I’m in a session with Al Bertani talking about change, differentiation and leadership. I’m sitting in an auditorium with 250 principals listening and watching a PowerPoint presentation with targeted moments of interaction around specific prompts. After spending the summer talking about notions of new professional development, new conferences, networked learning, I find myself missing my network terribly. It’s not that I don’t have peers here sitting around me, I do. But Dr. Bertani is saying interesting, challenging things, and I want a chatcast session because I want to read what people are thinking about these things not just when he gives a chance to talk. I want to know what people think when he gives us seven things that happen when we talk about change. I want to throw out a question to my peers about talking about differentiated instruction when we don’t talk about differentiated assessment. And I want to engage with these ideas and I want to engage in the conversation now, not just when I get three minutes to answer a prompt.

I feel this way because of the learning I did this summer. I feel this way because I took part in Skypecasted sessions with brilliant people, and the learning I did, both as a presenter and as a participant, and I can never look at lecture format the same way again.

So in the context of talking about change… and coming out of one of the prompts, I realized something.

I want to stop talking about creating cultures of change. Change is a word with no positive or negative meaning. Change can be positive or negative. Change can be a bad thing — ask folks in New Orleans about the change Katrina caused. I want to start talking about innovation. I want us thinking about how to make our schools better tomorrow than they were yesterday. Innovation doesn’t have to mean technological innovation. It can be about teaching practice, school structure, student learning styles, anything… but that’s the term I want to use.

There are those who would change for change’s sake. That’s exhausting and frustrating and can make it hard to make improvements when we see powerful opportunities to do so. Innovation suggests a moving forward, which where I think we need to go. It also suggests that we will have to question why we want to change, what the desired outcomes will be… and also what gets lost when we change, which is really powerful.

So I think that’s something I want to do moving forward… I don’t want to talk about how our schools will change, I want to talk about how our schools will innovate.