Monday, April 1, 2019

Student Innovation Teams- Part I of II: Middle School

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About eight years ago Minnetonka moved from traditional strategic planning annually done by a representative committee to crowdsourcing ideas from all employees to gather and rank needs and ideas--read more in a previous post, Innovation is Now Our Strategic Plan. Over the past few years we have started getting students involved in this process, too. Three years ago our high school launched a Student Innovation Team and two years ago these teams began at our middle school. Recently, both levels of Student Innovation Teams presented to our School Board about their work. There was so much content presented I decided to post about it in two parts--this week an overview of the middle school students’ work and next the high school.

As you can see in the video of their presentations, both middle schools have student innovation teams that meet regularly to identify, brainstorm, and come up with solutions to problems affecting their classmates and school. They learn about and use Human Centered Design which is grounded in empathy throughout this process. Students immerse themselves in the problems by interviewing and surveying classmates, teachers and other stakeholders to work toward a possible solution. After ideation, students prototype and test out possible solutions, then revise and repeat the process testing iterations. Students work cooperatively with one another in groups and communicate their efforts and progress. Throughout this process, students are engaging in motivating, real work meeting multiple dimensions on our Minnetonka Teaching & Learning Framework: real-world learning, communication, collaboration, creativity, authentic problem solving, use of technology for learning, and more.

The student innovation team at Minnetonka Middle School West is named the WISH Team- West Innovation Student Hackers Team. It is led by Dr. Paula Hoff, Principal, Sara Hunt, Instructional Technology Coach, and Lisa Reed, Tonka Coders and Makers Teacher on Special Assignment. One of the projects they showcased in the video (watch here) was their work with Moving Minds, a branch of Gopher Sport, designing classroom furniture products that are comfortable and  allow movement. Students helped provide feedback and design suggestions on products. Students took a field trip to the headquarters and were able to and tour the facility, seeing the products they helped work on and meeting staff working to name the product, make a logo and photo shoot to bring it to market.

At Minnetonka Middle School East, over thirty students in grades 7 and 8 are part of the student innovation team. It is coached by Lisa Reed and Julie Baeb, one of our Innovation consultants. There are seven groups of students who work on team projects/tasks as part of the student innovation team. Students have worked to improve the lunchroom experience, redesign learning spaces, product design, and more. The group highlighted in the video (watch here), named the Innovation X Team, tackled ways to provide their fellow classmates with brain and body breaks throughout the day.

As Eric Schneider, Associate Superintendent and Nicole Snedden, Innovation Coordinator and Design for Learning Project Leader stated in the opening of the presentation, we continue to embrace innovation as a strategy. By engaging not only our staff but our students, we are helping all those involved in education be change agents. This will improve the educational experience for everyone and lead to even more innovative solutions.

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