Setting Sail

     We had our first meeting about our Innovation Space today with the teachers that will be part of our first project.  Our Board TelT lead the discussion about what project-based learning is and how our space could be used for an endeavor like this.  The teachers had many questions about logistics and how we could make this work with 118 students across 5 classes from 5 different subject areas.  What was incredible about the meeting was that we were able to come up with a topic and a question for students to base their project on.  What we have decided is important is to ensure that students receive a tutorial about group work and how to be an effective group member, to have built in checkpoints and targets so students can manage their time, and finally the team needs to work out the assessment piece so that students have a clear understanding of how they will be assessed.  As ideas started to swirl, there were some questions that we simply don't have answers to at this point i.e.  What about the kids that can't handle group work or the project-based learning?  What if a group doesn't want something built for their project and they have a group member that is a builder?  How often do the classes need to get together?  Who assesses and how?  What do we need in the room to start working asap?  How do we get buy-in from the kids?  As the questions are difficult to answer, we quickly realized that we need to go and reflect on these questions and come up with some solutions before the kids can even be told about the project.  This caused us to switch gears to the space itself and what needs to be in the space before we can go in.  (see photo)
     Before students and even introduced to the topic, we want to present each class with an introduction/sales pitch on this pilot project.  We are hoping our Director, Principal, TelT and Coach can be a part of the promotion piece to legitimize the importance of their participation and build some excitement around it.  Our project topic is around the UN Global Goals and the question we want our students to answer (at this point) is:  What are the Global Goals, the Catholic Teachings, and how can we promote them to others?  There are 17 Global Goals identified, we will survey students to see which goal students would like to promote and group them accordingly.
    Our next steps at this point are:  create the student pre survey, prepare the promotion piece, start to order the most important materials from our list and begin to furnish the space with what we need, and set another meeting date in two weeks.

Our Brainstorming: