"Good Educators" and the Relevance of NETS Standards

Are we fostering the creative spirit in today's classroom? The NETS standards for students, teachers and administrators carefully define five to six standards to make this happen.  The more I read, I find my interest continuously drawn toward the very first standards of each of these documents.  The first standard listed for these are:

1. Creativity and Innovation (Standard for Students): where students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
2. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity (Standard for Teachers): where teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments.
3. Visionary Leadership (Standard for Administrators): where Educational Administrators inspire and lead development and implementation of a shared vision for comprehensive integration of technology to promote excellence and support transformation throughout the organization.

These three standards are intrinsically interrelated to developing students into life-long learners that can achieve their fullest potential.  As educators we can do this in the following ways:

1. Creativity and Innovation for Students: Recently someone told me that it is not important for the students to know how something works, just that it exists for them to use when needed.  If we continue to follow that wave in education, we will produce a society full of consumers instead of a society full of creators.  There needs to be a balance between product and creation to allow students to be truly innovative in multiple field of study.
2. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity: if an assessment is truly authentic, the learning becomes more meaningful to the student. The key here is to allow students a chance to fail. History proves that creativity and innovation go hand in hand with failure. We need to build more opportunities into our curriculum to provide students the opportunity to take a chance on something and learn from their mistakes. Our society has become so grade conscious, that we are subtly teaching our students that grades are more important than learning. This must structure be revised in our assessments for learning to truly happen.
3. Visionary Leadership: administrators need to advocate for policies that allows students and teachers the opportunity and ability to reach their potential in these environments where success does not always perfection.  

At the end of the day, the student learning is what matters.  When you think back on your own life, when did you learn the most?  When you succeeded or failed?  It is what we do when we come face-to-face with that failure that true learning happens and as educators, we need to provide more opportunities for this to happen.