Implementing pedagogical innovation is a tremendous challenge, because it is not only about learning a technique or a didactic, this path requires getting involved, questioning one’s own beliefs about learning, teaching, the teaching role and above all the role of students in their own learning process.
That said, the conditions required to prepare us to move the floor, are very important, because questioning and preparing to learn something new, puts us in a condition of exposure that requires confidence, belief that you can, high motivation, a certain degree of institutional autonomy, that is, a context that accompanies and supports.
What happens when those conditions are not there? Imagine a school that is in an insufficient category in the Chilean educational system, which in a year lives several changes of management team, with broken relationships and trusts between professionals, overwhelmed teachers, more restless students post-pandemic, situations of violence within the school community, differences with the community of parents and guardians, climate of uncertainty in social networks and media generalizing the problems. Under these conditions, can you innovate?
This scenario has been explained in the literature as establishments that are in highly challenging contexts and dysfunctional educational systems, identifying at least 5 categories of associated factors: (1) socioeconomic level of students and their families, (2) high rotating directive, (3) quality of pedagogical practices, (4) teacher commitment and (5) idiosyncratic characteristics of the Chilean educational system. From common sense, these are clearly schools in which it is urgent to generate profound changes and put students at the center, that is, to make pedagogical innovation, bet on active learning methodologies and, in this scenario, it is not only desirable but an ethical imperative, as mentioned by Santiago Rincón-Gallardo.
Children and young people who today are in an establishment considered deficient, in 6th grade or in 3rd grade, can not wait 2 or 3 years for the structure of the school to be ordered. It seems uphill, doesn’t it?
Accompanying schools in innovation, since Education 2020, we have learned that there is not a single way to support this process, on the one hand there is the structure, in how to promote, together with the supporter, a system that ensures minimum conditions such as: schedules, “protected” times for collaborative teaching work, some stability in the management and teaching teams and leaderships that promote dialogue.
On the other hand, when the school ceases to be a place of learning and becomes a place without cohesion, we have to concentrate on providing tools that promote active learning and focus our greatest effort on what happens inside the classroom.
We have learned to make our accompaniments more flexible and also, something very relevant, to regulate expectations. We can make innovation step by step and understand that we do not necessarily have to change everything immediately, while generating minimum conditions for learning and joining efforts in coordination with the entire educational system. Offer concrete opportunities for teacher professional development, validation and assessment of the efforts that are being made, which are returning confidence in the people who make up that community, because the scenarios are never black and white, we are full of nuances and in that network of grays is where we must sustain change.
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