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ENGAGING STUDENTS ON INNOVATION
by Trudy Kuehner
Vol. 14, No. 1
February 2009
Trudy Kuehner is associate director of FPRI's Wachman
Center. This essay summarizes the discussion on how to
engage students in the history of innovation that took place
at the Wachman Center's two-day history institute for
teachers on this subject held October 18-19. The Institute
was hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas
City, MO and webcast worldwide. See
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/
for videos and texts of lectures. The History Institute for
Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A.
McDougall. Core support is provided by the Annenberg
Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding for the innovation
program is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
The next history weekends are Teaching the Nuclear Age,
March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las
Vegas, and America's Wars, Part II: 1920-present, May 2-3,
at the Cantigny First Division Foundation, Wheaton, IL.
ENGAGING STUDENTS ON INNOVATION
by Trudy Kuehner
Lawrence Husick, co-director of the Wachman Center program
on Teaching the History of Innovation, began the discussion
by noting that our K-12 education system may separate out
far too early students who display an aptitude for
math/science from those more apt in the humanities. We seem
to believe that people can do only one or the other, not
both. In order to foster innovation, we need to maintain a
more balanced and interdisciplinary curriculum for much
longer than we do, Husick urged. That means asking all of
our students to be rigorous in their reasoning, and in some
ways, more "scientific" about what they do in all subject
areas.
One negative result of our failure to demand careful and
fact-based reasoning, he said, is that it is widely
considered acceptable to hold beliefs about our environment,
fuel use, waste processing, and many other issues with
little or no factual basis. Another result of our academic
separation between the sciences and humanities is reflected
in the oft-heard statements that we're not producing enough
graduates in science, math, and engineering. But that's the
wrong focus. What we've failed to produce is innovators.
Innovators are special people, but everyone has the innate
capacity to innovate. It just requires understanding a few
things about how the world works, about the process of
innovation, and in particular, that in order to innovate,
you must take risks.
How, then, to teach the process and benefits of innovation?
First, Husick observed, innovations of all kinds engage
young minds. Our students are, and want to be, innovative,
but our educational system discourages them. We teach the
accepted and conventional lessons, facts and methods, and
disincentivize students from diverging from this narrow and
efficient path.
Husick remarked that students have no fear of new
technology. They don't worry about breaking an expensive
computer -- they know it can be fixed and that it's not hard
to fix (unless you drop it hard, or drench it in your soft
drink!). In the 1950s and 60s, young men played with souped-
up cars. Now young people soup up their computers. (Husick
noted that our kids run 20 or more programs at a time of
their computers. It's not attention deficit disorder; they
are gathering information, and interacting with each other
in ways that are unfamiliar to their parents and teachers.)
They view it as a game, and in so doing, they innovate by
attempting to break the rules. Game designers now design
games with rules that are intended to be broken. Video games
have built-in "cheats." You try to discover what the cheats
are by talking to other players. In so doing, students are
discovering the inner workings of the machine, to "hack" the
system because it feels good to know something the next
person doesn't.
Innovators must fail, Husick emphasized. It is an essential
way to learn. Almost all our hero innovators failed
miserably multiple times. Being an overnight success as an
innovator means you put in fifteen years when no one
recognized you for what you were attempting to do. We must
teach our children and almost as importantly, their parents,
to accept failure. They must not only tolerate failure, but
celebrate it. We must make it possible for a student's
project to fail, without causing the student herself to
fail.
So, can we give students environments in which failure is
anticipated? A learning environment with the mental
equivalent of athletes' mats on the floor? Contests like
Olympiad of the Mind or Science Fair provide a safe
environment and some safety constraints. Husick also
recommended four more:
1. Problem-solving exercises. We can ask students to solve a
problem we give them, but in an unconventional manner. The
assignment should be interesting to students but with a
highly constrained definition. The value of innovators'
education is that it serves as a sieve that allows them to
focus on a particular problem and get down deep to the truth
of it. This process obviously takes too long to be done in a
class setting, so we limit the scope of the problem and make
it appropriate to the students.
Once the puzzle has been defined, brainstorming is a skill
we can teach our students that has great value. The rules
are simple. Just throw out ideas for solutions and
approaches. The most difficult part for students is that
they may not judge during this process--no negative
comments! Put all the ideas on the board, no matter how
silly they may sound.
Then comes the rank-and-select criticism. Ask each student
to write down his or her top 3-5 solutions. Then go home and
collate all of those, put the top ones on the board in order
at the start of the next class, and identify the best two
solutions. Then build, or if actual construction exceeds
available time and physical resources, describe and draw,
the solutions, and have students present the solutions in a
slide format.
The final step is demonstration. Silicon Valley's culture is
"demo or die," Husick noted. At Apple, every potential
feature of a product is built two ways by two different
teams, who play at the secrecy between them. Each one wants
to get their version of the solution into the final product.
Teacher comments included that after the demo, there needs
to be a reflective process so students may further refine
what they've done, identify pitfalls, and streamline the
process. Another teacher observed that solving one problem
usually creates others. Accordingly, students should be
asked to identify new problems that might be created by
their solutions, to help them learn to anticipate unintended
consequences.
The importance of providing students opportunities to
showcase their work to adults and the community was noted,
if time is available for that. (Sometimes teachers might
prefer having students solve a "toy" problem that can be
looked at in one class period, in order to focus on
process.) It was observed that this whole matter may really
be about the teaching of creativity.
It was agreed that students should be asked to identify who
the stakeholders are in their project. For instance, for
large-scale projects, there must be buy-in from the parents,
community, and administration. Students should learn how to
"sell" whatever their solution is, in order to get buy-in
from others - in the "real world" these are superiors,
venture capitalists, consumers, and the market.
Concerning teaching creativity, we want to avoid people
saying either, "I don't need to be taught that" or "I'm not
creative, so don't bother." Rather, try to see innovation as
scratching an itch. The difference between inventors and
others is simple. We all invent things, but an inventor
writes it down and pursues it to see if it's been done
before, how it may be changed. Perhaps the idea goes
nowhere, or maybe it results in a patent. The rest of us do
nothing and then see same thing at Target or WalMart in six
months.
Conference speaker Peter Watson noted that the psychological
evidence suggests that groups are actually more conservative
than individuals, and wondered if maybe group projects
simply identify the leaders. Husick agreed that "group
think"--the tendency not to say things outside the group's
norm-does exist. The exercises can be done with individuals
as efficiently as with the class as a whole. For groups, toy
situations tend to work best because group members don't
think that the stakes are very high.
One teacher noted that our educational system tends to group
students so that the "gifted" get to do innovation projects,
and it was agreed that really, these projects should be for
all students. This mirrors the problem of our separating
students by science/humanities too early.
2. Biographical narrative. Second, Husick noted that
biography is a great way to teach innovation because
students learn best through narrative. Biography allows
students to explore what makes innovators different. What do
they do? How do they view the world, approach problems, and
choose problems?
Understanding a narrative thread about innovation is one way
for students to learn this history. We tend to focus on a
few heroes, and then only on the myths about them, having
students study Thomas Edison as the "Wizard of Menlo Park."
What we know about him is actually different from what most
of the biographies say. The Wizard of Menlo Park is a
fictional invention, given to the world by Edison, who was
as innovative in creating his own image as in everything
else he created. Edison built a factory for innovating,
hired lots of people, and drove them hard. Edison always
took credit for everything, and was ruthless about
protecting his businesses once they got started, as with his
motion picture cartel. But he also had the ability to choose
important problems. He once remarked, "I never invent
anything that people don't want to buy." (Though Henry Ford
observed, "If I had asked people what they wanted before I
brought out my product, they would have asked for a faster
horse.")
You can use projects that focus on real stories of real
innovators. Pick a known one or one who lives or works in
your area (the patent office website is a good source for
this, www.uspto.gov, which website includes an Inventors
Hall of Fame.) Students can research, interview, and invite
inventors to speak. They can learn the innovators' stories
of problem-selection, alternative weighing, and failure, and
ask about their processes and the obstacles they faced.
Conference speaker Prof. Walter McDougall added that
students can be asked to think about kinds of innovation
other than technology-e.g., in institutions and
philosophical or psychological approaches to life.
Wachman Center Senior Fellow Prof. Paul Dickler encouraged
teachers to teach disruptive vs. sustaining innovations.
Disruptive innovation theory has been extensively written
about by Prof. Clay Christenson of Harvard Business School,
Husick noted. This theory classifies innovation into two
categories: Disruptive, which seemingly comes out of
nowhere, is given no credit by the people who know what the
"right" things are, but overtakes the market leader to
become new standard. By contrast, sustaining innovations
make a product/service/system better incrementally. One
clearly disruptive technology of our lifetime was the
personal computer, which was derided as a useless toy by
computer manufacturers but is now the standard.
3. The Rube Goldberg contest. Goldberg was a cartoonist, a
"hypothetical inventor" who invented strange and different
ways of doing common tasks that were illustrated in his
drawings. E.g., to empty a bucket of water, one might mount
a boot on a wagon wheel and have that boot turn with the
wheel and kick the bucket over at the end of a long series
of other events. A search for "Rube Goldberg" on sites like
YouTube will produce videos of fantastically complicated
machines doing simple things. Students, like Goldberg, don't
have to build such devices (although that's lots of fun,
too), they can just draw them and come up with new ways to
do common tasks.
4. Consider and rank order important innovations (see e.g.
From Stone to Silicon: A Brief Survey of Innovation (FPRI,
Oct. 2008, at www.fpri.org). While "Stone to Silicon" takes
the broad view (all innovations, over all time), students
may do better with more constrained parameters. For
instance, ask them to research and list: the top 10
innovations in transportation; the top 10 in the United
States since 1945; the top 5 during their lifetimes; the top
5 in the industrial revolution; or the top 10 in military
technology. The number, era and subject are not particularly
important. What is important is that there are clear metrics
for ranking the innovations, and that students develop
reasoned arguments for their own versions of the lists.
These projects are ideally suited for small group work, so
having five students responsible for a list of 5 innovations
gives each an investment in one candidate for the top spot,
and naturally leads to discussion and competition. Give
several groups different areas of innovation during the same
era, and then have a competition to merge all of the lists
into a larger list leads to lively disagreement and a great
deal of learning.
Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute
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