Stephanie Wells
"An investment in knowledge, pays the best interest"
-Benjamin Franklin
Innovation Project Update
The process of working through each step in the ADL program has made me believe that I am capable of much more than I even believed possible. I have mentioned previously that adopting a growth mindset was an important part of even starting this journey but I would be lying if I said that I really believed that to be fully true until I became immersed in the process. I had to fully explore what having a growth mindset was so that I could embrace what I needed to implement for my students and determining if my why holds enough power to transform the curriculum.
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Although I addressed how I would convince my organization and program to implement my innovation project earlier using my influencer strategy, actually implementing the organizational change happened after I learned how to design the curriculum and first convince myself why it was so important. What I thought was my dream goal of having my very primitive innovation outline implemented in Fall 2024 has blossomed into a much larger project. Yes, the procedures faculty do have blended elements being used in their courses at the moment which was my original goal. The plan has now grown to include most courses across both the radiography curriculum but also within different cohorts at different levels. I will be presenting my professional development course to the faculty in the Spring of 2025 with the goal of having the new and improved multi-leveled plan fully implemented by the end of the Fall 2025 semester. This is the crucial step in not only promoting and communicating my innovation project but launching it forward. If I have learned nothing else in this program, I have certainly learned that collaboration with my peers is the most powerful step in accomplishing anything of quality. The first major advancement in my innovation project came as we discussed action research design. This was a particularly fascinating course because I thought I hated research. This was an significant area of growth in figuring out how we would know if something specific worked within the radiography curriculum and how that assessing would be done. After my second literature review, I strongly believe that there is not currently an adequate amount of radiography specific research available regarding blended-learning within the radiography curriculum. I plan to change that with my publication once my implementation is complete.
Figure 1 and 2. AI-generated image created using Wix website builder
Next steps were the exploration into instructional design and the best methods for determining how to set up a course. As I worked through this process of backward design specifically, I realized that this was the secret sauce in bringing anything into fruition. I aligned my assessment with my outcomes and goals. Start with the end in mind. This was my step 2 since I revamped my plea to the administrators to get on board. After making sure my stakeholders and administrators liked the plan, I also created my digital course to work as a professional development for those faculty members that don't appreciate the research that is available for blended-learning and creating autodidacts within the program. enhance learning.
So, not only do I have the complete professional learning strategy for how to teach the educators to implement my plans, I have added a prequel step of the online digital course to introduce them to COVA/CSLE and building self-directed learners, and the power of collaboration.
Implementation began quite simply by adding just a few collaboration areas between student groups, adding some digital tools so students could have ubiquitous access to the material. We were able to use the action research as a method to evaluate the student outcomes in those areas. The newest iteration of the innovation plan put together multiple areas of cross-over between cohorts and content areas. Next came how would we measure our effectiveness so that we can make improvements.
We practiced assessment within a digital environment which was very helpful to further propel my innovation project forward. My department chair, program director and other faculty within the radiography program gave me feedback on what other areas that thought would be good areas to add digital tools to enhance learning.
Figure 1. Innovation Project Evolution [Infographic]. Created using Infogram.
We are already collecting feedback from the implementation we have done for the beginning parts of this innovation plan and we have established a permanent section in our monthly faculty meeting to discuss findings and potential detours if needed. The amount of support from the administrators has been outstanding. There will be no turning back, only evaluation, assessment, collaboration, potential redirection and reimplementation. I will no longer pigeonhole myself into traditional ways, my fear of failure is gone. I have fully embraced failing forward and most importantly, I have embraced that the students have so much they can teach me. They are my number one stakeholder and I need to consider there views and opinions in every iteration of improvement.
References
Wells, S. (2024). Innovation Project Evolution [Infographic]. Infogram. https://infogram.com/innovation-project-evolution-1h0r6rzvxgl1l4e?live
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Images generated using Wix AI (2024). Wix. Retrieved November 3, 2024, from [https://editor.wix.com/html/editor/web/renderer/edit/49f2173a-9a47-4edd-91cb- fa3f271523a8?metaSiteId=4e969540-fcec-4e90-bdef-afeadcd28789]