Innovation, Research, and Policy: Evolutions in Classroom Teaching

This article offers a vision of innovation within the complex nature of teaching. Innovation is the process through which new ideas are generated and put into productive practice—“new” meaning new to this situation or this location or this community. In this article, the authors describe a) how innovation occurs through small-scale “tinkering”; b) the conditions for innovation; c) methods for distributing and developing innovation; d) the complex relationship between policy and innovation; e) the need to evaluate fully the consequences of innovation; and f) how to develop capacity for innovation. Building capacity for innovation also requires examining our goals—what we think we are doing – because, when innovation occurs, it occurs in the direction of people’s goals.