This week during our group meeting, we were able to come up with quite a few ideas for this ideation phase. We each came up with our own set of ideas individually, shared them collaboratively, and discussed them at length. After doing so, we chose the most viable ideas from our brainstorm and categorized them according to different umbrella categories. One of the main categories that we were able to come up with was a "School-wide Campaign." Under this category we could fit all the other ideas that we had. With this main idea, the other ideas (such as community outreach, curriculum, sharing personal experiences, etc.) fell under it. We felt that a school-wide campaign designed to raise cultural awareness and tolerance would be the best fit for our awareness focus. It will then be fleshed out with some of the minor sub-ideas that we had, from how to address critics to gaining wide support from the community to funding it.
This week, we were all able to successfully meet and went through the entire process together, piecing our individual input as part of the larger whole. This week I feel as though there was no one assignment per individual, rather, the collective contributions of made one intermingled whole.
Unfortunately, finding the time every week where all four of can meet to discuss and progress is proving to still be a challenge and will continue to be a challenge in the coming weeks as I have two weeks of science curriculum trainings (I will be out the second week). Meeting in a group for six continuous weeks is the real challenge here. I am not sure if I would do anything differently though, we are doing fairly well, and everyone is contributing to the best of their ability.
The ideation phase is something that can easily be transferred to the classroom or the even a staff training. For students, sometimes finding solutions to open ended problems where they have to plan everything and explain everything can be a challenge. One great starting point for those students is ideation, especially the 100 idea challenge. By having them come up with as many possible solutions in a short amount of time, we can get their brains to start thinking creatively. They will fill out the first few ideas easily, but may struggle with the other ones. This struggle is essential to the creative process, by struggling they are being forced to make different connections to different areas of their brain. It is actually quite the idea, it is almost as if it is a process forces creativity to begin sprouting. Sometimes limiting yourself to a few ideas also limits how many possibilities you explore.
This same process of ideation can be applied to staff meetings/trainings. When teachers are struggling with how to help a student, ideation can be used to come up with as many ideas as possible. Then by sorting, grouping, and exploring some of them, solutions can be reached that may not have been considered before.
Creativity is thought of as a way to create novel solutions to a problem. Ideation helps to support those novel solutions by forcing people to come up with many ideas, see if they work, and then selecting the viable ones. The more ideas someone comes up with, the less likely they are to be conventional as the conventional ones are likely to be written down as the first ideas. But, it does not always have to be a novel solution to a problem, with creativity also meaning that students need to be able to use many different sources of information to create a solution, ideation can be used to meet that end. If you were to research a specific subject using different resources, you could possibly arrive at a few conventional solutions. But, if you continue to look for new solutions, then you can potentially arrive at a solution that incorporates all of your research in a way that no one else has been able to achieve. This could be especially helpful in the sciences.
This week, we were all able to successfully meet and went through the entire process together, piecing our individual input as part of the larger whole. This week I feel as though there was no one assignment per individual, rather, the collective contributions of made one intermingled whole.
Unfortunately, finding the time every week where all four of can meet to discuss and progress is proving to still be a challenge and will continue to be a challenge in the coming weeks as I have two weeks of science curriculum trainings (I will be out the second week). Meeting in a group for six continuous weeks is the real challenge here. I am not sure if I would do anything differently though, we are doing fairly well, and everyone is contributing to the best of their ability.
The ideation phase is something that can easily be transferred to the classroom or the even a staff training. For students, sometimes finding solutions to open ended problems where they have to plan everything and explain everything can be a challenge. One great starting point for those students is ideation, especially the 100 idea challenge. By having them come up with as many possible solutions in a short amount of time, we can get their brains to start thinking creatively. They will fill out the first few ideas easily, but may struggle with the other ones. This struggle is essential to the creative process, by struggling they are being forced to make different connections to different areas of their brain. It is actually quite the idea, it is almost as if it is a process forces creativity to begin sprouting. Sometimes limiting yourself to a few ideas also limits how many possibilities you explore.
This same process of ideation can be applied to staff meetings/trainings. When teachers are struggling with how to help a student, ideation can be used to come up with as many ideas as possible. Then by sorting, grouping, and exploring some of them, solutions can be reached that may not have been considered before.
Creativity is thought of as a way to create novel solutions to a problem. Ideation helps to support those novel solutions by forcing people to come up with many ideas, see if they work, and then selecting the viable ones. The more ideas someone comes up with, the less likely they are to be conventional as the conventional ones are likely to be written down as the first ideas. But, it does not always have to be a novel solution to a problem, with creativity also meaning that students need to be able to use many different sources of information to create a solution, ideation can be used to meet that end. If you were to research a specific subject using different resources, you could possibly arrive at a few conventional solutions. But, if you continue to look for new solutions, then you can potentially arrive at a solution that incorporates all of your research in a way that no one else has been able to achieve. This could be especially helpful in the sciences.