How

How about a party to get ideas flowing?

So with a problem in hand it was time to start coming up with ideas. Good ideas, less good ideas, fun ideas, big ideas, small ideas, all types of ideas. Our professor hosted small groups of us who were working on different problems in an ideation party where we talked about our problem and started ideating. It was fun and beneficial to get multiple diverse minds together to think about creative ways to solve our problems. Each idea led to the next until I found one that I wanted to run with.

Learning Outcomes

After the party and some more thought, it was time to make sure that this solution was learner-focused. I wrote two learning outcomes to get started. While the beginning will change along with the solution that is chosen, the outcomes should still be attainable.

After attending a creation focused half day workshop where the teachers role played as students, teachers will be able to incorporate activities where students create documents or media using technology into their lessons.

After guiding their homeroom classroom through the school wide creativity and innovation challenge, teachers will be able to augment their curriculum with activities and programmes that they and their students had a positive experience with.

Prototype #1

Creativity Week Flyer

"My prototype is a week long creativity challenge where homeroom teachers guide their students to design and create something impactful for the school. This challenge has inherit merit for the students where they practice creation in a fun low stakes environment, but it is also a veiled professional development activity for teachers around implementing more creation in the classroom. In order to successfully guide their students through this challenge, they will need to learn from other teachers and the ed tech who are already proficient at integrating creativity into the classroom. Tools and examples will be shared school wide, and once the week is over, teachers will be familiar with these tools and the type of creativity that can occur with them."

Get Feedback, Make Changes, Get More Feedback, Do It Again (and again)

I received feedback from my classmates (thanks!), and I ran it by my very helpful Library Media Specialist. The idea is to help teachers incorporate creation based activities in the classroom, but when exactly am I doing that with this prototype? My core idea is still strong, but it went off-message in the process. It's time to make some changes and iterate on this product.

Prototype #2

Creativity Week Instructions

"Before creativity week, on a teacher work day, instead of a typical professional development seminar teachers will participate in a mini design sprint over 5 hours. This mini design sprint will take them through the design thinking process, where the first hour is empathy, the second is define, then ideate, then prototype, then pitch (lunch will be 30 mins and pitch will only last 30 minutes). In this design sprint teachers will be given the problem of "a lack of creation based activities in lessons" and work to design a solution to that problem for their own lessons. This day will expose them to an accelerated version of a design sprint, which they will then facilitate themselves for their students over the creativity week. Each day of creativity week will cover a section of the design thinking process. With this experience in hand, a set of premade design thinking resources, and direct guidance from the ed tech team, teachers will embark on the week long design sprint with their homeroom class. The students are given the challenge "design a new student lounge". At the end of this program, teachers will have designed a new lesson that includes creativity from their own accelerated design sprint, as well as guided their students through the design sprint in creativity week. There will be immediate deliverables in terms of student creation from the week as well as improved ability to teach creativity among the educators. Also, it's going to be so much fun!"

Why will this work? Why should I put this out into the world?

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