Working with a design committee of education grantmakers under the auspices of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and in close collaboration with GFE senior leadership, Collective Invention developed a toolkit for engaging teachers in the design, planning and implementation of education reforms and innovations. The goal: to increase meaningful teacher involvement in grant-funded initiatives that support continuous quality improvement and raise student achievement. Our process included expert interviews, teacher focus groups, and the prototyping of practical engagement protocols. The toolkit is slated for public release by mid-2013.

Since its founding in 1866, Pacific School of Religion (PSR) has been a progressive voice of change in the Christian tradition, advocating for the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.  But, like seminaries everywhere, PSR has struggled to remain viable: job prospects for seminary graduates are dwindling, and the combination of declining enrollment and high fixed-cost organizational models have led to fiscal crisis.

PSR asked Collective Invention for help developing a courageous new institutional vision that was unanimously—and emotionally—approved by the PSR Board of Trustees in the fall of 2012. We are now hard at work with senior leadership, facilitating PSR’s transformation through the creation of new programs, pedagogy and organizational models.

Collective Invention ventured to Kuala Lumpur, joining an Institute for the Future team at work with the Malaysian Government’s Special Innovation Unit. Drawing on IFTF’s extensive research, we developed strategies for engaging Malaysian youth (a large percentage of whom currently have no access to electricity or reliable water sources) in the economic and civic future of the region.

We have been working with NeighborWorks to explore the feasibility of complementary early childhood education offerings in affordable housing. In collaboration with NeighborWorks and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, the first phase of the work, a broad survey of options, was completed in late 2012. We are currently working on the development of the next stage of the research plan.

Will regional accreditors act in service of the public good by stimulating greater access to high quality, low-cost options for college students? How will the teaching profession evolve as a result, and what are the new opportunities for higher education “edupreneurs?” For over a year we worked with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) to redesign its accreditation standards. As a capstone to that process, we conducted Learning2025: Higher Education, a simulation of teaching and learning in the year 2025, at the WASC Academic Resources Conference in April, 2012.

An overview of the work done by Collective Invention and the Idea Factory in the field of education innovation over the last ten years. From a powerpoint presentation.

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A recently released video and in-depth report document Collective Invention’s partnership with the Vallejo Charter School.

“We must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.” – Pablo Picasso

For the four years since it’s founding, the Vallejo Charter School (VCS) has been on the forefront of innovation in education. By utilizing a cutting edge Experiential Learning model, VCS serves as a platform for innovation in the education sector.

Collective Invention partnered with VCS to assess the effectiveness of this model and to help the school understand its place within broader trends transforming education over the next decade. The resulting report is available to download here:

A School Worthy of Its Children

Highlights include:

• Many of the jobs that VCS students will hold in the year 2025 do not currently exist. They may range from Aquaprenuers who finding opportunities in technology addressing the state’s water crisis to Clinical Bioninformaticists who tailor drugs to fit patients’ genetic codes.
• 66% of education philanthropies are funding innovation in education, and 33% plan to increase funding in this area. By positioning itself as a center for prototyping and scaling new learning models, VCS can more effectively capture philanthropic investment.
• Ethnographic documentation of VCS’s model revealed a striking emphasis on attentiveness. “In classrooms around the campus we noticed an emphasis on the physical characteristics of listening: eye contact, empty hands and a still body. “Use your listening eyes,” we heard in one classroom. “Make sure your hands are hands are empty and your feet are still. No distractions while you are listening” we heard in another. Research by the Dana Consortium indicates that attentiveness is significantly correllated with improved scores on intelligence tests.

Arnold Wasserman at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club on Oct. 13, 2011.

It may be the moment for innovation in the education system. Earlier last month, President Obama released a budget proposal calling for the creation of an “Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education.” In a nutshell, the audacious goal of ARPA-ED is to look at a system that has historically sputtered on even incremental reform and seriously consider what radical change might look like. Coming from a federal level, this kind of radical re-envisioning could easily terrify so many entrenched stakeholders that it shakes apart before ever putting marker to whiteboard, but it could also succeed beyond our wildest expectations.

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