Take Aways from iNACOL 2015

Here's a trivia question for you: What does the acronym EPCOT stand for?

Did you even know it was an acronym?

Give up?

EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

I mention this because the backdrop for the conference I attend this week, the iNACOL Symposium for Blended and Online Learning was Disney World. In my opinion, there could be no more appropriate setting for a group of 3200 forward-thinking educators.

Walt Disney created Disney World in an attempt to make the happiest place on Earth. He wanted to transport guests at the park to different immersive experiences that grew from the imagination. In short, Disney World was Walt's attempt to improve the world his guests lived in.

After succeeding with the Magic Kingdom, Walt turned his attention to the future. For him, it wasn't enough to transform the "now," he wanted to innovate for the world years from now. EPCOT was originally imagined as Walt's futuristic utopia. In Walt's own words, "EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise." EPCOT was to be a model of city planning and organization, a testing site for new systems and infrastructure, and a home for 20,000 residents.

After Walt's death, Disney decided they could not run EPCOT as a city without his leadership, and so restructured the community as a new theme park.

While walking through EPCOT, it was not hard for me to draw parallels to the experimenting and prototyping that educators at the conference were doing, and to the innovation at work here in Hartford. With that in mind, here are my conference takeaways.

1. Innovation in the classroom, in schools, and in a district is within reach if we do it thoughtfully. It is not truly an innovation if we throw Chromebooks at every students and tell them to start using a tool. Innovation is reimagining broader ideals. Because we are in the work of shifting paradigms, we need to be as open, honest, and reflective in the process as possible. Though Walt's vision was utopia, his was a community of tomorrow, meaning that perfection would never be reached. If we innovate with that in mind, we can make changes not just for next class or next year, but for the future of our schools and our kids.

2. I continuously come back to this, but the tool does not matter! Through three days of sessions, I only attended one workshop focused on a particular tool. We're at the point in the EdTech world where most of the cream has risen to the top. We'll make decisions on tech tools based on our context, but what really matters is having systems in place that allow those tools to be successful. This comes down to design thinking. How do we design authentic and valuable learning experiences for our students. It may be time to move beyond the lesson plan.

3. Which leads me to my third takeaway: We as teachers need to be ready to teach in innovative schools. The chart below summarizes this shift nicely:

The best way to teach our students to have agency, have a growth mindset, and not be happy with being "good enough" is to model it ourselves. Yeah, we may be able to get by with limited changes to our teaching and our systems, but that's being happy with "good enough." Instead, we need to model lifelong learning, challenge ourselves to innovate, and constantly reflect on how we can be improving. 

And finally, above all, there is no harm in having fun, being imaginative, and getting in touch with your inner-child along the way! As Walt Disney says, "If you can dream it, you can do it."