Innovating Within Constraints

What do you do when you don't get to choose the tool, the curriculum, the format, or the constraints?

That question came up quite a bit during the 2025–2026 school year, especially as the school district implemented a newly developed and new-to-us language arts curriculum. There wasn't exactly a blank canvas, and nobody had seat at the table with the people making the decisions about what the curriculum would look like, what resources would be provided, or how it would be implemented. There were strict requirements, firm timelines, many expectations, and a whole lot of new information for teachers to figure out, and yet, even with all of those constraints, there was still room to innovate.

One of my favorite books is Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, by Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker.  They apply Clayton Christensen's business disruption theory to education, shifting away from traditional frameworks of schooling toward student-centered, competency-based learning, but making it work within current restraints (Christensen, 1997; Horn & Staker, 2015).  I think part of the reason I've always liked the idea of disruptive innovation is that it challenges the assumption that innovation has to mean completely reinventing something. Sometimes innovation means looking at what you already have and asking how it could work differently, work better, or simply become easier for the people who actually have to use it. That was the mindset I brought to this particular challenge; I couldn't change the curriculum or any parameters surrounding it, but I could ask, “Okay...so what can we do with what we have?” (and believe me, I did). Honestly, that became one of the most interesting parts of the work.

The new language arts curriculum came with a lot of information. There were teacher materials, student materials, planning resources, implementation expectations, and all of the other pieces that come with asking teachers to learn something new and expect them to implement it with fidelity while students sit in front of them every day. It is one thing to hand someone a new curriculum and say, “Here you go!” It is another thing entirely to help someone actually feel like they can use it, especially when they are already balancing everything else that comes with being a teacher.

So I started thinking less about the curriculum itself and more about the experience of the people who had to use it. While the curriculum leaders focused on the content, I focused on the process. What was going to be difficult to find? What was going to take too much time? What could be organized differently? Where could a digital resource make something easier to navigate? Where could a visual help someone understand the planning process? Where were teachers going to have questions, and could I help answer some of those questions before they even had to ask? This curriculum had so many opportunities because it literally just came with PDFs of the student activity book and a basic teacher slide deck to accompany units. The possibilities to increase accessibility and enhance were endless!

That is where the Coach's Toolkit started to take shape. Designed for campus instructional coaches leading the work, I began creating resources that were designed to sit alongside the curriculum and make the work a little easier to navigate; there were planning slide decks with visuals to help ensure people were looking in the right spots and paying attention to all the new things, digital planning documents, separate bilingual resources to support our bilingual team, items to support walkthroughs, consistent branding, and other pieces that helped organize information that could otherwise feel scattered. None of those things changed the curriculum itself, and that wasn't the point. The point was to reduce some of the friction that comes with learning something new. That distinction mattered to me because I didn't want to create another giant collection of resources that teachers would have to learn how to use. I wanted to create things that felt intuitive enough that a teacher could open them and think, “Oh, I know what to do with this.” That became one of my favorite questions during the whole process: What can we do to make this easier for the people who actually have to use it?

As I started building the Coach's Toolkit, I also quickly realized this was bigger than something I could create by myself. I could see that the heaviest load was going to be on our campus instructional coaches, who were also learning this curriculum and charged with leading and supporting the teachers in all the new while still maintaining and improving instruction for multiple grade levels in addition to their "other duties as assigned". They were going to need a way to navigate all of this information. At the same time, I could also see that there would eventually be a need to think about what the experience would look like for students. However, seeing a need and building something that an entire department can actually use are two very different things, and I knew pretty quickly that I needed other people’s buy-in at my instructional technology table.

I brought the idea to both my direct supervisor and the head of the elementary language arts department because I wanted to talk through what I was seeing and what I thought might be possible. From there, the work became collaborative in a way that I think was essential to making it useful. The bilingual team was already working separately on the pilot version of this new curriculum, so that wasn't something I needed to support; instead, I was able to recognize how that work connected to the larger need and think about how the different pieces could eventually fit together. You may be thinking, “Why campus coaches?” I chose to focus first on the coaches because I knew that if we could equip the people supporting teachers in the day-to-day grind, the student-facing work could come next. Also, there was no way I could, or should, build all of this alone.

That became one of the most meaningful parts of the process for me. I had started with an observation and a question, but the answer was never going to be mine alone. It required the knowledge, experience, ideas, and buy-in of an entire department, and the more people became involved, the more the work changed and improved. What started as an observation and a question became something we could build together, and that shift from an idea to our work is actually a story I will be sharing in a standalone blog post. The partnerships and collaboration between multiple district-level departments, all the campus coaches, and classroom teachers were truly something so special that it will forever live as a highlight in my professional career.

Back to the "Why campus coaches first?" I remember someone asking me that during the initial campus coaches’ training, and it kept coming back to me because it really captured what I think coaching should be about. When something new is introduced into a school, the people who are expected to implement it are the ones who need the most practical support. They don't necessarily need someone standing in front of them explaining why the change is important; they need someone willing to sit beside them and figure out what the change is actually going to look like on a Monday morning.

This is where technology became useful, but not because technology was the goal. I wasn't trying to turn the language arts curriculum into a digital curriculum, and I wasn't looking for an excuse to put everything online just because I happened to be the instructional technology coach supporting that department. Instead, I was looking for the places where technology could actually help. Sometimes that meant making planning resources easier to access. Sometimes it meant organizing information in a way that was easier to navigate. Sometimes it meant creating a digital space where coaches could find what they needed without digging through nested files, multiple websites, and a pile of paper documents.  Sometimes it meant creating opportunities for students to do something novel with the curriculum rather than complete another page in their activity book.

For our students, we explored the ways digital tools such as Canvas, Seesaw, and Book Creator could support learning and creation, provide another place to organize learning, access resources, and create opportunities for students to interact with content in different ways. The technology wasn't about replacing the curriculum; it was about giving teachers and students additional ways to work with it, and that distinction is something I keep coming back to in my work because technology doesn't have to be the star. Sometimes it is just the thing sitting quietly in the background making something easier; sometimes it gives a teacher a little more flexibility, gives a student another way to demonstrate what they know, or organizes a mess of information into something that makes sense, and sometimes it simply isn't needed at all.

I think that is one of the reasons I connected so much with the idea of disruptive innovation in the first place. Innovation doesn't always look like throwing everything out and starting over, and in education, we don't get to do that very often anyway. We have curriculum standards, schedules, budgets, staffing realities, required resources, policies, technology limitations, and, of course, actual human beings with very different needs sitting in classrooms every day. Those constraints are real, but constraints don't necessarily mean there is no room for creativity; sometimes they actually force us to become more creative.

When you can't change the curriculum, you can change how you help people access it. When you can't change the format, you can change the experience around it. When you can't remove the complexity, you can help organize it. When you can't give teachers more time, you can look for ways to give some of their time back. That is innovation, and it doesn't always look shiny or brand new or come with a big announcement or a fancy launch. Sometimes it is a planning document, a slide deck, a resource translated into another language so someone can actually use it, or a digital space that helps someone find the thing they were looking for in thirty seconds instead of ten minutes. Sometimes it is sitting in a room with a group of educators and asking, “What would make this easier?” Sometimes it is simply being willing to look at something you didn't choose and say, “Okay...so what can we do with this?”

I didn't get to choose the curriculum, and certainly didn’t get to choose all of the constraints that came along with it, but I did get to choose how I responded to them. Maybe that is where innovation actually begins; not when we get everything we want, but when we look at what we have, get curious about what is possible, and start figuring out how to make it work a little better for the people who are actually doing the work. Sometimes you don't need a blank canvas or something brand new; sometimes you just need to be willing to add some sparkle within the lines.

References

Christensen, C. M. (1997). The innovator's dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard Business School Press.

Horn, M. B., & Staker, H. (2015). Blended: Using disruptive innovation to improve schools. Jossey-Bass.