News and Opportunities for EDU-Nerds
Local
Last Fall Rhode Island’s new education Commissioner, Ken Wagner, joined us and spoke at our screening of the edu-documentary Most Likely to Succeed. The film stresses how little our education system has changed from industrial age model, and showcases how an innovative school is preparing students for the future. The Commissioner’s speech (and subsequent work) has well aligned to our mission at the BIF Student Experience Lab. Comissioner Wagner is working to empower schools and communities to rethink the way they engage students to prepare them as 21st century problem solvers. With over a decade of experience in developing innovative models with education leaders, teachers, and students, our organization is very excited by the Commissioner’s new School and Family Empowerment Act. The act allows public schools throughout Rhode Island the opportunity to apply to be an Empowerment School, which gives the school increased flexibility to experiment with new models to better prepare students.
News
Equity has become a huge topic in the world of education, and for good reason. At the SXL, we agree that education is the civil rights issue of our time. Dismantling the deep rooted economic and racial inequality of our education system is a huge endeavor, and one we must work on together (if not to prepare our the next generation to solve it). Bringing equity in our classrooms is of the utmost importance, and will have profound impacts on our society — but how do we get there? Although there is no silver bullet solution, there are many ways educators can promote equity in their classrooms. The article Take Action for Equity in Education lists several possibilities for doing so. Given our work in empowering students, teachers, and community members as designers, we are pleased to see the article highlight the importance of bringing these key stakeholders into the decision-making process on education.
Technology
We have been very interested in where teachers are finding resources to use in their classrooms. During our School Hackers work, a platform which showcases educators’ inventive hacks, we discovered that many educators were using websites like pinterest for new ideas. This article recently published by Education Week affirms through data that many educators are using websites like Pinterest to find resources to improve their practice (in this case for Common Core). It is interesting to see the data on where teachers are turning for ideas and tools. Are the places in these data sheets the same places you are looking for resources? What is it about social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook that make good platforms for finding resources?
Opportunities
Ideo’s Teacher’s Guild is taking applications for Teacher Fellows! If you are an educator interested in design thinking, this is a great summer opportunity. Fellows will work in a team in order to design new opportunities for empowering educators as designers. Teachers will have the chance to learn from a cohort of other educators and Teachers Guild staff in order to learn and share best practices in human-centered design. We are a proud partner of the Teacher’s Guild, and are also working to empower educators as designers. We are excited by this opportunity for educators, and although The Teacher’s Guild is primarily looking for educators around the Bay area, they are willing to take educators elsewhere. We’d love to see a teacher in our network join the collaborative!
Thank you for tuning in to this week’s news and opportunities. Have any questions or thoughts about the above articles or our work? Please leave us a comment or email louie@bif.is. We look forward to sharing more stories from around the education world with you. In the meantime follow us on twitter @bifsxl for more Student Experience Lab updates.
