The Why, How, & What
When trying to explain from the heart and appeal to the heart instead of the mind can be challenging at times. Luckily, I have been listening to Simon Sinek: ‘Start with Why’ which has given me great starting points. With my content being SpEd, I feel that I have to appeal to the minds rather than the heart because SpEd educators don’t like the hassle of dealing with the paperwork after trying something new. Especially if it fails, it's even more of a load. But focusing on paperwork is not coming from the heart. Going back to my innovation proposal, my why is simple: inspiring SpEd students to do things out of their comfort zone can increase social, emotional, and cognitive ability. We must focus more on what can help them advance and what they should focus on etc. Hence we have to start with us educators teaching the content first.
The Why: We believe that it's important to inspire SpEd students to learn from a different setting that can increase social, emotional, and cognitive ability.
The How: By incorporating blended learning in SpEd classes, we inspire SpEd students to become self-driven learners.
The What: We prepare SpEd students to become self-driven learners by focusing on their learning through social settings.
When changing and implementing new things educators must first learn how to do it themselves. My proposal should be taken with urgency because we want all students no matter of disabilities to succeed. Wanting your students to try something new is no good if you aren’t able to answer questions and guide them on how to accomplish it. When figuring out my ‘Why’, I had to think from a Growth Mindset perspective. Dweck once spoke about having a fixed mindset makes a person have to prove themselves over and over again, and that's not what we want for our students. We want our students to enjoy learning and have a broad knowledge of the intelligence. It ALWAYS starts with us educators.
References
Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: the new psychology of success. Ballantine Books.
Kotter, John Dr. (2011, March 23). John Kotter--The heart of change. [Video].
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NKti9MyAAw
Sinek, Simon. (2013, September 29). Start with why. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/sioZd3AxmnE