Edutopia has an interesting article about creative ways to establish better relationships with students on campus. Well worth reading as we talk about the ‘relationship’ part of rigor, relevance and relationships.
We’ve been talking all year on the committee about innovation and ways to support that on campus. The University of Southern California has started a new institute for innovation, the USC Stevens Institute, to support innovation across departments. The idea is to have a university-wide resource to support innovators, not just in terms of funding, but in terms of helping innovators make connections.
Business Week interviewed the head of the institute, Krisztina Holly, who comments:
It’s about empowering the innovators and getting them connected with the right people—and creating a community from within and also outside the university with experts from business. It’s about having a shared sense of enterprise.
She talks about the value of reaching across departments including art, music, film, etc. As she points out, “That’s what’s so cool about innovation; it’s the common language between academia and the marketplace.” The institute isn’t just focused on business projects, but on community projects as well.
She shared some tentative survey results which found that over 50 percent of their students have had an idea while in college that they thought would make a good business.
It strikes me that having some sort of support for innovative projects at a high school would be a great idea as well. An innovation club? A innovation subset of the Vision committee? Wouldn’t it be great to have a nationwide or statewide “Institute for Innovation in Education?”
Any ideas on what we could do on campus to incorporate this concept?
It’s been so fascinating to sit in our Vision committee meetings and other conversations and start watching a new vision for our campus unfold. We’ve reached the point in the year where we are already putting things in place that we were just dreaming about in the fall, and it’s really exciting. New courses are already in the offerings for students, we’ve got a technology plan for the next year or two along with a logo and a motto, we’re addressing bringing guest speakers into our campus, we’re looking at some global focus, we’re redesigning the library space, and more.
This afternoon I was reading a post on Will Richardson’s blog, Weblogg-ed, about a project he is working on with some schools in New Jersey, redefining a twenty-first century vision for their schools, and he listed the skills they are defining and I thought–that is like what we are doing! And it made me feel very excited to know that we’re coming together with parents, students, and staff to define our 21st century and also technology goals to address how society is changing.
Take a look at his post and I think it’ll be interesting to follow their progress, but I’m hoping we can also do more to document our own progress, maybe here on our blog?
It’d be a great record of the development of our ideas and perhaps provide some model for other schools. So share your thoughts or progress here if you would like.
This post, Prisoners of Time, is a fascinating summary of a study done on issues with time in schools–covers everything from time for teachers to learn to time of the day that students are ready to learn. Well worth reading as we talk about the school schedule.
Recently we’ve been discussing the ideas we saw at High Tech High, and Edutopia has an excellent article this month about another new project-based school in Philadelphia, the Science Leadership Academy. Well worth reading about.
Chris Lehmann, the principal of SLA, blogs about the evolution of the school, leadership issues, technology problems, and more at his site Practical Theory if you’d like to follow the school’s progress.
