I’m not sure how many of you have read the book The Innovator’s Mindset by George Couros.  It’s a book that I have referenced in the past, and today I happened to be on his blog and came across a great post that I want to share.  Below you’ll find a link to his short post titled “Successful Adaptation.”  Click the link to check it out, and then come back here for some closing thoughts:

Successful Adaptation – by George Couros

How many of those contradictions are things that you’ve heard, or maybe even said, before?  I feel our steps with the HSE21 Best Practice Model have helped us to attack many of the contradictions, however I still see some of those contradictions within our building.

I know Couros shared his own remix of those contradictions written as questions, but I have a few more questions for us to think about:

What have you created in the past week?  Month?  Year?  Have you shared any of those things with your students?  How could our own efforts at creation model that expectation for our students?

What are some areas that you would be willing to give up the expectation of students asking for permission? (assuming they are acting responsibly)  How would this promote greater empowerment for our students?

What are the things that you have let go of this year in order to show more of a growth mindset?  What are the policies within our classroom or our building that get in the way of the growth mindset?

I want to say again, I am not asking you to change for change’s sake, rather I am asking you to think about how you might change in order to make your classroom a better learning environment for our students.  With that, I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Couros:

If you feel up to it, share your response to one (or more) of these questions, or one of the questions from the original quote by Couros in the comments below.