Saturday, February 19, 2011

How—and why—to teach innovation in our schools Call for innovative society raises important questions about education By Alexander Hiam


It’s wonderful to hear President Obama call for a nationwide emphasis on innovation, but it raises an interesting challenge: Where will all those innovators come from? Currently, we are chasing testable competency in academic core

skills. It is quite a different thing to try to educate future innovators. We don’t test for that.

An innovation curriculum requires an emphasis on what I am going to call, for lack of a preexisting term, the Five I’s: Imagination, Inquiry, Invention, Implementation, and Initiative (the latter being a foundational trait that enables the other four). Here is my take on how to teach each of the Five I’s of innovation in our schools.

Read more...

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/02/01/how-and-why-to-teach-innovation-in-our-schools/