Riverdale Country School
Project Title
For core support of the Teachers Guild
Date
Sep. 12, 2019
Duration
24 months
Description
While there is broad consensus that change efforts in schools are needed in order to improve the quality and equity of education, this change is often incredibly complex, requires shifts in personal beliefs and behaviors, and is difficult to get started. To navigate this complexity, the adults who serve them must get good at making change and collaborating in order to do so. One promising approach to building this capacity is the use of human-centered design, which empowers teachers and principals to act as designers who are better able to problem-solve for their students. Together with an intentional focus on building relationships, community, and positive school culture, this approach can help teachers and school leaders develop the collective self-efficacy needed to make change. The Teachers Guild, a professional learning community of teachers, and School Retool, a fellowship program for schools principals, use human-centered design methods as core to their approaches to professional development and are now joining forces to build a coherent program for teachers and principals. They reach 15,000 educators, over 850 schools, and over 350 districts, which together serve over 650,000 students.
Website
Project Title
For planning and early work related to launching a design challenge related to improving the parent-teacher connection
Date
Jun. 14, 2018
Duration
7 months
Description
The recent Learning Heroes report, Parents 2017: Unleashing Their Power and Potential (funded by the Corporation), highlighted the disconnects between school and parent expectations for students and their learning experiences, and the extent to which gaps in communication, perception and partnership between educators and parents result in unmet student needs. The report underscored the importance of understanding parents’ goals, interests, emotions, and perceptions so that educators and schools can be true partners in raising children to be happy and productive adults. However, parents and teachers have very little opportunity to create ideas together for how to better meet student needs. The Teachers Guild aims to provide the community, coaching and tools to make the Learning Heroes research actionable, by creating a program that unites teachers and parents to co-create solutions that better meet student needs. They propose accomplishing this by running a year-long Parent-Teacher Collaboration design challenge to activate educators and parents in designing new ideas for better connecting parents and teachers, which schools and districts can then test. This grant is for implementation planning for the design challenge.
Website
Project Title
For support to the Teachers Guild to implement a project that would strengthen parent-teacher collaboration
Date
Sep. 13, 2018
Duration
9 months
Description
According to the Learning Heroes report, Parents 2017: Unleashing Their Power and Potential, there is a disconnect between parents and teachers regarding student academic performance. We also know that parents and teachers have few effective communication channels or opportunities to collaborate and co-design support systems on behalf of student learning. The Teachers Guild, which began as an initiative within IDEO’s Design for Learning Studio, is a network of educators using design thinking to solve issues in the field of education. Since 2015 The Teachers Guild has run twelve design challenges on topics like reimagining parent-teacher conferences, college and career pathways, and STEM learning with partners such as the Reach Higher Initiative and 100kin10. With prior support from the Corporation, The Teachers Guild created a plan for the “Strengthening Parent-Teacher Collaboration” project aimed at solving this communication challenge. With this grant, The Teachers Guild will embark on implementing their project, executing a national awareness campaign, launching the Parent-Teacher Design Challenge, and creating a solutions fund that will offer support to parent-teacher design teams with leading solutions.
Website
Project Title
For a project of the nonprofit initiative The Teachers Guild (housed at Riverdale), supporting the launch of in-person Teachers Guild chapters in three districts and the design and launch of a teacher fellowship on innovation and integration (as one of th
Date
Jun. 01, 2017
Duration
0 months
Description
Amidst the plethora of current innovations in education, teachers lament that many such innovations are created outside of the classroom—that is, with teachers as recipients rather than authors. Teachers are designing creative ways to engage and inspire their students on a daily basis, but with limited pathways to integrate beyond the classroom walls, their creative leadership often goes unseen, their expertise goes unrecognized, and the potential impact of teacher-driven innovations is reduced. The Teachers Guild, incubated in IDEO’s Design for Learning studio and now operating as a nonprofit initiative under the aegis of Riverdale Country School and Plussed LLC, was formed in 2015 to overcome these barriers, launching a member-led community of teachers. The Guild provides an online platform and facilitated creative leadership experiences to support teachers in designing better solutions for students’ evolving needs, creating systemic change for and from their classrooms. With the support of this grant, the Guild will pursue two strands of work: (1) partner with local school districts to complement the Guild’s online platform with in-person experiences through three local Guild chapters; and (2) design and launch a teacher Fellowship that links teachers, principals, and district leaders around the adoption of promising innovations and helps top-rated teacher-innovators expand the reach of their solutions.