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.

2012 marked our sixth year of collaborative innovation at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) and the second year for NOCCA as a full-day, diploma-granting college preparatory high school for pre-professional artists. For the first several years Collective Invention led the Board, senior leadership, faculty and staff through the process of envisioning the Academic Studio; we specified design principles for a master-apprentice pedagogical model reflective of NOCCA’s arts training, identified world-class curriculum development partners including, among others, the San Francisco Exploratorium, and facilitated the prototyping of new courses.

In 2012 our work shifted to program evaluation to determine the degree to which the Academic Studio is delivering on its mission to provide both professional arts training and a full academic program for students who aspire to be creative artists and next-generation leaders of the creative and cultural economy. The multiple-measures assessment model we developed provides regular and transparent data for the purposes of continuous improvement and the tracking of progress towards outcomes. It enables students to own their personalized learning experience; provides means for families to support their students’ experiences by providing clear data and opportunities for feedback; and encourages the active engagement of all administrators, faculty and staff in improving the Academic Studio over time.

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.

In the fall of 2012 we facilitated a scenario planning session Bob Wise, President of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former Governor of West Virginia, and Scott Palmer, Managing Partner at EducationCounsel. Our focus: critical uncertainties relating to education policy relating to the 2012 Presidential election and the implications of a Romney administration versus a second-term Obama administration.

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.

Jenny Hoang
Marketing Manager and Design Strategist

Andrew Ellis
Associate, Research and Dynamic Media

Building on the success of SoCap in San Francisco, which has grown from around 500 attendees to a capacity 1500 in four years, the SoCap team initiated SoCap Europe in 2011. We have worked with SoCap for several years, co-designing the International Development track in 2010, and designing and moderating the Polycentric Solutions track in 2011.

For SoCap Europe 2012, hosted in Malmo, Sweden, we designed a learning journey for participants. This expedition took them outside the confines of the conference venue into the Rosengard neighborhood of Malmo. This is a high immigration neighborhood, with significantly higher than average levels of poverty, unemployment and failing schools. The city of Malmo in conjunction with community leaders in Rosengard is pioneering support for social entrepreneurship, enabling residents to develop businesses that contribute to the well-being of the community. In collaboration with SoCap staff we designed the learning journey, and created version of our expedition materials to guide observations and discussion. View more here.

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.