This week the Innovation Lab team spent time polishing curriculum design, and thinking about the most efficient ways of updating and sharing our newest ideas with parents and faculty.

In Humanities, we have discussed and created rough drafts of documents outlining our projects, our content, and our standards.  The projects allow for creativity while providing scaffolding to ensure student success.  For one of our last projects, for example, students are asked to research a problem facing our community.  Either individually or in groups, students must then outline a plan to solve the problem.  Students can choose to work with an existing organization, or create their own!  Our vision is to share project documents with our students early into our units, so that students have time to brainstorm ideas with their teachers and their peers.  For each of our marking periods, Humanities has created three solid projects.  Our goal now is to share these projects with students and GHS faculty.  Their feedback is essential in helping us create the best project based learning possible.  We will also run a little “tuning protocol” exercise among ourselves.  This not only improves our work, but helps us practice skills that we expect our students to master.  Our goal is to create an Executive Summary and book of resources that will be used as the Innovation Lab “toolbox” for teachers.  We will include projects, reflection templates, content standards, and other important information.  We need this document to be user friendly so that it is accessible to parents, students, and teachers alike.

Last week we enjoyed the success of our Trailblazers Event.  Kids have reported back to us with good news.  They not only enjoyed the learning experience and group dynamics within Innovation Lab, they also feel like we are really starting to form a community.  It was an invigorating and promising experience.  Our goal now is to create a similar opportunity for the parents of Innovation Lab.  Look for upcoming news about our Innovation Lab Parent Orientation Night.  We would like to officially welcome parents to our learning community.  During this event we will share projects and student videos.  Our goal is to get parents feeling as comfortable and as excited about next year as the students are!

Keep your eyes open for reports from Dr. Sarah Goldin who is attending the Deeper Learning Conference at HTH next week. It is about time, Sarah!  The rest of the team will be hard at work planning the physical space of Innovation Lab for next year.  We will certainly review the creative ideas of our students and work with our school administrators to make them a reality.

Innovation Lab Humanities Team