactions with current achievements, that engine of change that always makes something new emerge, something unpredictable. Open to surprise, open the doors to the different, the curious, the wonderful. To grow you need courage, get rid of the old, make room for the new. To live you need dreams and learning, and that dissatisfaction, those eagerness to change and maintain yourself, that constantly renewed restlessness with notes of utopia, therefore, change has some pleasure. When preparing a cake and using yeast, the time and temperature are calculated, but we also have the certainty that there is always a quota of chance, a little uncertainty may or may not depend on a chemical formula.
Faced with the new challenges that the school receives, and as a formula to share the path, and what it wants to offer in this work. What is written in it are only ideas and suggestions to go through the adventure, and certain words so that in each school they are completed with personal traces, they recreate it and that in each school they are fulfilled with personal traces, they recreate them and enrich them in order to that, as in the pastry shop, the result of the change may surprise.
The new context originates a rethinking of the goals that society assigns to education. Given this situation, education must then face the challenge of offering quality with equity, which guarantees starting and finishing points for all those who enter it, and training that allowed them to be included in the productive system and, at the same time, the bases of democratic system in a framework of freedom.
The challenges for the new model are mastering the skills to create and select information: having autonomy, decision-making capacity, flexibility, and problem-solving ability. But society also requires an intercultural education, which attends to the diversity of knowledge and perceptions of values, also requiring a focus on the development of communication skills, so that the learning subject participates actively, thoughtfully and critically in the society.
The school is the social institution, since it is undoubtedly the one that has changed the least, companies and other types of organizations have adapted more easily to new contexts, substantially modifying their organizational structure and management processes. In schools, these aspects have been the most stable throughout history, since they are generally considered immovable.
Vertebral concepts to plan educational change:
The organization refers to the structuring aspects of the institutional form; the relations of mutual dependency between the different "places" of the organization; times spaces and groupings.
Management refers us to the processes necessary to achieve institutional objectives, such as institutional planning, participation, leadership, institutional evaluation, etc. The way in which decisions are made, the conception and management of conflicts that prevail in the school, the areas, the conception and the management of conflicts that prevail in the school.
We must understand as teachers that innovation is the possibility of changing the founding axes of the school, it is to break with the old, to seek a new balance, destined to achieve greater achievements, higher levels of quality. It is a permanent, spiral, complex and contradictory process, never free from conflict. Innovating is thus breaking with the structural aspects of the school, it is producing new ideas and recreating old ones, it is an act of permanent creativity.
Another well-known problem is also the enormous overload of fragments, uncoordinated and ephemeral "in our schools. Schools are an integrated system and that thinking about innovation implies repairing the necessary articulations between the dimensions of the school, knowing that a change in one of them will necessarily impact another.
Planning in the school environment is a process to intervene and transform reality, not only to analyze or diagnose it. It is a shared, collaborative process that takes responsibility and commits the entire institution to its context. When planning innovation, institutional problems must be identified, as well as the causes that originate them. Once determined, the different courses of action for the alternates are designed for each of them.
The culture of innovation. Institutional actors
Organizations do not have a homogeneous culture. All people in the organization have different perspectives, interests, relationships and even worldviews that make the problem of innovation complex.
The analysis of isolated professional work carries many consequences. Hargreaves argues that this model enhances what he calls unknown competition and ignored incompetence.
The distinction is valuable for the implications it has for what we have designated innovation management technology, that is; to help discern what are the paths of change at school. The experiences of change, or innovative experiences, can be carried out by teachers (be they from an area, a cycle, etc.) and be the seed of an institutional innovation.
The experience of the internships of future computer science teachers, who somehow solves the problem from the outside, that is; without the teachers of the school taking over, it did not expand to the entire institution but remained within the scope of the humanities specialty. The actions promoted by teachers do not include this type of internship, but are based on curricular reorganization. There is no doubt that this experience of institutional change affects the very foundations of the school model. Although it is clear that the experience undertaken does not end all the unwanted situations, it does imply a firm step towards achieving the objective image, that ideal situation that is born from the institutional consensus.
Some terms of the innovation:
Innovation the breakdown of the classic balance given by the routine operation of the educational unit, in search of a new balance.
Innovation as a social category, engages in a process of social deliberation, concentration and planning, aimed at considering the contents and orientations of educational processes at a historical moment given the ideological, social, economic and cultural coordinates of the system. Social.
In order to promote an innovation, the commitment of the actors, the existence of a critical table capable of carrying it out, and the birth of a parallel and complementary process of research with the ability to analyze the conditions of success, control the variables that are put into play and generate a process of reflection and analysis from the practice itself.
The learning organization is one that facilitates learning for all its members and that continually transforms itself by taking learning as the fundamental basis of the organization.
An organization that learns, needs permanent innovation processes, innovating requires asking why change, why change, and how to do it. You need reflection, analysis and inquiry processes in and about educational practice. An institution in which teaching teams detect errors when analyzing their practices and collectively consider how to solve them, is developing training processes and professional development.
There are more and more certainties and consensus on the inability of the bureaucratic model to respond to the changes and challenges that today's society poses to education, which, as we have already stated, evidently call into question the school as a social institution.
Education therefore requires an open look at the future, a proactive position that allows our institutions to face the uncertainties that new times generate, that intentionally avoids the lethargy of the goal accomplished, that reinvents situations and remains attentive to changes in the future. context, and being able to transform it.
To know the institutional strengths and weaknesses, starting by detecting which ones we have and which we lack can be a good diagnostic exercise. But this statement requires a necessary warning: working through the framework of strengths and weaknesses also has its limitation. From the certainty that change can be managed, and that for this, adequate and reliable tools, a specific space and time in the institution are needed, we think of planning as a strategic and flexible process that is useful not only to analyze or diagnose it, but fundamentally to intervene and transform reality.
The complexity and speed of the changes impose on the school to work multiple teams that break the fixed structure of the organization, which allow the elaboration of various strategies to attend to different problems. In order to promote all innovation, it is necessary to know the reality, detect the problems, find a gap to innovate and launch a collective process, in which commitment and leadership must be balanced with the institutional culture, the profile of the school and the existing organization.
Innovation implies, then, an action work planned with specific management technologies, to design, implement and evaluate actions and projects hitherto not contemplated; projects and actions that have a real impact on the school, enabling benefits with a certain degree of durability and consistency.
In this change of changes, it is necessary to distinguish very precisely those innovations that must be adapted, those that must be developed and the proposals that must be rejected in order to leave them aside, guiding ourselves in the process so that it is convenient for each institution according to its purposes.
By recognizing mistakes and learning from them, the organization that is intelligent also generates the capacity to transform itself permanently. In short, it is "it is a flexible and heterogeneous institution, which not only accepts the challenge of the environment but is capable of taking advantage of it as the engine for institutional transformation".
