Join us
Saturday, May 21, &
Monday, June 20, through
Wednesday, June 22

Join us Saturday, May 21, and Monday, June 20, through Wednesday, June 22

WHAT IS THE INNOVATION INSTITUTE?

The Innovation Institute @ LREI  is a four-day deep dive design thinking experience focused on educational innovation. The Institute is hosted by the Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School and co-facilitated by LREI faculty and our partners at The Design Gym. In its third year, the Institute provides school-based teams of 3-5 people with an opportunity to learn design thinking by doing design thinking as they address important school mission-focused opportunities and challenges. The Institute will take place over the course of four days. A single day introduction and ideation session will take place on Saturday, May 21st, followed by additional research that the teams will conduct together back at their schools over a three-week period. On June 20th, we’ll reconvene for three consecutive days where teams will collaboratively turn their research into insights, ideas and a plan of action.

THE GOALS FOR THE INNOVATION INSTITUTE

School-based design teams will identify mission aligned opportunities and prototype for:

  • School-wide initiatives,
  • Team/departmental solutions, and
  • Individual action plans

INNOVATION INSTITUTE FEES

The per person cost for the Institute is $500. Early bird pricing of $400 per person will run through March 31.

Register for the Institute

Overview of the Institute

Click sections below for more detailed information

PREPARING TO LAUNCH

Before teams come together in May, we ask that they engage in in a 45-minute design thinking activity at their school site. Ideally, this activity should be run with a variety of school stakeholders present. The goal of this activity is to identify and then group pressing and relevant mission focused questions. A subset of these questions will become the focus for the team that attends the Institute. You can find some resources for running this session here.

LAUNCH: The Kick-off and Examine Phase
During our first kick-off day on May 21st, all of the participants come together to begin the process of building the Institute learning community and to begin important preliminary work. In addition to aligning the participant’s expectations, teams explore the questions raised in the pre-Institute activity and through a number of creative exercises they refine the set of questions to those that will become the focus of the team’s work during the Institute. The day will run from 9:00AM to 4:00PM.
GETTING INTO ORBIT: The Research Phase
As we near the end of the first session each team will receive a list of recommended research methods to try back at their schools over the three weeks between our first and second session. Our hope is that each team returns to their school site energized and excited to collect data that will further their work when we return to the Institute in June. The primary focus of this research is to build empathy for and with the users for whom teams are designing.
MISSION CONTROL: The Understand & Ideation Phases
We open up the first of our June sessions with a huge welcome back. The teams are excited to reconnect, share out what they’ve discovered over the last three weeks and settle into the work that will be our focus for the next three days. The teams work together to find trends in their research, identify points of tension and areas of potential opportunity for our upcoming ideation sessions. The first day closes out with teams creating refined problem statements and identifying insights that will help them reimagine how their problem might be approached. The day will run from 9:00AM to 4:00PM. We begin the next day with activities that align team problem statements with  “Need based ideation” or brainstorming for the purpose of solving a particular friction or opportunity point versus simply just generating ideas. In this phase, we push the teams to think about their ideas in terms of school-wide initiatives, team/departmental concepts, and ideas for individuals. Before we break for our customary Institute dinner, teams engage in a prototyping “dash” and share out the results with the other teams who will provide feedback. This leads into an evening of food, drinks and fun to celebrate the work that has been accomplished so far. The day will run from 9:30AM to 8:30PM.
RE-ENTRY: Experiment and Distill
During our final day we’ll need to make sure we fully understand the ideas that we’ve created, analyze the feedback received from the first prototyping sessions and begin a second prototyping round to better bring these ideas to life. Teams make a final presentation, which includes their post-Institute action plan. Through social media and periodic updates, the Institute teams will continue to connect and provide each other support as they work in their projects in their schools.

Our Partner: The Design Gym

What We Believe In

At The Design Gym, we think everyone should be passionate about the work they do. They should be empowered to reimagine how the world they live in could be better, for themselves and their company. Work should be both independent and collaborative, balance the quantitative and the qualitative; visual and visceral; provocative and actionable. The foundation of organizations should be in the needs of the people it’s serving. Only once those needs are understood can strategic decisions be made. Ideas should live and breathe. Then they should be prototyped, revised and remade so that they can really live. And anyone (yes anyone!) can come up with the next great idea. Schools will very soon start relying on communities to solve their biggest problems and plan their futures. Those communities will exist both within and outside the walls of the school. Most importantly, work should be fun. Otherwise…what’s the point?

Register for the Institute

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about the Institute.

Contact Us

ideation resources:

You may have a favorite ideation/brainstorming/question finding activity that you like to use. If so go for it! The main thing is to use the pre-Institute session to generate a set of idea/questions that have meaning in your school content. These ideas/questions will be used by your team to identify a specific area of focus for the Innovation Institute.

The faculty at LREI used an adapted version of the affinity mapping protocol that generated ideas from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. Feel free to use and adapt to your community.

If you want to try a new activity, we are big fans of many of the thinking tool that you can find at gamestorming.com.

From ideo.org:

From the Stanford d.school:

From the National School Reform Faculty site:

Innovation Institute Team Tools