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.

Supporting Creativity Through Digital Media and Learning

Grantmakers for Education

This learning expedition was the fourth in a series of sessions about philanthropic innovation that Collective Invention has developed for Grantmakers for Education (GFE), a national network of nearly 300 grantmaking organizations funding education reform in the United States. A Renaissance of Wonder was a hyper-local, hands-on experience that took us all over Pittsburgh—formerly known as the “Steel City” and now known as a hotbed of collaborative innovation as teachers, gamers, roboticists, artists, designers and child development experts use child-centered arts, media and technology to inspire curiosity and learning. View more here.

On this journey we explored interrelated questions such as:

• What investments hold greatest promise towards “anywhere, anytime” learning?
• How can education philanthropy make smart bets when the children born today will be educated in a digital world that we can scarcely yet envision?
• In a society in which kids spend 80% of their learning time outside of schools, how might digital media more equitably help greater numbers of learners gain the skills they’ll need to succeed in 21st century life?
• How can philanthropists support the creation of environments like Pittsburgh’s, in which so many of the major local actors (philanthropy, school districts, politicians, university leaders, non-profits) appear to share a complementary vision around digital learning and creativity?

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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The education system in the United States faces massive challenges — challenges that are constantly redefined by a rapidly changing environment.

Leaders and innovators in education need to do more than address falling test scores, crumbling facilities and a mounting teacher shortage; they need to address those problems in a world transformed by everything from advanced biotechnology to climate refugees.

Grantmakers for Education (GFE), a network of approximately 260 education funders, is working to build a common definition of innovation and to identify investments that can transform our education systems. As part of this initiative, educational innovation specialists from Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks collaborated with GFE to design and document programs that enable grantmakers to step back from their typical funding procedures and consider what innovations can leverage the most change for learners. (more…)