By: Heidi Vissia
We talk about innovation in education as if it is a shiny new tool we can simply pick up, but we rarely talk about what we have to put down and the grief that comes with letting it go. Everyone is searching for the next breakthrough, yet true innovation eventually forces us to confront a painful reality: the models we’ve leaned on for the last twenty years were built for efficiency, not for learning. To pivot toward something better, we must first face the uninvited guest of grief. This isn’t just a loss of a lesson plan; it’s the loss of our pride, our time, our content, and the professional identity we built on a foundation that we are now realizing was archaic. To move forward, we eventually have to look back and reckon with the hard truth of our current state.
This isn’t about blame. This is about origin. We have to pause and reflect on why we are where we are. We are products of an archaic system designed for industrial efficiency rather than deeper learning. Many of us know that we are operating with a model that wasn’t built for the modern student or for our society’s current needs. We simply didn’t know what we didn’t know.
But what if we know now? What do we do when we realize the system is broken, and even further, the system may be harmful? For me, I reached a fork in the road: stay the course or pivot. In my 25-plus years in education, I’ve had a moment like this a handful of times. I admit that in each of these moments, I was aware that I was making a choice to change, and therefore knew I would face challenges. I changed jobs a little over a year ago. Three months into my new job, I was sitting in a room full of education innovators, listening to a superintendent from a Midwest school share his story about innovation in his district. I had been doing what I consider innovative work for about 8 years, so I thought I had really grappled with what it looks like to be an innovator and lead innovation. The superintendent recalled a story about sticky notes his staff created on a wall. The sticky notes were staff members’ reflections on what they feared. This leader brought in a social worker-type consultant. After reading the notes, the consultant asked, “Who died?” They discovered that the staff was grieving. I sat in that meeting and cried. I cried, realizing that I was grieving.
Grief was a language I already spoke fluently, though I had never used it at the office. The year before I transitioned into this role, I lost both of my parents. My mother’s journey was a long, grueling battle with Alzheimer’s; my father’s was a swift, brutal fight with pancreatic cancer. In working through those losses, I had already played the bartering game. I knew the hardest truth about grief: ignoring it never leads to healing.
So, I decided to meet with my boss. Courage is rarely easy, but for me, it has always been worth it. I kept asking myself: Why are you doing this? What is the outcome you want? Is it worth the risk?
The answer was yes. If I didn’t let him know where I was, how could he possibly support me? If I wasn’t healthy, my work wouldn’t be healthy. When I chose to be brave, I was met with a level of compassion and reciprocity I didn’t expect. My boss sat and listened. He affirmed my feelings and then, unexpectedly, shared his own story of transition. In that moment of clarity, he realized that he, too, was moving through a form of grief he hadn’t yet named. He walked me through William Bridges’ work on transitions, the idea that every beginning starts with an ending and a neutral zone of uncertainty. We realized right then that our staff, the early adopters of our most innovative changes, were likely feeling the same weight. We needed to pause and address the grief of the transition with them before asking them to build anything new.
In our conversation, my boss and I realized that we couldn’t reach what Bridges calls the new beginning without first honoring the ending. We often try to skip the messy middle, the neutral zone, and wonder why our innovations feel hollow. When we looked at the stages of grief through the lens of our school’s transition, the friction we were feeling finally made sense:
- Denial: This is just another initiative; I’ll wait it out until the pendulum swings back. In a transition, this is the refusal to acknowledge that the old way is actually gone.
- Anger: I’ve spent 20 years perfecting this lecture; how dare they say it’s ineffective? This is the pain of an ending. We aren’t just mad at a new rubric; we are mourning the loss of the expert identity we spent decades building.
- Bargaining: I’ll do this project-based learning, but only on Fridays. We try to keep one foot in the past to dull the pain of the future.
- Depression: If I’m not the fountain of knowledge in front of the room, then what is my value? This is the low point of the transition; the uncomfortable space where the old identity is dead but the new one hasn’t been born yet.
- Acceptance: My value isn’t my content; it’s my ability to spark curiosity. This is where we finally put down the heavy weight of the past and pick up the tools of the future.
Our meeting ended with a realization that has changed how we lead: You cannot ask people to pick up the tools of innovation while their hands are still full of the grief they haven’t put down.
I left that meeting with a little more healing, a little more hope, and a lot more courage to face the unknowns of transformation. It taught me that the most productive thing a leader can do isn’t always to build a new system; sometimes, it is to hold space for the death of the old way of being. We aren’t just retiring a workflow; we are outgrowing the mindsets that once made us feel safe.
Many educators and leaders choose to ignore and or avoid grief for many reasons. For me, addressing grief demands reflection. Reflection is expensive. It costs us our comfort. It can feel very lonely. It makes us vulnerable, and therefore, risk is involved. It costs us time. However, without reflection, the pivot is just a surface-level change, not a transformation. Without reflection, we have, at best, acknowledgement. When we choose to pivot, we aren’t just changing a grading scale or a classroom layout; we are dismantling a part of ourselves. This is where the unexpected weight of grief settles in. We are forced to mourn the loss of our time, years spent perfecting methods we now realize were ineffective. We mourn our pride as we admit that the best practices we championed were often just remnants of a broken system.
Most poignantly, we are forced to divorce our content. For years, we have wedded our professional worth to the specific knowledge we deliver. To move toward a model of true learning often means stripping away the content we love to make room for the skills students actually need. There is a profound sense of loss in realizing that the correct answer, the lecture, or the project we held dear is no longer the best vehicle for student growth and learning. I’m not suggesting we abandon our content; I’m suggesting we treat it as the scaffolding for the skills students actually need. The goal isn’t the “answer being 21,” it’s the thinking required to get there. We need to move from the teacher as the Fountain of Knowledge to the teacher as the Architect of Experience. That transition is where the ego most often gets bruised. Trust me, as a former high school math teacher, I’ve acquired a lot of bruises, and at times I still find myself dropping my guard and taking a punch from my own ego, but over the years, I’ve gained quite a bit of humility and learned to work the ring a bit better. As Brené Brown reminds us, if we are going to be brave with our lives and our leadership, we have to step into the arena. I’ve realized that the arena of innovation isn’t just about fighting for a new system; it’s about having the courage to show up and be seen when we no longer have all the answers.
To innovate is to relinquish that expertise and step into the vulnerability of the unknown.
How do we truly transform then?
This is the curious thing. With innovation, we constantly demand that students be reflective, growth-oriented, and open to feedback. Yet, as adults, we often resist doing the same internal work. We ask students to have a growth mindset, yet we meet them with a fixed identity. If we want students to be reflective and growth-oriented, we have to recognize that they, too, are grieving the loss of the traditional path. We cannot ask of them what we are not willing to do ourselves. As leaders, we must model this transition literacy. We must sit in the discomfort, acknowledge the weight of the loss, and provide a culture of grace. Only then can our teachers truly support students as they navigate the emotional weight of changing how they learn. When we provide a culture of grace and reflection to our adult learners, it trickles down to our students. If we have leaders in our buildings who know how to grow and grieve in change, those same leaders can then hold space for their students to do the same. We often acknowledge that innovation is hard, but we need to also acknowledge that it is painful. When we can do this and work through this as adults, it allows us to be fully authentic and effective for our students. We must, as leaders, model grief and reflection to trigger the domino effect of change for our learners, both adults and students.
So, before you redesign the master schedule or overhaul the grading system, I challenge you to do the harder, more expensive work of reflection:
Acknowledge the ending. Name what you are putting down. Whether it is a beloved lesson plan or a 25-year-old professional identity, give it a moment of silence.
Choose to be brave. Go to your boss or a trusted peer. Tell the truth about where you are. You might find, as I did, that your vulnerability is the very thing that gives them permission to be human, too.
Reclaim your value. Look in the mirror and reconcile your evolving identity by realizing that your worth was never the content; it was always you.
Heidi Vissia is the CTE Curriculum and Instruction Coordinator at Muskegon Area ISD
The post The Cost of Innovation: Why True Transformation Requires A Season of Grief appeared first on Getting Smart.