“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:
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.
In order to prepare students for a rich and turbulent future, we need to empower them with the tools of design. That’s why Collective Invention cofounder Arnold Wasserman has been working with the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) to create an event which provides high school students with hands-on experience using design principles.
The day’s learning experience will kick-off a series of phased projects in which students will take an active role in the design and expansion of their teaching and learning spaces over the course of the next few years.
In addition, the students will continue to hone their design skills and understandings to then contribute to the planning and design of the future Homer Plessy Museum.
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.
Try to imagine a student from the year 2025. No, really, try to imagine her. What kind of technology does she use? What does she want to be when she grows up? How does she participate in the struggles facing her family, her community, and her world?
These sorts of questions are a powerful tool for breaking down the assumptions and institutional barriers that have stood in the way of true education reform. This year at South by Southwest, Erika Gregory of Collective Invention and Dr. Jillian Darwish of Knowledgeworks will lead a workshop combining user-centered design, systems thinking and scenario planning to identify the needs of these learners. Armed with these personas, workshop participants will discuss how to build an education system which meets their needs in the context of an uncertain future.
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 KnowledgeWorkscollaborated 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…)
Picture the stock market. Chances are you’re imagining a bunch of people staring frantically at numbers. There are lots of numbers, so many that they need giant screens to display them all. All of the numbers are constantly changing, and each change feeds an already-intense flurry of activity. People are morphing strategies on the fly. In the next room, banks of computers are humming away trying to uncover new and interesting relationships between all of those numbers. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good at allocating resources to grow the economy, good enough that it’s failures rather than its successes are front page news.
Now picture the market for innovative ideas in education. This market is no less important, but it looks very different. There’s far, far less data. The data can’t be aggregated on a bunch of screens, it’s siloed in statistics and reports scattered across the country. That siloed data is updated rarely, usually just a few times a year. Sometimes these updates set off flurries of activity, but just as often people fail to see their significance. Individual researchers look at trends, but the data is so fragmented that intensive data mining is severely limited. This system makes headlines when it succeeds. (more…)
I’m writing this blog post from unused space in the San Francisco Chronicle building. The Chronicle has had to scale back recently, and so the space is getting used by number of early-to-mid-stage web startups. A few dozen feet from me is Change.org, a nifty activism platform that’s busy delivering customizable content on a suite of customizable platforms to a generation that hasn’t cared about a newspaper in over a decade. What does that generation’s kids think of textbooks?
Educators face an incredible challenge: constructing and delivering compelling content to distracted audiences with very few resources. The apocalypse and emerging rebirth of news media is an important example of how the systems which deliver this sort of content can be radically reinvented. Many of the tools making up this new wave of media can be directly applied to educational challenges, when they can’t they serve as an important inspiration.
There’s no question that the education system is structured more like a newspaper than a mashed-up twitter prediction algorithm, and for the time being that’s probably a good thing. Still, it’s worth asking what a reborn education system would look like. (more…)
Grantmakers for Education asks Collective Invention President Erika Gregory and veteran KW executive Jillian Darwish to design an innovation process for national leaders in education philanthropy. USDOE assistant deputy secretary Jim Shelton says philanthropic community can play powerful role in transforming learning.
San Francisco (Vocus/PRWeb) April 8, 2010 — Leaders from the grantmaking world will be immersed in the future of learning at the Grantmakers for Education, or GFE, briefing at the Delancey Street Foundation here Thursday and Friday.
“Innovation in Education, Redesigning the Delivery System of Education in America” is a new kind of convening by GFE designed to help education philanthropists develop a shared vision for transforming U.S. education based on the needs of learners. The design for the event, created with Collective Invention and KnowledgeWorks, thrusts philanthropic leaders into the future by seeing through the eyes of future learners. From their student-based perspective of the year 2025, participants will identify innovations which are likely to have the greatest leverage for creating transformation in the present. (more…)
The story is that most peoples’ thinking is stuck at the 10K level of Foresight. This is what our education schools us for. It is doubtless an important cognitive strategy, but it is not the only one, and in isolation it is a dangerous one.
Read more on this subject and to watch the slide show at arnoldwasserman.com.
I teach art in a kindergarten class every other Friday. I am an “enrichment teacher.” What that means is that I am enriched by my time with these 20 young artists. In my case, the enrichment is even greater: the classroom teacher, Ms. Wood, is my daughter, a second-year public school teacher.
These young artists are four and five years old. They are filled with spirit, wonder and unbounded enthusiasm. Our art projects are “pedagogically sound” and track with the California State Standards for kindergarten art. The state standards aren’t magic, but the children are. By smashing those two ideas together Ms. Wood and I create lesson plans. On the Friday after the presidential election my goal was to have the students discover that colors and shapes have meaning and – as artists – they create that meaning.
I’ve always flown the American flag on holidays. It bugs me that the colors and shapes of the flag seem to stand for something political instead of something patriotic. But after the election there were dozens of American flags flying in my neighborhood. That’s when I decided our Friday art class would be about the colors, shapes and meaning of flags.
The young artists in my class come in many stripes. So, I brought stripes of all colors. I made star fields with 20 stars – because there are 20 star artists in the class. On Friday we talked about the flag, about Barack Obama, about colors and shapes and about glue. Then, they each choose some stars and some stripes and made their own version of an American flag. We called them the Obama Flags and, indeed, they are filled with meaning.
After we made our flags we talked about them. Alejandro said he wanted to grow up and be the president. So does Vanessa. Then Richie said he wants to grow up and be an artist. Ms. Wood and I realized that our job is to make sure all of them keep believing it.
#digitalPA We get to play with the gigapan - GigaPan helps bring distant communities and peoples together through highly detailed images.02:15:29 AM April 20, 2012from web
The Six 21st Century Skills You REALLY Need | Learning Management Systems | Content, Course, Digital Learning, Educati…http://t.co/EEe36kO507:45:08 PM January 10, 2012from HootSuite
