Replication is a requirement to innovation

By Dr. Matthew Lonn, Executive Director at North Dakota Center for Distance Education

I appreciated last week’s blog post, Replication is more important than innovation. To that observation I would add that replication is a requirement to innovation, for reasons explained below.

I vividly remember one of my English teachers in high school. I was 17 years old, and I think the class was American Literature. The teacher’s name was Mr. Carlson. Mr Carlson had a passion for literature. We read and had engaging discussions every day. His primary method of instruction was reading to us as a class. He had the ability to bring the characters alive with his inflection. The two books I remember most vividly were “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller (which is actually a play) and “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka. I remember being so depressed after reading “Death of a Salesman” that I swore I was never going to pursue a business degree. After reading “The Metamorphosis” I couldn’t understand why American Literature had to be so depressing.

Regardless, Mr. Carlson left an impression on me that few other English teachers could replicate. To be fair, most teachers throughout my high school career seemed to operate exclusively in their own classrooms with not much collaboration or effort applied to implement any type of standardization or replication among or across subject areas.

Replication is a touchy topic in a profession like education where teaching is often described as both an art and a science. Professional educators often bristle at the notion of a prescribed or scientific approach to teaching and learning, even though we know there have been discoveries in brain science that have shown there is a scientific approach to education that can help students learn.

Manufacturing and service industries outside of education are, in some cases, years ahead of the educational field when it comes to understanding the importance of replication. In the private sector, quality drives the need to replicate processes. Toyota is sometimes referenced as the pioneer in driving quality processes and standards. Total Quality Management (TQM) paved the way for more quality manufacturing standards along with Lean Six Sigma. Six Sigma focuses on reducing defects by standardization of processes. Private industry has realized that to greatly improve quality, they first had to be able to document replicable processes.

The ability to document and then replicate a process is crucial to the quality of the good or service delivered to the customer. It’s that documentation that allows actors involved in the process to see vital hand-offs and measures to make sure the customer’s expectations are met. It is then the ability to replicate that leads to innovation. For example, when you purchase that morning coffee, your barista followed a specific formula to brew the coffee. The ratio of grounds to water must be able to be replicated if the coffee company’s reputation for quality coffee is to be met regardless of where the restaurant is or who the barista was that brewed it. Once that formula is fully documented and replicable, the company can begin to experiment with new flavors. Perhaps peppermint during the holiday season, or the dreaded pumpkin spice during the fall. It is the replication that allowed for the continual improvement/innovation of the coffee.

For a practical example in a digital school, consider the following: A school’s online instructors meet to discuss best practices when working with their students asynchronously. They all agree that a first-time online student is at highest risk of not successfully completing their course compared to experienced online students. They’ve studied the data and they believe the data confirms their hypothesis. The teachers agree that one standard practice that should be replicated regardless of the course taught is a live video discussion with every new student. This is documented and then replicated across the school’s entire digital platform. The data at the end of the year shows that completion rates among first time online students increased at a statistically significant rate. Seeing their success that was only made possible by the ability to replicate the experience across the entire organization, the teachers decide (innovate) that they should start leaving video feedback on all summative assessments. The replication was vital for the organization to grow and innovate together. Without replication, the quality would have varied greatly for each student depending on their teacher and the organization would not have been in a good place to innovate.

Mr. Carlson was a great teacher. I certainly had other good teachers throughout high school. Very few if any though could replicate the practices that Mr. Carlson used to engage his high school audience and help them learn. Education is definitely not the same as manufacturing cars or brewing coffee. Students learn through different modalities, at different rates, and all bring their unique personal experiences into the classroom. However, science has taught us that there are teaching practices that can be implemented that will help students learn. The key to innovating in education is establishing practices that can be replicated across different organizations. It is the experimentation after a replication has been successful that will afford educational organizations the opportunity to help more kids.