Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Here is a question I often get in workshops:

How do you focus on being innovative while still teaching the curriculum?

When I hear this, the viewpoint of “teaching the curriculum” and “innovation in education” is that the curriculum is on one side of the spectrum, and innovation is on the opposite side.

Working often as an outside consultant, I could tell teachers to not worry about the curriculum, “school is broken, and we need to fix it,” blah blah blah, but that would be irresponsible of me as someone who works with schools, but not employed directly.  While these teachers focus on “innovation,” they may also lose their job because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.

What I try to get people to understand is that how we teach the curriculum, often, is the innovation.