Niggle, jiggle and squid: The new road to innovative VET practice

If ‘niggling’, ‘jiggling’ and ‘squidding’ sound strange to you, you probably weren’t at any of the workshops on innovation in teaching and learning in VET presented throughout Australia by Yvonne Hillier and Jane Figgis last month.

Actually, the words were new to Hiller and Figgis too. They emerged from the workshops where practitioners grappled with the task of devising innovations to improve their students’ engagement and learning.

The workshops grew out of the research Hillier and Figgis undertook for NCVER. Hillier’s work looked at international perspectives on innovation in teaching and learning, while Figgis focused on innovative practice in Australia.

The research showed that the most interesting and sustained innovative practice starts with the teachers/trainers feeling that their students’ learning could be better somehow.

So the workshops started with participants in groups of three talking about the niggles they had about their own practice. These discussions were very lively. It turns out that everyone could think of things that could do with improving.

The next step was to jiggle: time to play with various ways to solve the problems, to counter the niggles.

This is where the creative ideas began to flow, proving that whenever a few people start sharing their half-formed thoughts—what Figgis calls ‘pooling their ignorance’—quite imaginative solutions emerge.

But bright ideas are only half the way to a practical innovation. Getting all the way there requires squidding, to borrow a term that Lisa Smith, from the team at Minds At Work, shared with the group in Geelong.

Squidding is to think of all the reasons a bright innovation won’t work. It comes from the fact that a squid defends itself by shooting a cloud of ink at the offending object and running away.

It sounds negative but it is really important that an innovation be thoroughly critiqued. People found that, as they answered the questions, the innovation got sharper and better.

The final step in the workshop was for the groups, who had earlier eliminated all but one of the innovative possibilities, to bring their innovation to the ‘market’.

One point is quite important: an ‘innovation’ doesn’t have to be big and it doesn’t even have to be new. Using mobiles with apprentices is not ‘new’—it’s been done before—but for the team using mobiles to engage their students for the first time, it is new. It is an innovation for them.

The whole niggle–jiggle–squid process worked well. Quite a few participants said that they intended to try it back in their own training organisations. Hillier and Figgis encourage others to try it too.

Innovation in teaching and learning in vocational education and training: International perspectives is available at
www.ncver.edu.au/publications/2137.html

Regenerating the Australian landscape of professional VET practice: Practitioner-driven changes to teaching and learning is available at
www.ncver.edu.au/publications/2136.html