Interview with Liz McCormick on the Innovation Curriculum
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals who are passionate about the future of Michigan Education. Now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education; this week we are joined by Liz McCormick. Liz is the Director of Continuing Education and Professional Development at Grand Rapids Community College, and Liz is here to talk to us today about one of the specific innovations of WIRED called, 'Innovation Curriculum' and she is the champion of this particular curriculum and innovation.
This is the second in our series of shows that we are dedicating to the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development initiative, otherwise known as WIRED. Liz, thanks for joining us and it's a pleasure to have you on our show.
Liz McCormick: Thanks Rob for having me; I am happy to be here.
Rob Huisingh: Liz, could you take just a few minutes to tell us a little bit about what is innovation curriculum and why is this important?
Liz McCormick: Sure; as we envision it today, the innovation curriculum is really a flexible and customizable body of study around innovative thinking and behavior. And I think that it's increasing important right now, if people are familiar with Daniel Pink's book, 'A Whole New Mind'; in that book he really did a good job of articulating why left-brained logical sequential skills are important for people but they are not sufficient in this new economy, this new global economy we're facing.
So in order to kind of include some of those right-brained attributes in terms of synthesis and ideation and appreciation of design thinking, we really are taking the approach in the curriculum that a whole-brained approach or whole-brained engagement in learning methodology is the way we need to go.
Rob Huisingh: So, you actually can teach Innovation.
Liz McCormick: That is our position; yes, that we believe that there are these attributes or traits, characteristics, habits of mind that individuals possess, and that through the education system and through a lot of our job training and so forth, we have really focused on enhancing and honing left brain kind of thinking proclivities, but we haven't focused as much attention on right-brained thinking and proclivities, and we think that the bringing together of those two things is really what creates an innovative mindset.
Rob Huisingh: Interesting, as I look at the -- when we talk about innovation, we might just as easily be talking about creativity, and it seems that when people are young, they have a lot of creativity.
Oftentimes I have heard people say that you can't train creativity in, but you can certainly teach creativity out. Is that sort of the process with Innovation as well?
Liz McCormick: Well, certainly that is; some of the leading thinkers, one of our partners on those projects is the design firm IDEO, as well as a lot of research that we have read about -- again, people's sort of innate abilities to have these ways of thinking that again, are not honed after certain parts of the formal education system or really valued or rewarded as such in our workplace and in workplace education.
So the premise of this curriculum is really in, such that, again our tag line for it is that it's in you and we believe that people have different levels of proclivity towards these skills, but that everybody can be made more aware of them and get more in touch with those things, and that certain people again will probably excel in certain areas than others, and again there is not a right or wrong to that, but yes, we do believe that we can sort of raise everybody's initial awareness and understanding of innovative thinking in our economy.
Rob Huisingh: Interesting; who is involved in the initiative and who is funding it?
Liz McCormick: This project is funded through WIRED, which is Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration Grants, so they have been the funders on the project and who is involved with it. I have a counterpart who is a project coordinator with an organization called CQIN, that's a group of Continuous Quality Improvement Network, there are 44 community colleges across the United States, and 22 of those are involved as partners.
In addition we have a design team; I mentioned IDEO as one of the partners on that group; we have some independent consultants, an experienced architect, a designer.
So others who have been brought into this work to sort of give the initial design very much a holistic, symbiotic approach to the design.
Rob Huisingh: I have heard you talk about this in terms of prototype; what do you mean by a prototype?
Liz McCormick: Well, again what we are trying to do is, come up with an initial design, and then as you think about the term, 'Prototyping', and people understand that that's sort of a way in design that you fail faster.
So we have an initial sketch or some initial thinking about how people will learn these different traits or characteristics and we want to see how those resonate with learners, if that learning methodology that we are prescribing in terms of learning objects more animated, gaming-like experiences will help engage them in this kind of learning.
So the first prototype we are doing right now is on the topic of Synthesis. Our next prototype which actually comes out next week is on the topic of iteration, and then we have a third prototype coming out on the topic of self-reflection.
So what we are doing right now is, we are beta testing between now and the end of January, those learning prototypes. And we want users, current employees, people who do teaching and training for a living, students, displaced workers, a number of touch points to see how does this sort of learning methodology relate to people understanding and relating to those innovate habits of mind that I talked about.
Rob Huisingh: So with the prototype being in place here, then your goal is to actually test different people that you have mentioned and then to correlate that data with what kinds of results you are seeing.
Liz McCormick: Exactly; and what we would do in the prototypes again based on the user feedback that we get out of the beta testing, that will inform the rest of the design and then we would work forward to building out an actual product and actual curriculum based on those user touch points.
So it is really critical for as many people who are intrigued by the idea, who want to really know if this is effective way that they can learn these skills, to come down and have a few hours of experience at seeing what this is all about and giving us their actual feedback.
Rob Huisingh: What do you envision for the future of this?
Liz McCormick: Well again, sort of where the curriculum is being positioned is that like a basic foundational skill set. So, this is sort of an initial foray into innovative thinking and innovative mind sets for a much larger system of innovation skill development for our workforce system, and so initially what we are envisioning now is again a basic skills curriculum that would be available, not only here in West Michigan, but we are hoping throughout the United States to start people on this path.
Rob Huisingh: And what kind of a timeline would you expect to be on? I know you have already mentioned that you are just about ready to have two of the prototypes ready, two out of the three, and you will be testing and gaining results. So, how long before this is going to be ready for some form of implementation?
Liz McCormick: Well, our final beta test we hope is in the month of January, and again, based on that user experience and continued funding, we would hope that the first actual end product is available at the end of 2008, that would be the plan that we are working from right now.
Rob Huisingh: Well, Liz I want to thank you for taking the time to be here and for telling us about the Innovation curriculum. It sounds like a fascinating topic and I certainly wish you all the luck with this.
Liz McCormick: Thank you very much, Rob.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to contact Liz, she can be reached by telephone at (616) 234-4081. Again that's (616) 234-4081. To read more about the Innovation curriculum online you can visit them at www.wiredforinnovation.com. Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
Announcer: This has been the Inside Michigan Education Podcast. Comments are welcome through our website at www.insidemieducation.com, or by email to feedback@insidemieducation.com. We hope you have enjoyed the show.