How might we engage teachers, the people who know best, into a robust conversation that results in ideas for the Innovation Plan?
Giving a voice to classroom teachers has shown to be a key variable for success. To help the partnership between Ball State University (BSU) and Muncie community Schools (MCS), a team of Emerging Media Design and Development graduate students, Debbie Parker, Amy Gibbs, and Kate Bramlett, created a plan to facilitate interactive sessions with all Muncie Schools’ teachers and staffs to generate ideas.
The 90-minute interactive sessions included two parts. First, participants listed strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats specific to their schools, also known as a SWOT analysis. Second, participants divided into groups and played Aha! The Game, developed by the graduate students. Ninety-eight educators from 10 Muncie schools participated in the sessions.
Aha!: The Game was created by a team of Emerging Media Design and Development graduate students, Debbie Parker, Amy Gibbs, and Kate Bramlett, to help facilitate interactive school-improvement brainstorming sessions with school teachers and staff.
The teachers were provided with a situation that would remove restrictive problems and free creative thinking. After reviewing their assigned situation, teachers were given 25 minutes to create a solution prototype to one of the seven themes identified during our first session.
Six of the seven themes were chosen by teachers, and 10 solution prototypes were created.
The graduate team distilled all of the teachers’ ideas from Aha! The Game into seven key themes. Many of the themes identified from these sessions were common problems found in most schools across America. Although there were a few innovative ideas generated from teachers, it appeared they needed a different framework to elevate their creative thinking. The graduate students decided to return to schools to first validate the themes synthesized from the data with a short survey and conduct a second design thinking session with teachers.
