To bring innovation to education, schools should learn from companies
Before investing heavily, start with a simple design challenge
[X-posted at LinkedIn here]
Much ink has been spilled about how to innovate in the education space to better align schools with real world demands. Even at some of the best K12 schools, students are simply not being exposed to the skills, mindsets, and experiences the adult world will require of them shortly, be that in a company or freelance context. Universities are at least beginning to address the problem by incorporating more real world problem solving and immersive collaborations with external partners, even if they still overindex on the traditional content transfer around which their model is built and which many professors frankly prefer. In short: primary, secondary, and tertiary education all have a long way to go in this regard.
It’s less often noted in this context that industry faces the same problem. Companies and NGOs around the world need to train employees in creativity, soft skills, cross-cultural communication, and entrepreneurial mindset to improve work outcomes and culture. Companies investing in this type of transformation — not just “digital” but cultural — are already reaping rewards, and innovation agencies can barely keep up with the demand. Increasingly they are being hired not to develop a single product or service but to build innovation capacity across the full organization, from C-suite on down. Companies see this, rightly, as a long-term investment in themselves, ideally resulting in a customized, in-house alternative to outsourcing creative solutions to these same agencies.
Why aren’t K12 schools learning from this model? Why is it that the most creative and exciting educational models and learning activities — summer camps, afterschool clubs, special semester programs — take place out of school? Even within school, the “cool stuff” is increasingly happening in weeklong project blocks that disrupt the “regular” school year to do the type of project that, by now, should be standard.
The answer, of course, is that disrupting school toward a more integrated, project-oriented model is hard. Between the logistics of scheduling longer work blocks, integrating classes, and training content-focused teachers in process-driven approaches like design and entrepreneurship (nevermind how to work together in cohorts, or the talent gap in the teaching profession), you might as well just start a new school. (Another answer is that schools, as institutions of formal education, haven’t learned from or effectively collaborated with informal educational models like camps, clubs, teams, and gaming platforms. But that’s another post.)
But practically speaking, we can’t just start new schools; we’ve got to transform existing ones. Companies realize this and have discovered a process: start small, create a safe space where innovation can flourish, gain momentum, and find practical ways to spread the virus, led by intrapreneurs and early adopters, and supported by external innovation experts. Alternately they sponsor innovation competitions which end up serving a similar function. Schools are trying this in varying ways, but here’s my preference: teach innovation to students and teachers by *practicing it* with professional organizations in the format of a design challenge.
The challenge — which runs participants through at least one full design cycle to research and redefine a problem and ideate and prototype a solution — is an ideal vehicle for school innovation for three reasons. First, it provides a clear but flexible structure to tackle problems and experiment: it can be a short or ongoing event, living inside or outside a class, and mix participants of different ages, facilitated by experts or by students themselves. Second, it offers benefits in both process and product: each phase builds various of these desired skills and behaviors (which can then transfer to other classes and contexts); meanwhile the solutions can then be implemented or further tested, give the community a tangible sense of progress, and often unlock other valuable insights about that school’s operations or culture. Finally, challenges are fun: adequately framed and facilitated, the blend of cooperation, competition, and creativity in pursuit of a tangible result brings out the best in students and adults.
We’ve been using this model at Avenues: The World School and have seen results. Our Social Innovation Program emerged organically after an initial design challenge experiment four years earlier. Design 4 Impact (D4i), a student-run startup, supports classroom projects with trainings in discrete design phases or skills, and hosts public-facing one day challenges for internal and external students. These events not only build our internal capacity for innovation but deliver insights and prototypes to the Pro Partners with whom we work. For details, here is a breakdown of a recent 1-day Challenge at our Sao Paulo campus.
Obviously, schools cannot simply up and do this. Running such events requires capacity building in design thinking, event hosting, communications. Our challenges are student-run, but they needn’t be to serve as effective trainings; nor must external Pro Partners be involved. Schools can start by running a simple 70 minute turnkey challenge (courtesy of Stanford d.school, which also hosts a dedicated K-12 Lab) with a small group, and then evolve as they wish. There’s no excuse not to do this.
Like companies, schools can also bring in outside organizations — like D4i or the adult-run Design Gym or other consultants — to run challenges for youth and adults alike, and follow up with materials and plans to more deeply and broadly apply design thinking, entrepreneurship, and other innovation methodologies. Or they can use a turnkey program like the brilliant Design For Change to bring in a ready-made, age-appropriate approach for middle school. Or they can just cold call Pros: in our experience, design firms in NYC like ?What If! Innovation and SY Partners have generously participated in challenges and lessons. Even without explicit “schools” programs, it’s what they do, and they are happy to spread the virus. So before building out the research and design space they probably need, schools should simply summon the courage, create space to experiment, and ask for help. More broadly, they should recognize the ways in which they can and should learn from industry to innovate.
