Chapter 1: Innovation Essentials
Strategies to Spark Innovation in Education
By Lindsey Sanborn, September 8th, 2025
What makes us repeat the same strategies in schools and expect different results? By running the same old playbook, we are preparing our students for a reality that no longer exists. In a climate that is being reshaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI), now more than ever students need to develop future-proof skills that encourage resiliency and adaptability in the face of a lot of unknowns. If I had to pick one future-proof skill to start with, it would definitely be innovation. In a world defined by rapid change, innovation is the engine of progress, allowing us to adapt, solve complex problems, and create new opportunities. So, how might we empower students as innovators?
While school districts across the country invest significant resources in technology hardware and software, innovation in schools must ignite first through mindset shifts. This starts with educators who empower and trust students to drive their own learning. This requires educators and administrators to relinquish traditional teaching methods that rely on passively transferring knowledge from adults to students. Educators must buckle up and embrace the discomfort of putting students in the driver’s seat, even if it feels like a very bumpy ride.
Innovators are not just problem solvers, but problem finders, who unearth challenges, empathize with those most impacted and develop aligned solutions. Through this process, innovators create new methods, products and solutions to drive progress. This may seem like a tall order when we consider the pressure in schools to keep up with state standards and deliver impressive test scores. As an antidote to this urgency, I actually believe that small steps are the best way to test out new strategies, learn and iterate. In order to cultivate students as innovators, I think every educator can start with these three hacks in their classrooms:
Encourage boundless thinking: There’s a tendency to impose constraints and limits on students, perhaps as a way to encourage them to think realistically. One small step to encourage students to develop as innovators is to challenge students to generate ideas as if there were no limits or constraints. When students have the space to come up with wild ideas that may not be feasible, they are more likely to test the boundaries of what they think is possible. This type of creative thinking is like a muscle; you need to intentionally work on it to strengthen it. Start small by prompting students to consider what they would create/develop/make happen if they had the power of a magic wand and unlimited resources.
Normalize and Reframe failure: Students face mounting pressure to be perfect. Rather than chasing perfection, innovators use failure as a learning tool. They take time to dissect the root cause of their failures and then iterate on new solutions. Educators have an opportunity to flip the pursuit of perfectionism on its head by encouraging students to make sense of what failure means to them and work to flip the script on seeing failure as a learning tool. Try this out by having students keep a failure log where they document things they’ve tried that didn’t work, why they didn’t work and what their next steps were to iterate. This reframes failure as a dialogue, where students become curious about learning and iterating to make improvements.
Bad ideas: Are your students struggling to brainstorm innovative solutions? While it may seem counterintuitive, I’ve seen a lot of success in encouraging students to start with brainstorming bad ideas only. This helps students to generate wild ideas without placing judgment on how good they might be. Sometimes those bad ideas can even be reframed as good ideas. Turn it into a fun competition: who can come up with the absolute worst idea possible? This will encourage students to generate as many ideas as possible without the constraint of what’s feasible.
With these small steps, students have the opportunity to think more expansively, moving beyond the status quo. Do you have a practice or strategy that cultivates your students as innovators? Join our community, IYC Inside, and share with us!
Lindsey Sanborn is the Education Partnerships and Program Coordinator at the Iovine and Young Education Group, where she leads programs to empower high school students through challenge-based learning. Her career, which began as a 4th and 5th-grade inclusion teacher, includes roles as a User Experience Researcher for Atlanta Public Schools and a Data and Analytics Associate for Springboard Collaborative. She holds master's degrees from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.