Teach Middle East Magazine Jan - Mar 2020 Issue 2 Volume 7 | Page 16

Sharing Good Practice
MAKING AGILE CONNECTIONS TO
IMPROVE INNOVATION IN SCHOOLS
BY: TIM LOGAN
“
R
eal innovation needs to be
much more than an after-
school robotics club." (Peter
Mott, originator of NEASC’s
ACE Learning) Talk to anyone in business, finance, IT or
HR right now, and it quickly becomes
apparent that organisations from every
industry are grappling with the same
issues. Most are asking themselves:
We see this word ‘innovation’
everywhere. It is a central part of the
UAE Vision 2021 to develop an entire
‘innovation ecosystem’. Expo 2020 has
initiated Young Innovators programs
and Innovation Grants. Innovation skills
appear regularly in the UAE School
Inspection Framework. “How do we adapt and change to
continue to create new value in a world
that is shifting so fast around us?”
It even gets its own month! February
2020 is UAE Innovation Month. The added dimension in schools is that
not only do we want our organisations
to adapt and change to fast-moving
contexts and external pressures, but
we also want our precious young
people, for whom we are working
so hard to add value, to be equally
‘agile’ and prepared to take on the
complexities of life out there.
But if it is to have far-reaching impacts
for our schools and the broader
economy, innovation is going to have
to go much deeper than a series of
STEM projects, a robotics club or a new
set of virtual reality devices.
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Term 2 Jan - Mar 2020
So the story goes, if we continue to do
things in the way we’ve always done
them, we will be obsolete in the blink
of an eye.
Class Time
But where do we look for clues that
might help us create a deeper vision
for innovation in education?
OK, try this… open up your LinkedIn
app (or Google will do) and type in
the search term ‘agile coach’ or ‘scrum
master’… What do you expect to find?
Maybe a supple sports trainer, or a
legendary rugby player?
Often in education, jargon is a sure
sign that someone is trying to sell
you something! But just sometimes,
new terminology helps us to signpost
a totally different context in which
people are talking about the same
things, albeit dressed up in different
language.
Scrum and Agile do just this. The
approaches that lie beneath the
strange language are essentially ways
of working (frameworks) and ways