islt 9475
Diffusion of educational innovations
This was a very intriguing course for me, as I had no idea there was such a "thing" as Diffusion of Innovation studies or stages of adoption. While I found the anecdotes in the text very interesting, I mostly found myself applying the concepts of the adoption (or converse rejection) continuum to my own workplace environment.
During my experience in the field of education, at least at the one and only school I've taught in, the rumor has held true that everything comes and goes in cycles. That if you "wait out" an innovation you don't professionally or personally agree with it will eventually be phased out and replaced with a different one. I began to look at our own School Improvement Plan and those of years past and had the pleasure of bouncing some ideas off of my administrator. It seems that our leadership team almost always went from the Knowledge to Decision stage and straight to Implementation with little or no involvement from the remaining staff in the Persuasion or Confirmation stages. It is no surprise, then, that this last stage often ended in discontinuation of the "ineffective" innovation. After sharing Rogers' (1995) Innovation-Decision Process Model with her, she agreed that some changes needed to take place within our stakeholder infrastructure and the way changes were initiated to improve student success rates. We've begun to take much more time in the Knowledge and Persuasion stages and become more receptive to the concerns of dissidents. We've done much work to clarify the norms of our social system to ensure that meetings are productive and that information is accessible to all involved parties and clarified as often as needed.
While initially, coming from a corporate background, I struggled with the way my school operated and that decisions made by my "boss" were not blindly followed, enforced and action taken when an employee was non-compliant. I'm not sure if this in an anomaly in my school or not, but it seemed that rejection is widely practiced and accepted. Participating in this class has allowed me to understand that all entities deal with the same process of dissonance at times and gave me the tools to assist my community of colleagues to effectively adopt and confirm the most applicable innovations for our unique situation.
During my experience in the field of education, at least at the one and only school I've taught in, the rumor has held true that everything comes and goes in cycles. That if you "wait out" an innovation you don't professionally or personally agree with it will eventually be phased out and replaced with a different one. I began to look at our own School Improvement Plan and those of years past and had the pleasure of bouncing some ideas off of my administrator. It seems that our leadership team almost always went from the Knowledge to Decision stage and straight to Implementation with little or no involvement from the remaining staff in the Persuasion or Confirmation stages. It is no surprise, then, that this last stage often ended in discontinuation of the "ineffective" innovation. After sharing Rogers' (1995) Innovation-Decision Process Model with her, she agreed that some changes needed to take place within our stakeholder infrastructure and the way changes were initiated to improve student success rates. We've begun to take much more time in the Knowledge and Persuasion stages and become more receptive to the concerns of dissidents. We've done much work to clarify the norms of our social system to ensure that meetings are productive and that information is accessible to all involved parties and clarified as often as needed.
While initially, coming from a corporate background, I struggled with the way my school operated and that decisions made by my "boss" were not blindly followed, enforced and action taken when an employee was non-compliant. I'm not sure if this in an anomaly in my school or not, but it seemed that rejection is widely practiced and accepted. Participating in this class has allowed me to understand that all entities deal with the same process of dissonance at times and gave me the tools to assist my community of colleagues to effectively adopt and confirm the most applicable innovations for our unique situation.