Innovation Centre

Platform
for
Creativity, Critical Thinking,
Collaborated Effort (C3)

VISION
To identify the inherent potential in every student, Inspire,
Motivate and Nurture them to be competitive in the
transforming Smart Environment .

Mission
1 Enhance thinking and communication skills (both
written& oral)
2 Promote and Pursue
- Design Thinking
- Team work/collaboration
3) Apply knowledge of Math, English Science, Civics etc.,
learnt to
deal/meet real world challenges

4) Encourage /Source collaborative projects to Explore

/Exploit
creativity

Design and Innovation

Design by its own nature is creative, collaborative,
multidisciplinary
The methodology of how design is learnt by hands on experience
can make a difference to the process of learning different
subjects in schools.
Design process involves knowledge gathering, analysis,
discovery, and conceptualization resulting in a problem solving
activity and this in turn leads to experiential learning.
Design can bring sensitivity and awareness to Indian Arts,
Crafts, Culture and Environment.
Design can help students develop values, attitudes, sensorial
skills and critical thinking.
Design can make the students realize their creative and
innovative potentials.

Philosophy
Design thinking should be integrated into the school
curriculum at different stages .
Design should be used as a medium to teach subjects.
Design as a method for teaching? or Teaching Design as a
subject?
This will enable students to develop values, attitudes,
sensorial skills and critical thinking.
(The intention is to offer avenues that are creative and
innovative)

Big 10 Ideas for Better Schools

Improving Education through Innovation

Students:
1.

Engage:Project-Based Learning

2.

Connect:Integrated Studies

3.

Share:Cooperative Learning

4.

Expand:Comprehensive Assessment

Teachers:
5. Coach:Intellectual and Emotional Guide
6. Learn:Teaching as Apprenticeship

Schools:
7. Adopt:Technology
8. Reorganize:Resources

Community:
9. Involve:Parents

Engage
Project-Based Learning
Students go beyond the textbook to study
* Complex topics based on real-world issues - such as the
water quality in their
communities or the history of their town.
* Analyzing information from multiple sources- Internet
,interviews with experts.

Project-Based classwork
* More demanding than traditional book-based instructionwhere students may just
memorize facts from a single source.
* Students utilize original documents and data, mastering
principles covered in
traditional courses but learning them in more meaningful
ways.

Connect
Integrated Studies
Study should enable students to reach
across traditional disciplines and explore their
relationships - History, literature, and art can be
interwoven and studied together.
Integrated studies enable subjects to be
investigated using many forms of knowledge and
expression, as literacy skills are expanded beyond
the traditional focus on words and numbers to
include graphics, color, music, and motion.

Share
Cooperative Learning
Working together on project teams and guided
by trained teachers
- students learn the skills of collaborating,
managing emotions, and resolving conflicts in
groups.
Each member of the team is responsible for
learning the subject matter as well as helping
teammates to learn.
Cooperative learning develops social and
emotional skills, providing a valuable foundation for
their lives as workers, family members, and citizens.

Expand
Comprehensive Assessment
Assessment should be expanded beyond
simple test scores - instead provide a detailed,
continuous profile of student strengths and
weaknesses.
Teachers, parents, and individual students
can closely monitor academic progress and use
the assessment to focus on areas that need
improvement.
Tests should be an opportunity for
students to learn from their mistakes, retake the
test, and improve their scores.

Coach
Intellectual and Emotional Guide
The most important role for teachers is to
coach and guide students through the learning
process, giving special attention to nurturing a
student's interests and self-confidence.
As technology provides more curricula,
teachers can spend less time lecturing entire
classes and more time mentoring students as
individuals and tutoring them in areas in which
they need help or seek additional challenges.

Learn
Teaching as Apprenticeship
Preparation for a teaching career
should follow the model of apprenticeships, in
which novices learn from experienced
masters.
Student teachers should spend less time
in lecture halls learning educational theory
and more time in classrooms, working directly
with students and master teachers.
Teaching skills should be continually
sharpened, with time to take courses, attend
conferences, and share lessons and tips with
other teachers, online and in person.

Adopt
Technology
The intelligent use of technology can transform and
improve almost every aspect of school, modernizing the
nature of curriculum - student assignments, parental
connections, and administration.
Online curricula now include lesson plans, simulations,
and demonstrations for classroom use and review
With online connections, students can share their work
and communicate more productively and creatively.
Teachers can maintain records and assessments using
software tools and stay in close touch with students and
families via email and voicemail.
Schools can reduce administrative costs by using
technology tools, as other fields have done, and provide
more funds for the classroom.

Reorganize
Resources
Resources of time, money, and facilities must be
restructured
The school day should allow for more in-depth project work
beyond the 45-minute period.
Schools should not close for a three-month summer vacation, but
should remain open for student activities, teacher development,
and community use.
Elementary school teachers stay with a class for two or more
years, deepening their relationships with students.
New school construction and renovation should emphasize school
design that supports students and teachers collaborating in
teams, with pervasive access to technology.
Schools can be redesigned to also serve as community centers
that provide health and social services for families, as well as
counseling and parenting classes.

Involve
Parents
When school work involves parents, students
learn more.
Parents and other caregivers are a child's first
teachers and can instill values that encourage
school learning.
Schools should build strong alliances with
parents and welcome their active participation in
the classroom.
Educators should inform parents of the
school's educational goals, the importance of high
expectations for each child, and ways of assisting
with homework and classroom lessons.

Include
Community Partners
Partnerships with a wide range of community
organizations, including business, higher education,
museums, and government agencies, provide critically
needed materials, technology, and experiences for
students and teachers. These groups expose students
and teachers to the world of work through school-tocareer programs and internships.
Schools should enlist professionals to act as
instructors and mentors for students.

Take Aways
Pull, dont push.

Create an environment that raises a lot of questions from

each of your students, and help them translate that into
insight and understanding. Education is too often seen as
the transmission of knowledge. Real learning happens when
the student feels the need to reconcile a question he or she
is facingand cant help but seek out an answer.
Create from relevance.

Engage kids in ways that have relevance to them, and youll

capture their attention and imagination. Allow them to
experience the concepts youre teaching firsthand, and then

Stop calling them soft skills.

Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication,

empathy, and adaptability are not just nice to have;
theyre the core capabilities of a 21st-century global
economy facing complex challenges.
Allow for variation.

Evolve past a one- size-fits-all mentality and permit

mass customization, both in the system and the
classroom. Too often, equality in education is treated as
sameness. The truth is that everyone is starting from a
different place and going to a different place.
No more sage onstage.

Engaged learning cant always happen in neat rows.

Teachers are designers.

Let them create. Build an environment where your teachers

are actively engaged in learning by doing. Shift the
conversation from prescriptive rules to permissive guidance.
Even though the resulting environment may be more
complicated to manage, the teachers will produce amazing
results.
Build a learning community.

Learning doesnt happen in the childs mind alone. It

happens through the social interactions with other kids
and teachers, parents, the community, and the world at
large.

It really does take a village. Schools should find new ways to

Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist.

An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating

its relics and digging for
the truth of what was. An anthropologist studies people to
understand their values, needs, and desires. If you want to
design new solutions for the future, you have to understand
what people care about and design for that. Dont dig for the
answerconnect
Incubate the future.

What if our K12 schools took on the big challenges that were
facing today? Allow children to see their role in creating this
world by studying and creating for topics like global warming,
transportation, waste management, health care, poverty, and

Change the discourse.

If you want to drive new behavior, you have to measure

new things. Skills such as creativity and collaboration
cant be measured on a bubble chart. We need to create
new assessments that help us understand and talk about
the developmental progress of 21st-century skills. This is
not just about measuring outcomes, but also measuring
process. We need formative assessments that are just as
important as numeric ones. And heres the trick: we
cant just have the measures. We actually have to value
them..

Recommendation
Sensitivity, awareness and observation in children
should be preserved
Instead of they being told what to do, experiential
learning will help them construct their own solutions
and develop sensitivity towards the subject.

THANK YOU