Monday, April 8, 2019

Student Innovation Teams- Part II: High School


Last week in Part I: Middle School, I explained how Minnetonka has added secondary student innovation teams over the past few years to our annual crowdsourced idea hunt  (for more on this, see Innovation is Now Our Strategic Plan). This week I will highlight the work of our high school Student Innovation Team which recently presented to our School Board. The group is advised by Ann Kaste, Information and Digital Learning Coordinator and Nicole Snedden, Innovation Coordinator and Design for Learning Project Leader. One of my sons is on the high school team this year, so I have been able to hear his perspective, too.


As you will learn from the video of their presentation to the School Board, the high school innovation team is split into small groups. The group presenting was tasked with redesigning a newly created open space after the removal of an old locker bay. They used the Human Centered Design process to get to the final design pictured. They identified their challenge with “How Might We..?” statements:
  • How Might We design a quiet space that would allow for classes to remain uninterrupted while others were using this space?
  • How Might We construct the space to not only foster quietness, but also collaboration?
  • How Might We create a space that allows for easy maintenance and vigilance?   

The students met with different focus groups such as hall paras, custodians, students, and teachers. They learned about all sorts of concerns and hopes from the groups they interviewed, from the ease of cleaning the space, to the visibility of and collaboration opportunities for students meeting there, to the sound levels and the quality of the furniture. After gathering all this input and feedback, the students began to prototype options. 

They created two different prototypes and brought them to Intereum who designed a space using the student feedback. The final design includes movable walls that have acoustic panels to eliminate sound and whiteboard panels. The students explain in their proposal that “the panels allow the space to be separated and relatively private, but still allow for enough supervision that kids are kept safe. The walls also include school colors to blend in with the space around it”

The group applied for and was awarded a Design for Learning grant. Last week they were selecting fabric colors for the furniture. It should be done later this year and the team as well as all their classmates will be able to use the new space. Some quotes from their presentation show just how much the students learned from this process:

“Change takes work,” said Kristine. “It takes time, revisions, empathy… [I’ve learned] what it means to get things done. 

Lauren said she “improved my public speaking and presentation skills [and] learned through our own mistakes.” 

Colette explained that this work “pushed me to learn the value and benefits of seeing other people’s viewpoints.”

Nate described how “empathy is really important to the Human Design Process… Something’s that really stuck with me is the importance of talking with people and understanding their opinions and seeing where they come from...this will definitely help me later in life working on various projects… in college or future job. Empathy is the basis of everything.”

In addition to the locker bay remodel, student innovation teams at our high school are working on a variety of other ideas from improving the parking lot to therapy dogs. As I mentioned last week, students are engaging in motivating, real work meeting multiple dimensions on our Minnetonka Teaching & Learning Framework during this process: real-world learning, communication, collaboration, creativity, authentic problem solving, use of technology for learning, and more. All students, not just here in Minnetonka, can have these opportunities. Districts outside ours are partnering with Minnetonka to do both crowd-sourced innovation and establish student innovation teams.

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