How to Turn Your Classroom into an Idea Factory Culture Design Thinking Teaching Strategies Brightworks School Students building a cafe at Brightworks School in San Francisco. By Suzie Boss The following suggestions for turning K-12 classrooms into innovation spaces come from Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, published in July by Solution Tree. Why Schools Should Help Students Find Their Passion "Many people spend their entire lives doing things they don't really care for" and "endure their lives" says reknowned creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson in a talk for the School of Life on finding our purpose and following our passion. Robinson—who is known for speaking out against our highly standardized, one-size-fits-all education system that follows a "linear mode of production" and steers workers toward filling slots at companies so our economy can "beat China"—says the problem with this system is that humans are hard wired to use our imaginations and produce new things. When we find ourselves doing things we aren't passionate about, we are, unsurprisingly, pretty miserable. As always, Robinson has plenty of fascinating anecdotes about creativity and learning, but towards the end of his talk (around the 46:00 mark) he shares a story that's especially relevant for those students—and their parents—heading to college in a few weeks.
Outline for a New Pedagogical Framework Education is one of the most fertile fields for innovation. There is a continuous effort by the community to improve the pedagogy and think of new ways of reaching out to students in newer and better ways. And yet, the education system is among the most archaic, slow-to-change creatures in India (and albeit in a slightly well-dressed manner, in the West too). One explanation to this contradiction is that the large mass of people that comprise the education system are not the same dedicated, creative, not to mention smart people that are at the vanguard of creative life-changing, transformative education.