THE NEED FOR INNOVATION IN TEACHING

BERNADETTE P. MENDOZA

“Innovation” is one of the most used words in education these days. Innovation is about “doing new and better things” that lead to better learning in the classroom. All educators should aspire for innovation in teaching in order to cope with the fast changing learning needs of students. Simply put, there’s really no need for major shifts from our time tested ways of teaching. Small adjustments in practice will do well as long as these best serve our students. These could be modifications in reading programs, that we create when working with students or being open to creating an entirely new way to teach a concept (invention) that serves individuals in a way that was better than before.

“If students do not learn the way we teach, then we just have to teach the way they learn”. Constant adjustments are in order to deliver better classroom instruction. The best questions to ask are, “What do these learners need”? “What is best for these learners?”

At the end of a teaching day, we evaluate whether the measures we applied were effective or not by the impact they had made on our learners. If it is truly innovative, it will eventually become best practice.

There has never been a best practice in teaching and learning, that wasn’t at first an “innovation”. Someone, or some group, was in the pursuit of doing something better for students, and they saw their new practice as better than what they were doing before in education.

Ideas lead to innovation, but only if we turn those thoughts into actions. Yet if those actions are new and better, they will become best practice for a period of time. There should be no better researcher of student learning than the teacher working directly in classrooms. They have to decide when to embrace best practice, and when to create “next practice”. That is where the true innovation in teaching and learning happens.

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The author is Teacher III at Natividad High School