Video production: Andrew Kennedy Lewis
While technology has freed us to be innovative in new and different ways, at times, it’s also been something of an innovation limiter, says Michael Kennedy, learning and development leader with the NBA. The bottom line? There’s still plenty of opportunity to learn how to be more innovative in the classroom.
Read the full transcript of Palmer’s interview below:
I’m Mike Kennedy. I’m the learning and development leader with the NBA.
Technology is woven into the fabric of the answer for innovation in learning. We’ve to a certain extent allowed those terms to become interchangeable — when we think innovation in learning, we automatically think about technology. Technology certainly has freed us to be innovative in new and different ways, but I feel like we’ve also at times allowed it to be something of a limiter of our innovation, where we’ve really directed most if not all of the energy of innovation into technology. And there’s still plenty of opportunity for us to learn how to be more innovative in the classroom. That’s not to say that you would separate the two — I think that the enablement of technology is what permits us to, again, potentially be more creative about the way we approach classroom design.
I think the one thing that across the board we’ve done better with technology is to take at least some of the lecture out of the classroom and use more of the blended methodology. But I think in a lot of cases, it’s somewhat stopped there. And aside from that one element of less lecture happening in the classroom, there’s much more that we know now about how people learn and how they don’t learn that should inform better practice in the classroom. And yet, aside from that, just taking some of the lecture out … a lot of what we do still is very reminiscent of what we did before we had that greater insight into how people learn. We can be more proactive in looking at how we approach that time spent in the classroom, not just on the basis of “get lecture out,” but also — are we doing the things that really connect to the science of learning as we now understand it?
