Tips For Ideating

Get Your Ideas Rolling

The Teachers Guild x School Retool

Published in

The Teachers Guild

3 min readJul 30, 2015

By The Teachers Guild Team

This is where the “rubber meets the road”, as we say. Here are some tips to help you craft ideas to add to the Ideate phase:

1. Let’s Get Tangible

We want to hear EXACTLY how your solution works. Make sure you’re addressing the 5Ws.

Who: Who is your solution intended for? Other teachers? Students? Parents? The school community?
What: What (in one or two sentences) is your solution all about? Describe your solution in a way that anyone can understand.
When: How much time does your solution take to implement? To get off the ground? Make sure you’re helping people understand the capacity required to implement your solution.
Where: Is this a solution intended for classrooms? The teacher lounge? Hallways? What conditions are required from the environment to help make this idea work? Under what context does your solution flourish?
Why: Why does this solution have the potential to solve the Collaboration question? What is its intended impact?

2. Adaptability

How might your solution change based on different contexts? As you know, no student is exactly the same. No school is exactly the same. Explain how your solution can be adapted to meet the needs of different contexts.

3. Scalability

How might your solution scale? Is this something that has the potential to reach many other classrooms or schools?

4. Shoot for the Moon

Don’t hold back on those ideas you think are “impossible”. With all brainstorms, we want to encourage even the wildest of ideas. The Ideate phase is the time to exercise your out-of-the box thinking. Post any and all ideas — even the ones you think are “impossible.” This isn’t just design thinking — it’s radical thinking.

5. Demonstrate Potential for Impact

Address how your idea aligns to the Collaboration question. Make sure to add in a section about how your solution helps to create a culture of innovation within the context of a classroom or school.

6. Half Baked Ideas Are Welcome (In Fact, They’re Encouraged)

Right now is not the time to be a perfectionist. It’s time to get out all your ideas — as weird, zany, or unsure as you may be. We’re here (as is the rest of the community) to help coach your ideas to excellence.