It’s hard not to think about the recent school shooting in America and think about how innovation could benefit schools. These acts of violence are the most extreme case of why we need to change “school as usual” and start creating a paradigm shift in how we think about our school culture and climate.

It’s hard for me to imagine that a student who felt connected and supported at school would have ever fathomed to pick up a weapon and kill. There is no way that he would want to destroy what brought meaning and value to his life. Think about it.

 

I believe that if a child knew that it was a leaf or a branch on a tree, it wouldn’t hack away at its bark, it would turn toward the light and would be eager to nourish its supporting system.

We know the future will present great challenges ahead that we will need to develop more creativity, empathy, and resilience in order to tackle them. We need students prepared for that. But maybe instead of test scores, we need to think about student achievement through a different lens. Personally, I have been thinking a lot about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how our schools play a role in an individual’s life.Remember this pyramid of needs?-the core message was if you want to have a happy and fulfilling life, you need to reach the highest level of this. School provides a major basis for this, 7 hours a day, 180 days a year.

Perhaps our whole definition of student success should be reframed to include emotional intelligence and other indicators of SEL (social-emotional learning) because cultivating the mind without the heart is a great malfeasance of our educational system. Even as an IB school, which has character development as a central part of our framework, we never consider to assess SEL as meaningful data points. The IB’s stance (at least its workshop leaders) say that it’s too subjective to assess our Learner Profile, but I’d like to challenge this. We can’t say that we are creating internationally-minded citizens which work to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect (IB Mission Statement) without some data that proves that we are in fact developing these values in our school communities.

So it is becoming quite evident to me that we cannot speak about innovation without considering how it broadens our definition of learning. And we’ve got to think about how we all–students, school leaders, and teachers included– can climb this pyramid together.