-
“Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.”
-
Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.
-
You start to get the message Day One. At 9am on your first day of work we throw you a birthday party—with wrapped presents, cake and all kinds of fun. That morning, your family gets the “welcome wagon”—flowers, gifts and a personal note from me and Joe, delivered at home.
Why do we give people a party when they’re leaving a company? That’s not the time to make them feel important! How do we make people feel important the moment they join a company? The idea behind the birthday party is that you’ve arrived at a new place where you belong, you were expected, and you are important.
Even better, when you go to your birthday party, everyone in the room has a lot of different reasons to relate to you. New recruits fill out a “birth certificate,” which details their hobbies, travel experiences, family, schooling, pets, military service, and surprising facts—like a hobby of growing giant pumpkins or playing a particular instrument..
-
Love this idea of throwing people a party when they START at a school, not when they leave!
-
-
-
A Crash Course in Innovation | Edutopia
-
At capacity, SCS will serve 900 students in grades 6-12. Teens learn alongside college role models who are preparing for careers in creative professions.
-
Great synergy possible among 6-12 teens and college students studying for careers in creative professions. Interesting model of Ken Robinson’s “not grouping by date of manufacture.”
-
-
HFLI model emphasizes readiness for college and careers, “but we also want students to become active agents in community redevelopment,”
-
-
Can Innovation Skills Be Learned? | Edutopia
-
- Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questions and a desire to understand more deeply
- Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that are very different from your own
- Associative or integrative thinking
- A bias toward action and experimentation
-
But as an educator and a parent, what I find most significant in this list is that it represents a set of skills and habits of mind that can be nurtured, taught and mentored!
-
“Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic predisposition, it is an active endeavor.
-
what you have learned to do is more essential
-
But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.
-
“Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit . . . Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged.”
-
-
-
Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
-
Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
-
the convergent and the divergent
-
I wonder…are schools pretty good at the convergent, but relatively negligent of the divergent? If so, could this mean we are scoring a “50” in terms of educating “whole people?”
-
-
People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying
-
Educational transformation in ways that enhance and amplify the blurring of lines between “school” and “life” seems to be an idea worth pursuing for a lifetime!
-
-
Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility
-
Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”
-
This paragraph about sculpting and hard work reminds me of “Grit” from Jonah Lehrer’s talk on 99%. Great connection to Drive, Mindset, Talent Code, Element, etc.
-
-
Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality
-
Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted
-
Creative people are humble and proud at the same time
-
Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping
-
Creative people are both rebellious and conservative
-
In innovation, you have to play a less safe game
-
Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well
-
Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
-
Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable
-
-
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity – Harvard Business Review
-
If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.
-
-
Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums | Video on TED.com
-
Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In Mathematics
-
standards stress not only procedural skill but also conceptual understanding, to make sure students are learning and absorbing the critical information they need to succeed at higher levels – rather than the current practices by which many students learn enough to get by on the next test, but forget it shortly thereafter, only to review again the following year.
-
high school standards call on students to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges
-
develop a depth of understanding and ability to apply mathematics to novel situations
-
high school standards emphasize mathematical modeling, the use of mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, understand them better, and improve decisions
-
“Modeling links classroom mathematics and statistics to everyday life, work, and decision-making. It is the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions. Quantities and their relationships in physical, economic, public policy, social and everyday situations can be modeled using mathematical and statistical methods. When making mathematical models, technology is valuable for varying assumptions, exploring consequences, and comparing predictions with data.”
-
-
Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In English Language Arts
-
range of subjects
-
Research—both short, focused projects (such as those commonly required in the workplace) and longer term in depth research —is emphasized throughout the standards but most prominently in the writing strand since a written analysis and presentation of findings is so often critical.
-
students gain, evaluate, and present increasingly complex information, ideas, and evidence through listening and speaking as well as through media.
-
Formal presentations are one important way such talk occurs, but so is the more informal discussion that takes place as students collaborate to answer questions, build understanding, and solve problems.
-
standards help prepare students for real life experience at college and in 21st century careers
-
-
Colleges Awakening to the Opportunities of Data Mining – NYTimes.com
-
Social and Emotional Curriculum: Sharing Your Gift | Edutopia
-
“Happiness comes from giving, not getting . . . to get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy we must scatter it.”
-
This article on sharing your gift seems intimately connected to PBL and the future of schools to me. If classroom work was done more to share gifts, innovation, enhancements and less as just-a-completion-of-an-assignment-only-the-teacher-will-see, then the level of engagement would seem to rise dramatically. The possibility for solutions-oriented education would rise dramatically, too.
-
-
moving from “me” to “we.”
-
signposts that can mark the way
-
Could these also be some of the signposts for school transformation to a more 21C model?
-
-
-
10 Things in School That Should Be Obsolete | MindShift
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
1
it's about learning 