Fifth week: Reflections about training

We have many tools to innovate around us, many articles to read and many opportunities to experience, or it is supposed to. But, how can we be sure that we are well trained to innovate?

Knowing all the theory is positive for us as future professionals to have some guidelines to follow, or an initial idea of how we can develop our ideas to create positive and innovative changes inside the school, but theory is not the only tool we need to have.

The idea is to be able to innovate in a real context, once having all the information we need. But it is not easy to apply design thinking if we are not having a direct relation with the method, so we need people to educate and teach and help us to use these methods in the proper way. This is, we need a coach that can show us the process from the inside, and this process takes lots of time and effort from both parts.

A good way to promote this kind of learning about innovative methods is making them closer to the future and current professionals of education, both in training or working in the field, who need extra training outside the universities and school classrooms.

As current students, we have to opportunity to learn new things to innovate, that teachers who are not being trained at the moment unknown, and this gives us an extra point when changing the scholar system in which we are going to teach in a near future. The problem is that there are not enough curricular hours to develop the methodologies in a deep way and we learn only the bases of them, we have an initial idea of their functioning, but we are not capable to apply them when we are alone in front of a challenge. Then, if we want to get extra training, we have to do some research and find people who can explain us more about it, and most of the times we cannot be sure if the information will be trusty and we give up our search.

We know there are training courses but most of them have to be paid or they are difficult to find or even not announced, what makes people interested also give up, as they don’t have time to be constantly checking the nearly events. So, it could be a good idea promoting different courses and meetings from the different departments in order to help us develop the contents worked during the lessons.

Let’s imagine that someone finishes the degree and he/she is supposed to be innovative, as he/she has recently studied and has been trained in that field. The thing is that he/she knows all about theory, has learnt different methodologies to apply, but when he/she has to make them work, he/she realizes he/she is not able to do it because he has never done a practical work on innovation or has done it group and only referring to one specific context, which, in fact is more an obstacle than a tool.

I hope things will change and university teachers will have some support someday to help their students develop their possibilities in order to be real innovators, as subjects as this one pretend to start. Then, having all these possibilities in our hands it would be easier for us to innovate inside the classrooms.