Social Innovation Live: “The Internship Class”
an experimental semester elective from Jan-May 2014
Internships are a uniquely valuable learning experience for young people, so why not bring the experience to our Upper School* students? That was the basic premise behind Social Innovation Live (SI Live), a design elective I taught from January through the end of April.
Ninth and tenth graders were taught the basics of the design thinking process and then matched, in teams, with companies for ten weeks, with a major project as the final deliverable. The goal was to adapt the experience and lessons of a longer internship into a (short) class format, supplementing experience with appropriate tools and content.
Before the students even met their partners, lest they be distracted, we began with an introduction to design thinking. This was meant to provide a tool for students to work both together and with their bosses through each phase of the design process: identifying a problem or need, researching further to gain a broad perspective, brainstorming solutions, building and testing prototypes, refining the project and finally delivering the projects their companies required and presenting to the class. Some teams, like the GO Project, ended up focusing more on research; others, like Dream See Do, on brainstorming and prototyping; Incite Creatives focused on constant iteration; Epic Road spanned the process from start to finish; and Hard to Reach, a web platform in development, is the brainchild of a single Avenues student and still in business plan phase.
As you can imagine, the content and goals varied by team. The introductory unit attempted to establish a basic approach and vocabulary, a foundation for our work.
While it’s likely that any type of properly organized real-world experience — balancing a budget, landscaping, performing research — would be valuable to our students, SI Live partnered with socially good companies and startups. This was a personal and pedagogical choice. As an ardent admirer of the field of social enterprise, I hoped students would share an appreciation of the personal stories of success and failure, many of which are quite compelling, as much as the challenge of global problem solving. I hoped that this theme and format would allow students to understand how a business works while considering complex questions of social impact.
In a fall World Course elective called Global Social Innovation, a case study based approach to the field of social innovation, I was pleased at how well our students responded to these ideas and questions. How does Charity: Water raise the standard of living in underdeveloped countries while bringing attention to global crises and remaining financially sustainable? Is it really possible to “eliminate the idea of waste,” as Terracycle believes? How can crowdsourcing turn everyone into a philanthropist — or at least a change maker — as sites like Kiva, GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose suggest? Can game-changing digital tools like DoSomething and Kickstarter empower a new generation not of simple connectedness but awareness, making a difference, giving a damn? SI Live was born of the same big questions, but instead of studying Grameen Bank, Warby Parker or The Future Project, what if students could work for these and others in the industry?
Sounds good in theory; in practice, of course, there were logistical hurdles.
First, how could we find partners willing to give ninth and tenth graders a shot to do real work? We are extremely lucky to benefit from a generous vision and allocation for community engagement and a strong local community of social entrepreneurs (some of whom come from our parent body). I reached out to contacts from Avenues Community Engagement (ACE) acquaintances and friends to discuss the concept and emerged with a handful of candidates. We launched with three brave startups, one courageous mature NGO and an intrepid solo student startup.
Secondly, when would students “go to work”? Within the confines of our schedule and their other classes, students had between three and four hours each week in class, plus another two hours of homework time, to read, meet, research, leave the building, Skype, interview or think deeply.
Finally, what exactly did they do? The breakdown of group and individual assignments, benchmarks and meetings with bosses varied by team. The teacher was more a facilitator in this interaction, continually checking in with all stakeholders, calling meetings (discussions) and gauging progress (assessment). Students recorded their activity in a work tracker shared by all. Aside from several reflections, readings and presentations, their steady “homework” was the internship itself. (We plan to publish some of the final reflections here on OPEN.) Stakeholders agreed that these basic parameters provided the structure, goals and open space to work productively in this format. I prayed for a touchdown.
Aside from the predictable fact that students loved having real internships with “cool” companies, the other most rewarding part of this course was acknowledging its experimental nature and witnessing the students take ownership of the process. Similar to what we have seen in the World Course and other Upper School classes, students have responded energetically and thoughtfully to the challenge of turning an internship into an authentic learning experience in which they are active and accountable. As they do in World Course electives, students argued for their own grades according to a rubric with tasks and aptitudes (if only I had recorded one of these discussions!). The assessment model we co-created is a simple combination of input from self, peer, boss and teacher. Grades were generally (but not uniformly) high and undoubtedly earned.
As discussions and written reflections showed, students learned valuable and at times awkward lessons in professional behavior and “real work”.
Professionals asked for teaching advice; I asked them for managerial advice and students for grading advice. Happily, all of us appreciated the opportunity and resolved to work hard and remain patient as we created the SI Live experience.
This was a wonderful learning journey for all. The students responded well and did some excellent work. At the same time, as with any first iteration of a class, there were certainly areas to improve. Next time I will look for a higher level of consistent rigor in the work by creating more frequent benchmarks. Furthermore I’ll ensure that outcomes at each benchmark are aligned with and employ the design skills from the bootcamp in the first part of class.
*Please note that beginning in the 2016–17 school year, Avenues moved from a four-division school structure with an Early Learning Center (N–Pre-K), Lower School, (K–4), Middle School (5–8) and Upper School (9–12) to a three-division structure with an Early Learning Center (N–K), Lower Division (1–5) and Upper Division (6–12). The Upper Division is further divided into two programs — the middle grades program (6–8) and the upper grades program (9–12).
Originally published at open.avenues.org.
