How Schools Can Improve their Product of Learning

What do you believe is the major product of schools? My opinion is to achieve the ability and desire of students to learn new things. That is the product of learning!

The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.

Clay Shirky

As Clay describes the digital internet age, it is far from minor and not optional. Right on the mark isn’t it? This description is particularly relevant for the need for continuous learning.

The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. EVERY TWO YEARS. The top 10 jobs that were in demand in 2013 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that don’t yet exist. All this in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. Scary, isn’t it?

For students starting a 4 year technical or college degree, one half of what they will learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. We are clearly living in exponential times, aren’t we?

What is your choice for the top learning issue of the day?

Continuous learning is our choice. Taught in schools? I have not found many that are changing their learning and education strategy based on this environment. In fact, most seem to be hunkering down even more into the past.  I was very surprised by this finding.

In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grand parents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions. Learning in this environment was a lot simpler. It was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.

Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information and solutions. Clearly a paradigm shift had begun.  No longer dumping facts into a learner’s memory was going to be adequate.

In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. As we said earlier, the amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are clearly living in exponential times.

So how do we improve our ability for continuous learning in such a fast changing and complex environment? We have defined 10 ways we believe are essential in achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:

Learn by doing

Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world,actually doing, not reading or listening about doing. Confucius once said:

I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand.

He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. And learn as many new things as possible. That means making your work environment be an environment of change. Rotate into new things to learn often. We believe this the most critical of the ways for schools to improve your learning.

Walt Whitman: Remember this above all. There is no royal road to learning.

Observe and reflect

By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Give students more opportunity to increase their ability to ‘connect the dots’ around them.

Related post: Learning From Pet Dog Personality Traits

Present novelty

Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and help students become an explorer. Continuously expand their boundaries of new experiences …include some far out things in different fields. Continuously practice connecting the dots of experiences.

Don’t fear failure

Students need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a learner, we need to accept failure so we can use the often times messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).

Related post: How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?

Develop curiosity

Continually to get students to think about what they don’t know, don’t be afraid of confusing student learning and evoking tough questions. You can develop curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning. Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build students skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning.

Practice imagination

Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.

He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add it to improving student learning.

Related post: Albert Einstein Facts and Wisdom

Employ emotion

We as learners respond to things around ourselves that elicit emotion. Put emotional stories to work to create a stimulus-response learning process. Listen for inspirational and emotional stories and use them as experiential learning in the classroom.

Embrace change and contrast

Students learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences. To improve learning, work on the experience of change … have students study trends and study changes going on around them. Get them to step out into the unknown as often as they can.

Understand the meaning

In learning, students tend to respond best when they determine things are that are most meaningful. Find the meanings that provide that which motivates us to dig deeper.

Connect and collaborate

Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Have students find some online interesting connections who share like goals, and have them try a collaboration project or two. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.

In 1976, a British statistician named George Box wrote the famous line, “All models are wrong, some are useful.” 

His point was that we should focus more on whether something can be applied to everyday life in a useful manner rather than debating endlessly if an answer is correct in all cases. As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility. Science gives us power. The more useful that power, the better the science.”

Innovation Quotes … 10 Fantastic Lessons from the World’s Best

Nothing works better defining great lessons that the best innovation quotes from the masters on this subject. Here you find 20 of my personal favorites.
I have used them to derive ten innovation lessons to learn from.

innovation quotes
Innovation quotes.

Check out our thoughts on building innovation.
Our agency focuses on creativity and innovation. From time to time we’ll post interesting tidbits on creative thinking in general.
Many on how to generate innovative ideas for business adaptation and change. And vision. We are always fascinated by this skill.
And it is a great skill to have in our view. Does it mean you see everything? Certainly not.
It does say that you have the ability to see what many cannot. And then act on these.
Vision doesn’t count without action. And not without initiating innovation.
Consider the case of Microsoft, which failed horribly to adapt to mobile computing.
In fact, when the iPhone came out, CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed it, saying, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
Let’s review the lessons and the quotations that they were derived from:

 

Innovation quotes … Lesson 1   Work the right problem.

It’s not that they can’t find the solution … they can’t find the problem.
— GK Chesterton
The most original discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.
-Arthur Koestler
Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
— Goethe
A lot of what drives innovation comes from understanding the customers and their needs and problem.
If this isn’t done well, or worse, incorrectly, then the rest doesn’t matter.

Lesson 2   Be open minded

 

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.
– Dee Hock

innovation slogans
Innovation slogans.

We cannot solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. 
-A. Einstein
The sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your mind and still be able to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Being creative in your thinking is difficult at best.
If you depend on your old ideas and small, incremental change only, the difficulty is drastically increased.

 

Lesson 3   Practice imagination

 

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions
– Albert Einstein
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks a real advance in science.
— Albert Einstein
Without the playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth.
 The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable
– Carl Jung
We try to challenge ourselves to be creative.
Sometimes they are business-related. Other times they are not.
And now we have an arsenal of things that I do on a regular basis to stretch our thinking.
It’s trying to do creative thinking and practice a consistent habit.
Imagination and curiosity are our most valuable assets.

Innovation slogans … Lesson 4   Explore and discover

 

Being right keeps us in place. Being wrong forces us to explore.
-Steven Johnson
Innovation occurs at the intersection of previously unconnected and unrelated planes of thought.   
– Idris Mootee
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought
– Albert von Szent-Gyorgy
Without the playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth.
 The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
– Carl Jung
A person might be able to play without being creative, but he sure can’t be creative without playing.
– Kurt Hanks and Jay Parry
Always look for alternatives, improvements, and non-standard ways of solving problems.
Many of the ideas that your team will come up with will be unfit, some of them will be excellent, and a few will be brilliant.
Sometimes one brilliant idea is all it takes to make a huge business success.

inspirational innovation quotes
Inspirational innovation quotes.

Lesson 5   Ask good questions

 

To find the exact answer, one must first ask the exact question.
— S. Tobin Webster
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks a real advance in science.
– Albert Einstein
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
– Anthony Jay
The ability to ask good questions is most often more critical than jumping to the correct solutions.

Lesson 6   Try wild and crazy

 

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there will be no hope for it. 
-A. Einstein
The most original discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward. 
-Arthur Koestler
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions
– Albert Einstein
In many companies, employees are so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t pursue their best ideas.
They only follow the rules and keep their heads down, which drives nothing but mediocrity.
Don’t let them get in this rut. Encourage wild and crazy.

Lesson 7   Don’t fear failure

 

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
— Edward de Bono
James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson Vacuum cleaner, “failed” at more than 5,100 prototypes before getting it just right. In fact, nearly every breakthrough innovation in history came after countless setbacks, mistakes, and “failures.”
The great innovators and achievers weren’t necessarily smarter or inherently more talented.
They quietly released their fear of failure and kept trying.
They didn’t let setbacks or misfires extinguish their curiosity and imagination.

 

 

Lesson 8   Do things you fear

 

The key to success is for you to make a habit throughout your life of doing the things you fear. 
-Vincent Van Gogh
Failing means increasing the rate of experimentation… and exploring. Exploring things that scare you.
 Some will pay off; some will fail.
The key is to get results and adapt quickly. The speed of business has increased dramatically and every minute counts.
The best companies try lots of ideas and let the losers go quickly and with no remorse.
Move beyond the things that scare you.

 

 

Lesson 9   Take risks

 

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
— Wayne Gretzky
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
— Edward de Bono
Here is a great example: a software company in Boston gives each team member two “corporate get-out-of-jail-free” cards each year.
The cards allow the holder to take risks and suffer no repercussions for mistakes associated with them. At annual reviews, leaders question their team members if the cards are not used.
It is an excellent way to encourage risk-taking and experimentation.
Think this company comes up with fantastic ideas? Absolutely.

 

 

Lesson 10   Test by prototyping

 

Effective prototyping may be the most valuable core competence an innovative organization can hope to have. 
-Michael Schrage
As you can see, some of these lessons do not take much time and money to implement.
Start from small and transform your company step by step.
Creating an innovative culture is a process that takes time, but as the first ideas become a reality, and the first results show up, both you and your employees will appreciate the benefits.
latest book
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you.
 
It’s up to you to keep improving the growth hacking and innovation of your business. Lessons are all around you.
In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
 
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Need some help in improving the innovation process for you and your staff? Innovative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors? Or maybe ways to innovate new products and services?
         
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options for innovation workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
 
With 40 years of business experience, Dr. Schoultz writes about topics that relate to improving the performance of a business.
Go to Amazon to obtain a copy of his latest book, Exploring New Age Marketing. It focuses on using the best examples to teach new age marketing … lots to learn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
  
More reading on creativity and innovation from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks
Generating Ideas by Convergent Thinking
Amazon and Managing Innovation … the Jeff Bezos Vision
The Secrets to Building an Innovative Culture
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+FacebookTwitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.