What Does it Mean to Be Innovative?

PRESENTER

Carl Hooker

Carl Hooker is an educator, consultant and speaker from Austin, TX. He spent the past 26+ years as a teacher and administrator supporting the thoughtful integration of technology with learning. He serves as an advisor for multiple ed tech companies and is the co-founder of the social media platform K12Leaders.com – a social platform built by educators for educators.

He’s the author of 8 books, including his latest two best sellers Ready, Set, FAIL! and Learning Evolution which explores the impact of AI-enhanced learning in schools. He’s a National Faculty Member Emeritus for Future Ready Schools out of Washington, D.C. He hosts four podcasts (ISTE’s Learning UnLeashed, The UnDisruptED podcast, the Forward to Different podcast and the Search podcast) and was recently named one of America’s top 100 Most Influential Educators by District Administrator magazine. Follow him on Twitter/X @mrhooker, @hookertech on Instagram and his blog at https://HookEdonInnovation.com.

TRANSCRIPT

Erin Stanley:

Hello everyone. Welcome to our closing keynote. This is our fourth annual reaction and we’re so grateful that you could join us this year. A huge thank you to our presenters who were willing to share with us their strategies, their experiences, the projects they’ve been working on. The content has really been so, so good. This community is just incredibly collaborative and generous and we at GoReact have loved creating this space where ideas can be freely shared. We hope you’ve learned something that you can take back to your classroom or your institutions. And if you missed any sessions that you really wanted to hear, don’t worry. The team is already busy preparing the recordings and they will be available sometime next week. So just watch for an email with those links. You’ll also get an email about a post-event survey. Surprise surprise here at GoReact.

We love feedback and as you know, we’re a feedback and assessment solution. So we want to hear what you liked at the conference and your suggestions for what we can do to make it better. So I’m pleased to introduce our closing keynote, Carl Hooker. He is an educator, a consultant, speaker, and an author, and also a bar owner from Austin, Texas, hence the Stevie Ray Vaughan, when you came into the room, had to give a shout out to Austin there. So Carl’s going to talk to us today about innovation and I will hand the mic over to him.

Carl Hooker:

Awesome, thank you so much. Yes, I love having Stevie Ray as my walkup song. It can’t go wrong with Stevie Ray. For those of you that have been to Austin, you may see his giant statue right there in downtown. So what does it mean to be innovative? Yes, the big question. We hear the word innovation all the time, but what does it actually mean? So we’re going to dive into that and I’m going to invite you in the chat to also be a part of this conversation as well. You heard a little bit about me, lemme give you a little bit more specifics. A little bit of my numbers. 26 now, years in education. Started out as a classroom teacher. I actually spent most of my time in first grade, believe it or not, you can’t see me on Zoom as much, but I’m a giant person, so I just tried not to step on kids.

That was pretty much my goal every day. But yes, written a few books, hosted a few podcasts. I’ve worked with several startups including one I’m working with right now called K 12 Leaders, which is a social media platform made by educators for educators. So kind of our own little LinkedIn space. Yeah, you heard two time borrow owner, one in Austin, one in Houston. Somebody asked me the other day, they said, why would you tell educators that you own a bar? And I say, well, it’s because who do you think our best customers are these days especially? But yes, if you ever are in Austin and you head down to Idle Hands on Rainy Street, that’s the name of the bar and you show ’em your educator badge, you will get drinks at still full price. Sorry, but if I’m there, it’s half price. Three daughters all with a last name Hooker.

So pray for them. They’re in middle school and high school now. It’s rough. I’ll just say that. And still knock on wood one time husband. So those are my numbers. Yeah, there’s the girls right there. I’m also a very random person living in Texas that’s also an Eagles fan. So there’s a picture of the girls back when we won our Super Bowl in 18 and 2025. I’m not sure if everyone in the chat is a fan of football, but those are my kids there so I get a chance to share them. And then growing up through the years with that name, again, just such fun, you talk about innovation and risks. Speaking of which, when I was younger, this is me with my grandmother actually, and you talk about risks, take a look at those jorts there, who would invent shorts that short, but also just the fact that my grandmother’s holding a random rooster.

Anyway, I’ll move past this, but I was a risk taker a lot as a kid. And then growing up through the ranks, thinking again about those first years of teaching, if you can’t see me there I am right there just to help you out. Again, just trying not to step on these kids every day. But I work with kids of all ages and so here I am actually speaking of taking risks. This is a auditorium of 700 freshmen. There’s one adult in the room besides me and it’s us for an hour and a half talking about social media and social media usage. And it is amazing to when you lean in and listen to what kids really have to say, when you kind of break from the confines of the regular school day, how much insight they can give you. So through those conversations with my students, those conversations with these high school kids, I’ve kind of come to see that we really specialize in schools when it comes to conformity and compliance, right?

There’s a bell schedule. We want to make sure we’re walking down the hall properly, we want to make sure our kids are raising their hands. A lot of it has to do with conformity, but that’s counterintuitive to what we’re trying to do, which is make sure that our kids are also innovative and make sure that they’re trying new things and thinking outside the box. So the two of those, it’s kind of a tricky balance. I know you had Jim Knight yesterday and he mentions a lot of great ideas when it comes to having that growth mindset and really thinking about where do we go with just learning and teaching in general. I like to focus a little bit on where our kids are ending up, which is the job market. So if you look here, you can kind of see the top 10 job skills that the World Economic Forum came up with in 2020.

Now I’ll tell you something, this list in 2020 was actually predicted in 2017 and just recently in January they released their 2030 list and you can see already one of the items that’s on there. So it is interesting to watch watches this evolve from 10 years ago to the next few years. So environmental stewardship is important. Obviously thinking about the environment and where we’re going, the idea of analytical thinking, thinking about problems a little bit differently. I like the idea that you take people management and coordinating with others and you combine ’em into this idea of talent management. So again, thinking about how do you manage either your own talent or the talent of those around you or the talent of your team. It’s much more than just HR these days. And then of course, speaking of social media and talent, social influence is actually a skillset that you’ll need in 2030 that some of our students will need.

Now again, this isn’t for every job, but leadership too. I mean, there are kids and you know them. Those of you that are teachers out there know who I’m talking about. There are kids out there that you could tell they just have a leadership quality. Now sometimes they lead kids to do things they shouldn’t do. So our job of course as educators is to get ’em in that right direction, that curiosity. We hear this phrase all the time. When I look at mission statements from school districts across the country, including my own, it talks about having the lifelong learning being a part of the process. So how do we actually do that? Because that’s what employers want to know. They want to make sure that when our students are entering the workplace that they continue to have that lifelong learning, that curiosity, take that cognitive flexibility, add in a little bit of grit, resilience, agility.

Things are going to fail, things are going to be wrong things, they’re going to make mistakes. How do we teach our kids? That’s a big part of what we’re going to talk about today. How do we teach our kids to have that resilience? I like this idea of taking critical thinking and creativity and mashing it up. Having this ability to have creative thinking as technical systems tend to do more automation. How do we make ourselves stand out a lot more in terms of not just being a robot, doing everything right, the human qualities of creative thinking. And then these last three are really all around technology and so used to be called digital literacy, now it’s technological literacy, thinking about networks and cybersecurity. And then of course the big word that everybody talks about the last couple of years is AI and then of course big data.

So again, thinking about these traits where our students are going, those of you that are teaching high school, this is the future for them when they graduate college. My daughter is a sophomore right now in high school, so she’ll be almost out of college by 2030. So looking at this list tells me a lot, are we teaching or how are we teaching these things in our classrooms? And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a course on technological literacy. It could just be blended into your ELA course or it could be blended into your science course because I think sometimes we fall prey to what I call the game of school, and I’ll give you a quick story of what this means. So harken back to this very unfortunate picture of me in the jorts when I was in sixth grade, I got this assignment and it was the go home and make a recipe card. So figure out some sort of recipe and then come in the next day and turn in your recipe card. Well, I decided to be very innovative and take a major risk. I had this beautiful piece of technology that you can see right here, this camcorder and some of you in the chat could probably tell me, how much did this thing weigh? Just throw a guess in the chat.

For those of you that are old enough to remember, let’s just say this thing was not light. And I thought, oh, sorry about that. Someone just asked something on the chat. Can you put the 2020 slide in the chat? Oh yeah, I could do that. I’ll give you guys all the slides. By the way, I forgot to mention that. We’ll make sure you have access to all the slides, but you’re welcome to take screenshots too. Anyway, so again, thinking of this picture, I thought, you know what I’ll do is I’ll create, instead of a recipe card, I’ll make my own cooking show. And so here I am as a sixth grader. I’ll give you just a little snippet of it with my very first ever debut and only debut as a online or video chef,

Speaker 3:

Chef, and I’m going to teach you how to make my famous cookies. Well, the first thing you do is to preheat the oven to 350,

Carl Hooker:

And this microwave was from 1967, so watch the lights flicker. I’m not sure how I have kids this day to be honest. And then this cookie was just really, it was eggs and sugar and butter and chocolate. And as I put it in the oven here, I forgot to wear a MIT on my left hand though I burned my hand really badly and my dad’s like, you have to keep going. He’s recording me

Speaker 3:

After. Yeah, that set cool for about five minutes

Carl Hooker:

There I am in tears crying because this is the last time we had a chance to make this weird looking cookie brownie thing, but the show must go on. So the next day I go to school, I ask the teacher to go down to the library where we have this at the time, an all-in-one TV and VCR combo on a cart, and you guys were around those days when that thing came rolling into the classroom. It was a good day. Yeah, thank you Abby for dropping that into the chat by the way. And so we wheel the TV in, put in the tape. The kids, they’re watching it, they cheer at the end. I’m looking up there smiling. Then I got my grade, and at this point in my life, I was a straight A student and this was the first F I’d ever gotten in school and it left me devastated.

It really did in the chat, why do you think I got an F drop into the chat? I want to think what were the reasons why would I have gotten an F after doing all of that? What was the thing that I missed that stopped me from getting the A? Because again, at this point, I’m a conformant. I’m a compliant student. I make sure I do everything that a teacher tells me. Yeah, Glenn, you got it right. I did not follow directions and think about that. I turned in an assignment that was a video of a recipe, but it wasn’t the actual recipe card, and then DN mentions it too. It didn’t follow the exact directions. If I look back, I would’ve probably been wise of me to also turn in a recipe card, but I started thinking at that moment in my life, what’s more important?

Again, I’m only 12 years old at this point, but what’s more important? Is it those directions or is it actually showing what you learned? Because tell you right now, I actually remember every part of that. That was 30 some odd years ago, but I still remember every part of that cookie because we practiced it several times. There wasn’t video editing software back then. So by that last take when I burned my hand, we had done it three times already. I remember every part of it. So it kind of made me start thinking about school in a different light. What is the purpose of school again, as a 12-year-old, I wasn’t quite sure at that point. But then as I grew on throughout my career, I became eventually a tech director for a school district here in Austin. And a few years ago I was walking through the halls and it all kind of hit me again. I came across this classroom. It was a Latin class at Westlake High School here in Austin, and the Latin teacher came up to me and said, Hey, I’ve got to have you see this. This is wild. And I said, what is it that you want to see? And she’s like, just come in here for a second. The students were supposed to go home and create a two or three minute PowerPoint on the Roman bathhouse as spoken in Latin, and this kid decided to do something different. I play a little bit of it for you,

Speaker 3:

Poke asked Ma’am, Papa,

Carl Hooker:

And you can hear him. He’s speaking Latin and what did he do? Instead of doing a PowerPoint,

He created the entire Roman bathhouse to scale using Minecraft. Yes, Susanna, I get it right, which big right now the movie just came out, right? And it’s amazing as he goes through this, I asked him later, I said, do you remember he was a freshman? And I said, do you remember any of this his senior year? I said, it’s four years, but I’ve shown that example a lot. Do you remember any part of it? And he said, I remember every part of that. He goes, I spent 20 hours that weekend designing that Minecraft world. And I thought, okay, that’s a lot of time. But he was so passionate about it. It was an interest of his. And I’ll tell you the good news of the story is that he did not get an F from his teacher. His teacher actually gave him an A. My response as a tech director was How is he getting to Minecraft?

This is a Minecraft blocked in this district. So still thinking about what we’re doing in schools sometimes. It’s interesting, the school district I work with lately is latest, I should say, very successful. They had 99% of students were accepted into a four year college program. So for them, when I came on board and started introducing some new ideas and concepts, especially around technology and AI and things like that, they asked me this question. Teachers would often say, Hey, we’ve already been successful academically. Our kids are doing great. And that’s where I would challenge ’em. I’d say, okay, they’re college and career ready, but are they college and career successful? Because what we are getting from feedback from our students is after they left our organization, they would go to college and they would struggle with a lot of the things in life. They would struggle with resiliency, they would struggle with trying to think differently because they were so good at just nailing academic content.

They weren’t good at the other parts of life, those durable skills, those soft skills, things like that. So going into a sudden college auditorium with 300 students and just being overwhelmed with all of that, they would check out or scroll TikTok or something. So they didn’t have the skills honed to really take in all the parts of life and then be successful later on. So it got me thinking and I did some digging and I came across a couple of different books I’ll share with you. This is One Creativity Inc. And this is not an education book necessarily, but Ed Kamel was the former president of Pixar. Of course, Pixar great films do a lot of great movies. He was interviewed a few years ago on this podcast, and I love what he had to say. So give this a listen.

Speaker 4:

What happens is as you become more successful, people don’t want to tell you stuff. It’s one of the great traps of being a leader, isn’t it?

Speaker 5:

Oh, absolutely. The success actually is a pressure towards conservatism.

Speaker 4:

Explain, I mean I understand it, but explain it

Speaker 5:

Well, okay, so you’re doing something right? In our case, you make a movie and you’ve got these different groups who are making it and we’re making another movie, and each movie is a risk. Who wants to be the first one to screw up,

Speaker 4:

Right? Kill the golden egg. The goose is laying the golden eggs, so I’m going to crack

Speaker 5:

It. Yeah, this process works. I’m going to stick with what works. If you’ve fallen flat on your face and you say, try something new, it’s actually easier to do it if you’ve failed. But if you’ve been successful, it’s actually a little harder to try something different. At the same time, if you don’t try something different, you fall behind and you become stale.

Carl Hooker:

Think about that in the context of schools and education in a lot of ways. And we all had those love units. I mean, as an educator, I called it a love unit. It was that unit that every year I just wanted to do the same over and over again because I loved it. I felt like the kids loved it, but I never changed it. I never updated it. And over time, it does grow stale. Not saying you have to change every year, but looking in and examining what we’re doing in our own practice and what we’re doing with student learning and how do we update that is important. I like to give the students in my classrooms a lot of different examples. One famous one, for those of you old enough to remember this store, the Blockbuster example. I know this has been brought up quite a bit in terms of where they’ve gone, where they’ve been.

It was always amazing to me to hear their story. And then of course now as a dad of teenagers and tween ages, I get to relay the idea that my kids will never know the awful feeling of realizing there’s no tape behind the box at the video store and then having to go dig through the return bins. Some of you know what I’m talking about in the chat. Some of you may be like, well, that thing was gone way before I even got here. But yeah, thinking about this company, and I like to relay because they were in 2000, 2002, 2003, they were at the top of their game and so much so that at one point the CEO of Blockbuster is approached by the CEO of another company, one that you guys probably know really well, the CEO EO of Netflix. And the CEO EO of Netflix says to him, Hey, do you want to buy us?

This is about 2002, 2003. And the CEO EO of Blockbuster is like, okay, well tell me a little bit about what you’re doing. I don’t get the idea of sending DVDs in the mail. He said, that was a bad idea because you’re going to lose DVDs and CDs and all this. You’re going to lose all your overhead. It’s a terrible idea. Then the Netflix guy goes, well, we also have movies on the internet. He goes, the internet, it is so slow because think about the internet back in 2002, 2003, it was pretty slow there. You can see a picture of Yahoo Mail way back when. So he says no a few times to this guy, and eventually the Netflix guy takes his losses and walks away, doesn’t give up on his dream though. Now what’s interesting is what happens to Blockbuster at this point? So from 2004, they hit their peak about 8,900 stores across the United States.

By 2008, they’re bankrupt. They’re one store that still remains. It’s somewhere in Oregon. That’s like a museum now. So this isn’t to say that you have to always be changing, but also even though you’re successful, be open to the idea that there is no ceiling on excellence because you can continue to grow and learn as I love this media. Time heals all wounds, but the scars are a constant reminder. It’s not just blockbuster. And again, sharing these examples, there may be some companies on the screen right here, you see that, you’re like, oh, I remember that. You remember Toys R Us. I mean you remember Woolworths and Borders books, of course, airline companies. There’s always some sort of change that’s happening and we have to kind of think and anticipate where that change is going. Recently, I got to visit one of these stores. I dunno if any of you have been to one of these Amazon Go stores, it’s kind of interesting idea.

Just watch this concept for a second. You walk in, you scan your phone, it registers your Amazon account, you pick something off the shelf and you walk out and it checks out through your Amazon account. So there’s really no people involved at this part of the process. And it made me start thinking, okay, if we’re working with our students to prepare ’em for these jobs that may not exist, how do we do that with really good fidelity and still continue to teach kind of the traditional academic curriculum? And that’s the trick. We have to find the sweet spot. I’m going to give you a few ideas, but I want to start out with the idea that yes, machines are coming to replace several jobs and we’ll talk about some of those jobs in just a second. And this is a great quote. This is actually down the road for me at Rice University.

Dr. Vardy mentioned this few years ago that in the next 30 years, I would say maybe even the next 20 years, 50% of our jobs will be replaced by machines. However, you can look at that and say, well, that’s terrible. We’re not going to have any work for our students. The flip side of that is there’s also going to be jobs created. So AI is a great example. There’s rumors and numbers. I’ve seen that AI could take away somewhere around 11 million jobs, but it could create 16 million jobs. So there’s more opportunity there as well. And the other thing I’ll mention is, and this isn’t a talk to get you to buy a timeshare, but if you had two pennies to invest, although lately the market’s been a little wild, looking at these two industries and how it affects education, where people start investing their money, where they start putting their ideological dollars, where they start putting their investment eventually trickles down to education.

And I’ve shown this slide for years and people look at robotics and they’re like, okay, well robots in schools, sure, we can imagine that, right? We see this all the time. Now there’s little robots in schools 10 years ago, maybe not. When I showed that slide and showed ai, people are like, well, the AI won’t be here for a while. And I remember vividly showing this example at a language arts conference. This is about four years ago. This is the beta version of what now would become chat GPT. And so this is me where I got to be one of the first trials runs of this beta software and it was pretty decent. It did a couple of different things. It looks very different these days, but it got me thinking when we’re thinking about our students, what jobs are we preparing them for and which ones are going to go away?

So much so that there’s an actual website. This is a real website called Will Robots take my job.com, and I’m not going to make this up. So before I do this, what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to challenge you in the chat. I’m going to put teacher in here and I want you to do in the chat is tell me the percentage likelihood that you think that in 20 years teachers will be replaced by robots. So I’ll give you a second For those of you’re watching in the chat, throw in some numbers. It could be any number you want. This is the percent Elizabeth says zero, very optimistic, and then the very opposite. Glenn’s like 100% we’re gone. It’s kind of interesting. Okay, I see 20, I see 60. Alright, some different guesses.

It’s interesting to think because as early as far back as 2009, there was an incident where a Japanese school actually put a robot in front of some fifth and sixth grade students. And I read the article and it was interesting. At the beginning of the day, the students were, according to the article, the students were fascinated, they were engaged, they were watching everything this robot was doing, so much so that all the adults, the parents and the teachers left the room, came back a few hours later and found the robot tied up on the ground. They were poking and poking its face and it couldn’t do anything, so it didn’t work out. So let’s figure out, let’s see, here we go, teacher, an instructor. There is a less than 1% chance, less than 1% chance that teachers are going to be automated. So for those of you out there, the educators, guess what?

We are totally, we’re good, but there are some jobs that are going to be automated in the next 20 years. Go back into the chat and list out what kind of jobs do you think might be automated in the next 20 years. Just start putting some in there. We will see what you guys come up with because it’s kind of interesting to think programming coding. Two people said programming, coding. I just read an article this week about how AI can do about 95% of coding, and that’s about as close as it’s ever going to get. There’s always going to be a need for some sort of humanistic intervention. So high-end coding, programming, possibly telemarketers. Peter says, oh, let’s hope so. They’re already becoming automated. I think unfortunately cleaning, that’s an interesting one, Susanna. Yeah, Elizabeth says, clerk at a grocery store, we see this already, right?

If you’ve gone to a store lately, less and less of the checkout lanes becoming people more and more becoming automated bank tellers as well. Blue collar and assembly to some extent, Helena, that’s true. There is definitely a shift where it’s a lot more robotic. The people that may be design or fix, the robots are still there, but they’re not the ones putting together the parts. And Jenny, yeah, alpha School is actually right here was one of the schools is based here in Austin, so I did get a chance to look at it. Self innovating, AI powered education. I’ll tell you the one interesting thing about Alpha School that I like, some of the concepts, I don’t agree with all the concepts. For those of you that don’t know, it’s basically a school that’s powered by AI is how they call it, and they even advertise like teachers aren’t necessary, which isn’t really true.

They just call them facilitators or coaches there. But essentially students get two to two and a half hours on a machine that is giving them instant feedback and they’re working through the different academic things and then they spend the rest of their time doing kind of those life skills like building IKEA furniture, which is probably one of the most annoying life skills in no demand. It’s almost caused my divorce three times, I’ll just admit. So I like the concept. The thing that I struggle with is that it’s very exclusive right now. It’s a charter school. You have to have a certain amount of money to get there, and so I hope that at some point it becomes more widespread, but I like some of the ideas behind it. Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, so let’s go back to this list and I’m going to ask you guys a question I’ve highlighted for 2030.

There’s some things we can control and there’s some things we can’t. As educators, yes, we can offer courses on technology and networks and security and make sure that AI is a part of what we’re doing, but really those middle categories there, those are those skills that we really want to embolden our kids to have, and I think a big part of it comes with taking risks, but also failing and learning how to overcome it. So my question for the chat is this. Why do you think failure is important? And I’m not talking necessarily about just getting an F on a grade, although I did share with you earlier, I experienced that, but why is failure important, just learning in general? So through the end of the chat, let’s see. Yeah, resiliency should be number one in that sense in a lot of ways. Yeah. Stephanie says, we learn what doesn’t work, right?

If you’re always successful, think about it. And then at that first moment in life, when you make that mistake and fail, what’s going to happen? We saw this with our students too. It’s interesting. We saw when our students left, it was almost like they were given a bike with training wheels all through their educational career, and then the second they went off to college or career, those training wheels came off and they fell down and for the first time in their life they looked around and looked for help and didn’t have anyone there to help them. I mean, I think as teachers, but also as parents, we’ve almost overprotected or over coddle them in some ways where we don’t give them the space to fail and then to recover from that failure. Yeah, Helena just mentioned that too often kids are coddled sports, right? That’s a great example.

I love that in sports. Now there is the ribbons for everybody in participation. That’s one thing. But I do find that in team sports there’s a score where one team wins and one team loses, and you have to experience that. But think about our own students. Only about 30% of our students are going to ever experience collaborative team sports like that. Not every student is taking part in that. So those kids have a little bit of an advantage. How do we do this in schools? That’s some part of what I’m going to talk about too. Introducing or scripting some ways to get kids to try things, fail and then learn from that failure. That’s such an important life skill when you think about it. Someone else mentions failure, help us to continue to try new things and to be creative allows for problem solving and innovation and learning.

I love it. Yes, Christopher mentions design thinking and reiteration. That’s such an important part. The prototype meaning it’s never completely correct, it’s never always done trophies all displayed when only a few participate. Yeah, that’s also true. When you go into your schools and you see these magical giant showcase boards and shelves where they have these trophies for the five or 12 kids that played on that team. My daughter’s high school has 700 kids in every class. I know for a fact that only about 20 or 30 of them are getting those trophies. So again, it’s interesting what we teach kids. So I love your thoughts on failure and here’s a few other ideas that I’ll just mention. I do think that it does build character, and a couple of you mentioned that in the chat as well. I think it does allow for some opportunity.

Sometimes when someone makes a mistake, how do we recover? How do we learn from that mistake? I think failure is a great teacher. How many of you, I mean, I can’t see your hands, but how many of you have ever failed? You can do. If you can do the emoji hand up or whatever, you can do that too. We all fail. It’s part of the process of life, part of the process of being an adult, just of being a human. So learning from that failure is so important. But if I asked the question differently and said, how many of you consider yourself a failure? That’s a different question. Maybe you’re a failure at certain things, but you’ve recovered and learned from those things as well. And it does instill courage and it teaches that perseverance. One thing that’s interesting is as you start to make more mistakes, you sometimes think of creative ways around those mistakes, and so it spawns levels of creativity, sometimes good and sometimes not so good.

It does require a level of motivation. If you’ve ever watched a kid play a video game, that is a hard video game to play, they are motivated to beat that level, right? They’re just trying and trying again, and there’s something in the game logic of that problem. It’s called productive struggle where it’s just hard enough to where you can try it and do it, but maybe you make some mistakes along the way. If it’s too hard, they just give up and quit. But if it’s too easy, they also quit. The final thing I’ll mention here is that failure at some point in our schools has to be a level of acceptable. And now I’m not talking about test grades and that I know that all has a place in our schools, but allowing our kids to find a space where they can fail, learn from it, and recover from it is such an important part.

I came up with kind of a little zone here of different ideas. It’s called the zone of learning. And you guys may relate to some of this too. You’ve had these people in life who are successful even though they just make mistakes all the time. You know what I’m talking about? There’s that lucky person in your life. I have an uncles this way. He walks down the street and finds a hundred dollars laying on the road or something. Just always lucky. But for the most part, people in life who don’t learn from their failures continue to make mistakes and continue to fail. And so that’s not a positive thing. Now, in the middle here, we have something we try with our students, we try something new with our students, it works. They learn from it. Or sometimes as a teacher, you know this, you try something new with your students, it didn’t work, but if they still learn from it, that’s important.

That still gave them some sort of learning mechanism as a result of that failure. Then there’s the other part where you practice several times, you’re going to try this new thing. I just learned about this new AI tool the other day, and I want my kids to use it. And then of course, you practice, practice, practice. It turns out great, but sometimes, and we all know this, with technology especially, you can practice a lot, but on that particular day, maybe the technology doesn’t work. Maybe the wifi fails, maybe that one particular student is having a behavioral problem and just not wanting to be a part of it. And so it’s breaking everything into parts. So for me, I’m always trying to focus in classrooms, is that middle part there? We want them to try new things and let’s not say the product is the most important part of learning.

Let’s say the process is, and by the way, for those of you, it’s someone asked a question about AI in the chat, AI can cheat product. AI cannot cheat process. AI can make a paper look like a real paper, but if you have it as part of the process where kids have to reflect and learn, that’s a hard thing to do. And AI can’t do that. And I always ask this question and I harken back to someone who I got to meet years ago, sir Ken Robinson, and I love this quote, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. I got to meet him at an event years ago that I hosted here in Austin, and I started looking back in history at all of these cases of different companies that have tried and failed. So the first one I’ll bring to your attention is this one ro.

In the chat, I’d be curious if anyone knows what this company is famous for, and if you do throw it in the chat, we’ll see if someone gets it right, but I’ll talk about it for just a second. So Robo was a tech company. They designed games mostly for mobile apps, and this is one of their games to Tomi that failed several times. Yes, they also invented this 3D. They spent a lot of money on this particular app and it failed. They made this game that looked a little bit like among us, which was a game that came out later that was popular, but it also failed. But as Christopher mentions in the chat, he nailed it After 51 failed apps, they finally found one that just took off. They were the company that invented Angry Birds and then just spawned an entire franchise. So again, sometimes it’s that very next try.

That’s the difference between success and failure. Just trying one more time. I look at companies like Disney. Now, Disney is wildly successful. They own, I feel like everything A, B, C-E-S-P-N, they, it seems like every Marvel franchise, they have it, but they weren’t always super successful. In fact, the movie Fantasia, which came out in the late 1950s, 1940s, actually was designed with this giant symphony. It had an elaborate animation scheme, and what ended up happening is because of all the money they invested in it, they almost went bankrupt as a company because it just did not take off. And over time, what happened was it took ’em about 20 years before it became they broke. Even now it’s a cult classic, but they made a big mistake with that. Other companies, you may have heard of Apple, they had lots of interesting trial runs at certain technologies. But here’s what I want to show you. This is a commercial from 1992 for the Apple Newton. Just check it out for a second.

Speaker 4:

It has to do with helping people keep in touch. The idea behind Newton is that it’s an assistant, something that actively helps you as you capture, organize, and communicate your ideas and information.

Erin Stanley:

The possibilities are just limitless

Speaker 4:

When you think about it. The most natural way to get your thoughts down is to jock or to

Erin Stanley:

Sketch. We wanted Newton to be that natural.

Speaker 4:

Say you’re on a train or a plane or at a little cafe,

Erin Stanley:

You can write a fax.

Speaker 4:

Say you want to send that fax to Margaret,

Erin Stanley:

You just highlight Margaret’s name in the text, tap facts.

Speaker 4:

And Newton will automatically fill out a fax cover sheet with Margaret’s number on it.

Carl Hooker:

Facts. Remember the facts? Some of you, no. What’s funny is in that picture that I noticed that you could actually have emailed that too, but back then email wasn’t a thing. So timing is a big part of this too. Think about what now we see as an iPhone or an iPad compared to that vision back in 1992. Some of it is the marketplace ready for it. Some of you may have had the unfortunate experience of dealing with these wow trip chips from Frito-Lay, and you may not remember, but wow. Chips had this promise that they tasted like real chips, but they actually had zero fat. They were fat free because they had a fat substitute called ra. And I’ll just warn you, RA, they had to put product warnings on it because it would cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. I just want to see the A SL interpreter. Get that one. Sorry.

Again, they aren’t always successful, but FritoLay is still around. Now, some of you remember in the 1980s, there’s the old enough to remember there was a thing called New Coke that failed disastrously. And then Pepsi, not to be outdone, came out with something called Pepsi Clear, which is a little bit like corn syrup. And both of these were just disaster and failures. They had to learn, pivot, try again. So not every time are they successful, right? My own admission of failure, when I was a kid, I used to have these little things called casings. They were a cassette tape that would play single songs on one side and a song on the other side. One of the first songs I ever got was from this band. I’m going to play it for you. Let’s see who’s the fastest one in the chat on this. Who is, if you can name this band, here we go.

That’s right. We didn’t sing any of our songs and I showed this to my kids the other day and they said, what’s that red box? Oh, it’s a phone booth. Don’t worry, they don’t exist anymore. But yeah, again, milli Vanilli, if they’d been around now with TikTok, they could have been lip syncing everything and been fine, but back then they got in trouble for lip syncing. So a lot of times when we think about Good job, by the way, I think it was Christina was first in the chat on that really fast typing there. A lot of times when we think about failure and risk, they go hand in hand. I’ll share you a quick another story, and then we’re going to talk about maybe things that are causing you not to try new things because it starts with us as the educators, as the leaders.

Also, I’m going to share a quick story. Before the pandemic, I got to visit this island, not Nantucket, the one that’s right next to it. I already, oh, Martha’s Vineyard. Yes, Martha’s Vineyard, great island. It’s outside of Boston. Some of you may have been there, I’d never been there in my life. Took my wife with me. And she has this dream where she always wanted to drive a Jeep on a beach. And so we rented a Jeep and we go on the beach and Martha’s Vineyard. Now in Texas, when you drive on the beach, it’s not that big a deal. In fact, I thought in my head when I gave her the wheel and said, alright, go and get on the beach, this is what it was going to look like.

Just this amazing romantic hit away driving down the beach. But the truth was, the sand in Martha’s Vineyard is a little bit different than the sand in Texas. After about 500 feet, we buried it. And the weird thing about this experience was this is Sunday on Martha’s Vineyard, and we find out that 9 1 1 does not work. We call, and it’s an answering service. The tide, you can see the water back there. The tide is about two hours from coming in and taking this beautiful brand new Jeep into the Atlantic Ocean. And so we are freaking out. Anyone know? And I’m curious if anyone in the chat can guess, why did the Jeep bury itself? Because this is, again, part of taking risks. Sometimes you take a risk because you don’t have the prior knowledge. And in this case, we didn’t. The guy at the rental car place said, just put it in four wheel drive, you’ll be fine.

But he didn’t tell us something very important, and that is apparently right on the rims displacement. I love the chat questions coming in here. Apparently when you’re driving on beach that has loose sand like this, you’re supposed to let just a little bit of air. Yes, Louis got a little bit of air out of the tire, and we didn’t do that. And if we had had done that, our tires would’ve turned into more like a tank tread and just rolled right over the sand. But it’s funny is after we got out of there and got towed out, and we saw a sign down the road a little further that said, make sure your tires are on 20 PSI. So sometimes our students don’t see the signs. They take risks and don’t learn from it. Sometimes we can show our students or tell our students certain things and they still maybe take a bad risk or they don’t know what a good risk is.

So my question for you now in the chat, think about your own profession. Oh, thanks Claudia. Think about your own profession. What’s something that stops you from taking a risk? Something that you feel like, Ooh, I want to try something new, but something comes up. What is that thing? What is the thing that’s stopping you? I want to give you a second, some of you some time to put the comments in the chat. I have a few examples that I’m going to share that I’ve experienced personally as an educator. That’s a big one. Brooke just mentions that fear of failure, the fear of messing up. Sarah mentions a really good one. Lack of psychological safety. Having the culture and the safety net to know that if you do make a mistake, you’ll be okay. And a lot of that comes with leadership. Susanna mentions overthinking.

Yeah, sometimes we overthink. We’re perfectionists. We try to make it perfect, and that’s what stops us from trying something new. Elizabeth mentions not disappointing others, right? Your fear is that you’re going to let someone else down, so you’re not going to try something different in case you mess it up and let them down. Humiliation, ego. That’s big one, Glenn. Yeah, and we think about leadership. It’s interesting as I move my way from a teacher in the classroom to a director, an administrator in a school district, I notice that there’s more and more fear the higher up those positions get because you could be humiliated, you could be judged, exposed to something, looking at someone, a Elena says, looking like an idiot. Maria says, uncertainty of the outcome. This is great. You guys are nailing these. And I think this is important to identify because there’s certain things that we can do to help in our classrooms and in our culture to remove some of these.

Now, there is the more natural fear of what if I get fired? Okay, that’s different. That’s a big fear and maybe we should keep that one, but there are some things that we can try that don’t get us fired as well to help us innovate. And I do think fear, which a couple of you mentioned is a big roadblock to this. So yeah, Elena says, laugh at yourself. I mean, again, admitting and acknowledging the mistake is so important. I think Marie mentioned this too, but our number one barrier, I’m going to list six of them right now. Number one is this idea that we don’t know what’s going to happen, the discomfort of the unknown, or as she mentions in the chat, uncertainty of the outcome. I think that’s so important to think about. There’s, when you’re trying something different or new innovating, there’s so many different ways it could go.

We don’t know the outcome of all these paths. So because we don’t know, sometimes we say, you know what? We’re just going to be safe and not try something new today. And I think that inhibits us from that creativity and that innovation. Number two is one that I see a lot in working with teachers, especially around technology, is this idea that because they don’t know something now it’s a permanent condition. In other words, I, I’ll do a professional development around AI and technology, and I’ll have some teachers come in and they’ll say, I’m just not a tech person, or I don’t get this stuff, and they kind of fold their arms and decide they’re just never going to learn it again, opposite of that kind of growth mindset, and I see this in schools too with math, especially as a topic one that I was certified as a math teacher, and you’d have students to just say, I’m just not a math person.

Those of you that deal with art or creativity, sometimes you’ll have people say, I’m just not creative, or I’m not an artist, and it’s like a permanent thing. They’ll never overcome it. And I think that causes that major barrier to innovation. By the way, I’ll just point out they did a brain scan the other day of someone who feels this way, and I was surprised to see the results. It looked like this. Dope. Yeah, not really, but Homer feels that way as well except for donuts. Number three, some of you mentioned this in the chat too, humiliation. Glenn mentions the idea that you’re going to be exposed or judged either by your students, by your peers, by the parents or community at a whole. With social media. It becomes even more widespread. And I always think about those kind of worst case scenarios. If you mess something up and how do you own that mistake and how do you own that failure? Or as Helena says, not being afraid to laugh at yourself about certain things. And I think about this classic movie with Adam Sandler, and it’s, I’ll just play a few clips of it, a few seconds of it, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. So he’s answering a question at a trivia show. Those of you that don’t know this clip, and he gets it wrong. So here’s what the host said,

Speaker 6:

Mr. Madison, what you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. Okay, a simple wrong would’ve done just fine, but you remain wonderful.

Carl Hooker:

It’s never going to be that bad. I always tell people it’s never going to be that bad. I’ve said a lot of things in front of large audiences that I regret sometimes, but it’s never going to be that bad. And I think some of that roadblock is that fear of, again, of that exposure being judged. And I think that goes back to culture or as Sarah mentioned, that psychological safety. Here’s another one. This is one by the way. I’m going to go ahead and say that most of these I also have struggled with at some point in my career, and I know students who have struggled with these. In fact, I know a particular student I think of when I think of this particular one, which is there’s a student I had who always insisted that his paper needed to be perfect before he turned it in, and he would spend hours and hours of racing and rewriting and just redesigning, and eventually I had to tell him that you just got to turn it in, because sometimes I think perfection is the enemy of done.

We’re never going to make it to that perfect state, but we have to put something out there to see if it works. If you always want that lesson to be perfect before it starts, it’ll never work. So you have to say, okay, it’s close, it’s good enough. It’s not perfect, but we’re going to move forward because that is a big roadblock to getting us to try new things. This one is tricky because time, I feel like as educators, we are faced with what I call a time famine, meaning we have so many things put on us that if we try something new and it fails, we just felt like we wasted time because we don’t have time to get through the curriculum or the content. And so I do think that if you don’t learn from something, it is a waste of time in a lot of ways.

But I like this quote. This is a different book. Again, not an education book, but the Power of Habits by Charles Duhig. And he writes in his book that when something doesn’t work, it’s not a failure. It’s an experiment that gave some data. The only way it ever becomes a failure is if you don’t learn what you can from it. So again, every time you make a mistake and learn from it, it’s a positive outcome. Maybe the final product isn’t positive. Maybe you messed up tremendously, but if you learned and improve as a result of that, as a human, I think that’s great. Then this last one goes back to again, that idea of psychological safety that Sarah mentioned, and that is, can you put forth an idea that is different to your colleagues, to your team, to your school that will be accepted, or you’re so afraid that because of the culture, they’re going to reject it outright?

And I’ve had a couple of cases of this happen where I worked recently where our middle school was hiring a new science teacher, and we had the science department come and actually interview the candidates and some administrators, I was in the room, a few other administrators were in the room. And at one point, we leave the room, we say, okay, you guys, give us your list of your top three candidates. There was one candidate who was her second year of teaching, so she was fairly new, but she had a lot of great charisma and great ideas and things when it comes to engaging students. And I thought, well, she’s going to be number one. I was pretty sure we got back and she was listed as number three, and I went and asked some of the other science team, why did you not choose this one particular candidate?

And they said She had too many good ideas. She’s going to make us look bad. And I thought, wow, we’ve got a culture problem here if we’re not willing to accept someone else for their new ideas. And what does that mean for that team? What does that mean for the students when you’re rejecting ideas before they even happen? Because yeah, there’s a level of risk and rejection that comes with all of this. I’m going to share a quick story and a little video about this because my oldest child suffers greatly from the idea of being rejected. So much so that she sometimes will be afraid to even ask a server at a restaurant for a glass of water, afraid of, she might say it wrong or get a no or something. So I’ve worked with her over the years from the time she was about 10.

Now she’s 16 and over this fear, in fact, she’s probably a little too much over it now where we’ve told her that no, sometimes is just the first to low when someone says no to you. It could also mean that they just don’t know is the answer for now, but it may not be the answer forever, so don’t treat it as a permanent thing. And so in doing some research with her, we came across this guy named Jai Jang. He lives in Austin with me, and I got to see his Ted Talk years ago, and it’s an interesting story. I’ll share it real quick and I’ll play a video. He came to the United States from China years ago, and he wanted to become the next Bill Gates, the next Steve Jobs. And so he quit this tech company he was working for, his wife’s six months pregnant at the time.

He decides he’s going to start his own business. Well, he goes out and what happens is, is that every time he asks for money, the answer is always the same. It’s always no the first time, the second time, the fifth time, the 10th time, so much so that he becomes not necessarily immune to it, but scared to go out into the world and doesn’t even leave his house. He’s fearful that someone might just walk by the street and just say no to him for some reason. So he stays in his house, his wife, they deliver the baby. The baby’s now three months old and she finally says, listen, you’ve got to get out of the house. You’ve got to do something different. This is not working for you. How do you overcome this? The psychology of failure. And so found this thing called rejection therapy.

And what he does is for a hundred days in a row, he takes his phone and he goes out and films himself trying to get rejected. His idea is if he can desensitize himself to it, he’ll continue to kind of prod along forward the, and so the first one down on the list, you can see it says, borrow a hundred dollars from a stranger. He just goes up to a stranger in the streets of Austin and says, Hey, can I have a hundred dollars? They say no. He said, all right, I’m moving on. He asked for a burger refill at a Burger King once. What’s interesting is not everyone says no. In fact, when he gets to his third request, which is ask for Olympic symbol donuts, this is what happens.

Speaker 7:

I’m driving toward Krispy Kreme. I’m going to ask them to make me some specialized donuts and see what happens.

Speaker 3:

What

Speaker 7:

Kind of specialized Jonathan talking about. I like to have getting you link the five dos together, make them look like Olympic symbols. Oh,

Speaker 4:

When are you looking to these?

Speaker 7:

Huh?

Speaker 4:

When

Speaker 7:

The next 50 minutes? No, just you got the five donors together look like a Olympic symbol.

Speaker 3:

Was it this way this year?

Speaker 7:

Something like that. That will work. Just link any five donuts together. It’s going to be awesome.

Speaker 4:

Try. But what do you think?

Speaker 7:

Wow. That is really good. That is really good. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

I mean, that’s the best I could do with what we’ve got.

Speaker 7:

No, it’s good. It is good. It is more than I thought it would be done, so great.

Speaker 8:

Alright. Alright. So do I pay there?

Speaker 4:

Don’t even worry about that one’s on me.

Speaker 8:

Are you serious?

Speaker 4:

Deto

Speaker 8:

You serious?

Speaker 4:

Very extremely.

Speaker 8:

Wow.

Speaker 4:

Extremely. That’s my pleasure.

Speaker 8:

Alright Jackie, I’ll, I’ll take it, but man, you make me really happy today. Alright, thank you. Very welcome. See you. Give me a hug. Enjoy. All right, thank you. See you.

Carl Hooker:

Very welcome. You googled it and got the color right.

Speaker 7:

Wow. Sometimes you make a crazy request. You get an awesome answer. Jackie, who works for Krispy Kreme in Austin, Texas. Thank you.

Carl Hooker:

Thank you. The chat, the Hope and Humanities restored. Yes, Candace, it’s interesting. He does lots of these by the way, and he goes, and one point he goes on Southwest Airlines and says, Hey, no one’s listening to you. Can I do the security briefing? And they let him it. He and his wife are driving around Austin in February during the Super Bowl and they find a house with a bunch of cars in front of it and they walk up with some chips and a six pack of let’s just say soda and invite themselves to a stranger’s house, which they say no. So sometimes they get rejected, sometimes they don’t. But all along the way they’re learning. Again, the rejection is not necessarily the end, but it’s maybe a step in the process. So is that failure? So again, looking at these things, some of you may identify very personally with some of these.

I’ve told you in earlier, all of these at some point or another have hindered me in my own creativity, in my own innovation, that fear of judgment, the perfection and all of these words when you pull ’em out, very negative, right? Negative feeling. It adds a sense of anxiety. And we’re already kind of facing a world where we have a lot of anxiety. So I thought I would do something fun as we wrap up here. This is going to be tricky to do over zoom, so I’m going to trust that you’re going to do this with me. But what I’m going to do is a 15 second de-stressing technique and here’s how it works. And this is by Dr. Y cre. I want to mention his name because a Swedish doctor who came up with this technique. So if can you’re able stand up at your desk, stand up and stretch a little bit. Okay? Here’s what you’re going to do. As you’re standing, you’re going to put two fifths up at about hip height. So you want ’em just a little bit above your hip, okay? Because you’re going to need these in a minute to move. Alright, everybody there? Alright, here we go. We’ll see if someone can get this one right. Alright, what I want you to do is just slowly start to rock back and forth, and as you’re doing that, lift your fist up and down, up and down a little bit faster. And then there we go.

Now just mimic what, Rick, look at those amazing dance moves. That’s right. You just got Rick rolled. But also if you look at the name Dr. Ri, you may notice something. If you spell it backwards, it’s Rick Asley, but it works, right? Because if you actually did it, you’re probably a little less stressed. And this is where I have to give my daughter a shout out because she learned it. Where On TikTok, of course. That’s great. So again, going back, just to recap, what’s the number one reason why innovation doesn’t happen in schools? It really comes down to the culture, the mindset, what leadership thinks, whether or not we’ve created that blanket of psychological safety. As again Sarah mentioned in the chat, how do we create that atmosphere? Because there’s lots of different ways we can do this. And there’s also this idea that failure is always bad when it’s not.

Now there is this kind of failure you see on the left side of your screen, there’s the blameworthy people that are just being deviant or they’re not really paying attention to details and making mistakes. But if I move this over, there’s actually positive kinds of failure too when we talk about hypothetical testing or exploratory testing and how do we invent that and invigorate that in our schools to create this kind of culture of innovation. Because let’s face it, the answer to everything isn’t going to be in the back of a textbook. So we also need to make sure that our kids are willing to solve interesting problems and be okay if they don’t get them right the first time. I love this quote from Seth Godin for that. And a couple quick little tidbits as we wrap up. One, there’s an interesting study that came out of Stanford a few years ago that showed that students curiosity based questions peaks at the age of four years old.

Someone in the chat tell me, what does every three and 4-year-old ask all the time? In fact, up to 200 times a day. Yes. Why? Why? I don’t know. Go ask Alexa. Oh, I said it too loud. She’s going to hear me. Yeah, why? Right? But at some point that dies off. By the time they get into sixth grade, their curiosity based questions has gone down to zero to two a day. So in other words, they just aren’t asking the questions. Now this research shows that reading and writing also increases during that time. So maybe they’re seeking out their own knowledge and they aren’t asking as much, but I think about my own daughter, this is my now sophomore in high school. This is her as a 4-year-old. And think about how do we keep this level of curiosity in her eyes and keep it going.

I think in the future, what we need to make sure we’re doing is continuing to create an idea of these empathetic risk takers and innovators. I think it goes beyond just taking risks. I think we need to make sure that there’s a layer of empathy with that as well. Because we know technology, ai, all of these things are be a part of our lives, but we need to keep and maintain that humanistic part of it. And the final word on this is this. For those of you listening that are teachers out there, students will not take risks if you’re not willing to model it yourself and be okay with taking a laugh at yourself every now and then. For those of you that are leaders out there listening to this, teachers in your buildings will not take risks if you’re not willing to do it as well.

It’s one thing to say, have a growth mindset. It’s a whole nother thing to model it. Thank you all so much. I hope you enjoyed this talk. I’ll tell you, I took a big risk recently. I wrote, one of the books I wrote was called Ready Set Fail, which is what this talk is based on. And I ran into this gentleman who’s an icon for my childhood. His name is DMC. Some of you may know Daryl Mack as a run DMC. And I actually autographed and gave him a copy of my book. So sometimes you just got to see what happens. And guess what? He took it. I don’t know if he read it, but he took it. But thank you all so much. I hope you have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your school year. Y’all are awesome. Thank you.

Erin Stanley:

Thank you, Carl. Getting rip rolled during reaction was not on my bingo card, so thanks. You

Carl Hooker:

Got to do it at least once. Come on.

Erin Stanley:

I definitely feel inspired before everyone leaves. I’m just going to drop a link in the chat to our post-event survey. And thanks again for everyone joining us this year and we’ll see you next year.

Carl Hooker:

Thank you all so much.