Education Innovation

  • Teachers

    Teachers collaborate with peers and apply a human-centred innovation approach to explore and test solutions to issues and opportunities in their classrooms

  • Principals

    Principals support and encourage teacher innovation, help guide innovation priorities in alignment with school improvement plans and communicate innovation findings with peers and district education officers

  • Administrators

    Ministry staff identify priority areas to catalyze innovation, and nurture and support promising solutions to bring them to scale for wider impact in the education system

Learn more about innovation roles in an education system

For teachers:

The innovation method

Teachers have direct contact with students, parents, teacher peers and principals so they are best suited to deeply explore and understand school challenges and opportunities through an empathetic lens. Using empathy helps innovators consider problems and opportunities from other perspectives which can lead to effective new solutions.

Teachers are encouraged to innovate in teams to include a diversity of experiences and perspectives in the process. And innovation teams are encouraged to move quickly through the innovation process to minimize the time, energy and cost invested in testing new solutions. This means teams can explore truly innovative ideas because there is little risk in running quick, low-cost prototypes.

Understand

Observe and talk to those most related to the problem or opportunity to understand the innovation challenge from their perspective.

Ideate

Consider lots (and we mean lots!) of ideas, focusing on solutions that respond to the users’ experience of the problem or opportunity.

Prototype

Choose one idea that has the potential for a positive impact and test it in the real-world. Focus on learning if the idea shows evidence of working.

Reflect

For principals:

Leadership for innovation

Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point.

For administrators:

Innovation management

Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point.