Overcoming the barriers to educational innovation

I have just been reading this article on the Becta Emerging Technologies website.

"Overcoming the barriers to educational innovation" is a report on end-user innovation as a crucial approach to developing new practices and approaches.

This report recognises that the practice of creating solutions to individual problems, on an individual level, is an act of innovation. But also that learning from these individual acts can support wider, system level innovation – not through rolling-out the innovation that occurred on the individual level, but by supporting greater numbers of local level ‘end-user innovators’.

Existing studies have examined barriers to innovation for both institutions and the individuals who operate in them. Increasingly they have highlighted the interactivity of factors that are considered barriers to innovation. The relationship between each of these areas is unique to each school and each innovation.

Presented in this review are two models to explore this the ‘Distance and Dependence’ model, and the ‘Layers of Influence’ model. Initially the Distance and Dependence model gives clarity to understanding such educational innovations in context, by depicting how an innovation can be understood as its distance from current practice and dependence on available resources.

Click here to read more about "Overcoming the barriers to educational innovation" and download the report.