Improvement and Innovation_ Your expertise needed to craft its true meaning

In our EPMS form, teachers find the title on improvement and innovation where teachers are to highlight involvement and contributions in activities or projects on continuous improvement and innovation, and including the impact and value created as a result. In today’s reflection, I shall attempt to articulate what I see as improvement and innovations in teaching and learning, but more importantly to incorporate your experiences/activities and effort to improvement and innovation.

I will start by speaking of experiences I had learnt from other teachers.  A Primary 1 teacher asked students to solve 3 + 3. One boy, whom we shall call John, excitedly raised his hand and answered that the answer was 8. After asking John to rethink and still hearing the same answer, the teacher held up three fingers on each hand and asked John to count them. This time he got the answer “6”. “Great”, said the proud teacher.  “So what is 3 + 3?” John again replied the teacher proudly “8”, leaving the teacher perplexed.

As teachers become proficient in teaching, their lesson has become a well-learned routine.  In this way, such well-learned routine may turn out to limit the teacher’s ability to help students develop a basic understanding of the subject matter. I see this as self-contradictory. However, the teacher who focuses on helping students develop a deep understanding of the subject matter through providing command of alternative methods may be one answer to the problem.

Under such situation, the initial attempt to understand the students’ learning difficulty is not easy and time consuming, sometimes even painful if our conclusions are wrong. However, I find that it is through such process of learning new strategies, teachers will be more proficient than before, as they let go of some of their comfortable techniques while learning better methods.

It is this part of the learning and unlearning of the teaching process that I see as improvement and innovation. What is your opinon on this?
 

Is there any experiences/activities where you implemented and initiated in your own classroom for improvement and innovation? Have you shared/taught such experiences/activities with other teachers? Is there any collaboration done with other teachers for improvement and innovation in teaching and learning?

I personally hold that true improvement and innovation is not one more “extra thing” for teaches to showcase. It is not one teacher single handedly can do to change the teaching and learning for all students. And most importantly, it is not possible without building all teachers capability.