Richard Volz

Innovation in Plain Sight 

by Alex Lipoff

Multiple choice question: If you were to walk into Rich Volz’s classroom, you might immediately notice: 

A) Some of the last remaining chalk boards anywhere in the school that line the walls on three sides.

B) The missing presence of any projectors, monitor screens, gizmos, etc. 

C) Weekly itineraries for all of his class sections, with their assignments posted and dated in advance, stapled to the board.

D) Innovation happening everywhere.

E) All of the above. 

At a purely surface level, Mr. Volz’s classroom wouldn’t necessarily strike the casual observer as a place full of innovation and creativity. Where are the pricey high-tech screens and gadgets, and where is there room in his pre-planned curriculum for those impromptu and ingenious innovative lessons that seem to spring from the top of a teacher’s head and materialize in an exciting new class project?

Yet, as Amanda Ripley writes in The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, “Old school can be good school” (214). Every cycle since the beginning of the school year, students in Mr. Volz’s classes have been experimenting with creative writing exercises. Rather than simply innovating for the sake of innovation, Mr. Volz has been encouraging his students to use creative approaches to reinforce and solidify the content and skills that have been covered. “The most successful one was the first one I did,” he said. “We were reading The Odyssey and had really belabored the themes and patterns in the text, so the creative writing served a great purpose at that point. Students were asked to rewrite a story to invert the themes of the text, and by doing that, they obviously had to show that they understood the original content and were able to manipulate it in a way that would flip it on its head.”

Similarly, Mr. Volz has been asking students to write poems about the grammar rules the class has covered as a way of studying and memorizing what would otherwise be a fairly dry and inflexible subject matter.

Andres Schleicher, originator of the PISA test, believes that “[i]n most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms.” While the stereotype is often that the innovative lesson is something completely different from anything the teacher has tried before, Mr. Volz’s class is a testament to the inherent innovation that occurs in any classroom: “I teach the same texts each year, but I don’t think I’ve ever taught the same text the same way. We find new things, new passages and themes, to focus on and emphasize each time. That to me is innovation. It’s the same text, it’s the same material, but we’re going to twist it around and see it from a different angle. I ask myself: ‘What will renew this material for each of my students on an individual level? How do I give them a new understanding?’ That is innovation.”