Educational Leaders Create Cultures of Creative Problem-Solving
- Walter McKenzie
- Jun 8
- 5 min read
Dr. Kim D. Moore is Superintendent of the Richland School District 2 in Columbia, South Carolina. From leading in the military to leading in her district, she understands that everyone is a leader and she is committed to helping all of us be our best. This piece was originally posted through her Educational Leadership Moment Newsletter on May 31st. You can contact Kim via email here. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us, Kim!
As the leader of a turnaround school, I had several areas to address to improve student outcomes. One area of focus was our students’ performance on the state’s writing assessment. During our end-of-year planning, I challenged my instructional coaches to bring a plan to improve our writing scores to our summer planning workshop.
When we came together in the summer, my coaches created an innovative plan to integrate writing in every classroom daily using AVID writing strategies. My writing coach conducted small-group learning sessions tailored to each content area during our pre-planning time.
Teachers reinforced these strategies throughout the year across all content areas, including math, science, and the fine arts. As a result, our writing score increased by 19 points.
The Innovation Imperative in Educational Leadership
In education, the term “innovation” has become so ubiquitous that it risks losing meaning. Too often, schools chase the latest trends, purchasing new technology, adopting buzzword-heavy initiatives, or implementing surface-level changes, without fundamentally rethinking how they serve students.
True innovation in education isn’t about novelty but solving persistent problems more effectively. As Fullan and Quinn note in their research on effective school systems, “Meaningful innovation addresses unmet student needs through approaches that fundamentally improve outcomes, not merely alter processes.”
Today’s educational leaders face unprecedented challenges: evolving workforce demands, accelerating technological change, increasing student diversity, and expanding equity gaps. Meeting these challenges requires more than incremental improvements to existing systems. It demands fresh thinking and courageous leadership, building innovation capability throughout the organization.
Four Leadership Practices That Systematically Foster Educational Innovation:
1. Psychological Safety Engineering
Psychological safety, the shared belief that team members won’t be punished for taking risks, forms the foundation of innovative cultures. Research by Edmondson and Daley demonstrates that schools with high psychological safety generate 3-4 times more innovations that impact student learning than those with low psychological safety.
Implementation Steps:
Model vulnerability by openly discussing your own mistakes and learnings
Establish explicit norms that separate idea evaluation from idea generation
Create structured protocols for productive disagreement
Recognize and celebrate thoughtful risk-taking, regardless of outcomes
Rather than treating disappointing test scores as failures to be hidden, psychologically safe schools transform assessment data review into innovation opportunities. One middle school created “learning from results” protocols where teachers collaboratively analyzed unexpected outcomes and designed experimental approaches to address them, ultimately increasing math growth measures by 17%.
2. Boundary Spanning Systems
Boundary spanning intentionally connects educators with diverse perspectives, experiences, and knowledge domains outside their typical circles. These connections serve as the raw material for innovative thinking. Schools that systematically create boundary-spanning opportunities generate more novel solutions to persistent challenges.
Implementation Steps:
Establish cross-role innovation teams with diverse expertise and perspectives.
Create regular forums to connect with organizations outside education
Dedicate time in leadership meetings to explore analogous solutions from other industries
Develop partnerships with universities, businesses, and community organizations
When facing persistent attendance challenges, one elementary school created a boundary-spanning team that included transportation experts, behavioral economists, and community healthcare workers. This diverse team redesigned morning arrival procedures based on insights from multiple domains, resulting in a 22% decrease in chronic absenteeism.
3. Rapid Prototyping Processes
Rapid prototyping replaces lengthy planning cycles with small, quick experiments designed to test assumptions and gather user feedback. This approach acknowledges that the best solutions emerge through iteration rather than perfect initial design.
Implementation Steps:
Train leadership and teacher teams in simple prototyping methods
Create a “prototype approval” process that takes days, not months
Establish lightweight documentation templates that focus on learning, not compliance
Dedicate small discretionary budgets for prototype testing
One high school used rapid prototyping to test five different reading intervention approaches with small student groups over six weeks instead of implementing a comprehensive new literacy program. This approach allowed them to discover which elements worked for their specific population before scaling, resulting in reading growth twice that of previous intervention attempts.
4. Failure Analysis Protocols
Failure analysis protocols transform setbacks from sources of blame to sources of learning. These structured approaches help organizations extract valuable insights from initiatives that didn’t produce expected results.
Implementation Steps:
Establish standard “after-action” review processes for all major initiatives.
Focus analysis on system conditions rather than individual performance
Document and share learnings from unsuccessful attempts
Explicitly connect insights from failures to future planning
When a new parent engagement initiative fell flat, one middle school conducted a thorough failure analysis rather than abandoning the effort. This process revealed specific communication barriers they hadn’t anticipated, leading to a redesigned approach that doubled parent participation the following semester.
Building Organizational Resilience Through Innovation
Innovation-focused leadership creates not only better immediate solutions but also more adaptable organizations. Research by Bryk and Schneider demonstrated that schools with established innovation practices were 42% more likely to maintain student achievement during major disruptions like leadership transitions, policy changes, or community crises.
These schools developed what researchers call “adaptive capacity,” the ability to respond creatively to emerging challenges rather than relying on established playbooks. This capacity proved particularly valuable during the pandemic, when schools with innovative infrastructures pivoted more successfully to remote learning and back again.
The Innovation Readiness Assessment
Rate your school or district on the following dimensions from 1 (rarely evident) to 5 (consistently evident):
Team members feel safe proposing unconventional ideas
We regularly connect with perspectives outside our system
We test new approaches through small experiments before full implementation
We learn systematically from unsuccessful initiatives
Our planning processes explicitly include time for creative thinking
Staff have access to resources for testing promising ideas
We evaluate new approaches based on results, not alignment with past practice
Leaders actively model and celebrate thoughtful risk-taking
Scores of 30+ suggest strong innovation capacity. Scores below 20 indicate a significant opportunity to strengthen innovation practices.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Innovation requires seeing the same things everyone else sees but thinking about them differently.” - Grace Hopper, computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral
Educational leaders who truly foster innovation don’t just adopt new ideas; they architect the conditions where better approaches naturally emerge from the collective wisdom of their organizations. In doing so, they build better solutions for today’s challenges and more resilient organizations prepared for tomorrow’s unknowns.
What’s your first step toward becoming an innovation architect?
Kim
When students are led well, they learn well.
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