After a couple of weeks of summer vacations, we are back to school, but this time, we have a MISSION. As the IA, we've developed a project that has never been seen before in the Roosevelt campus, one were our main goal is to welcome new teachers, new students, and sixth graders; all with one main purpose: make them feel comfortable, happy, and exceptionally content with the decision of joining the FDR campus for the first time. Many times, it's hard to adapt to a completely different environment, even so, sometimes, you never get used to it. This first week of school, the IWEEK, the Innovation Academy, which currently has around 50 members involved, was divided into three equal groups, were sophomores, juniors, and seniors were together: mixing ages. Sadly, I couldn't attend the first day of school so I missed a huge chunk of the planning, yet I was able to recuperate the most important ideas of the discussion my group had, and I actually heard a quick anecdote about the experience of working with IA students from different grade levels for the first time. Seniors from my group told me that the first day was pretty challenging, they felt like "teachers", they had AUTONOMY over the cohort. Since it was |
Our group challenge was welcoming new teachers, and as soon as all of the ideas were solid and they fulfilled the purpose there was a division of two groups within the large group, one for the filmmaking of the process, and one for the final product.
Even though I was able to understand what my group had done, I missed most of the "brain explosion" for ideas, so I was somewhat behind. As soon as I got to the new IA class, with sliding glass doors, I was amazed. There were post-its all around, ideas inside bubbles, and a lot of PLANNING. Throughout the process I noticed a really important step, that many times we ignore. The common phrase says, that "two brains, think better than one", and I completely agree. But in this opportunity we were not two brains, we were 15 brains; WE HAD THOUSANDS OF IDEAS. I could spend an entire day reflecting about the process of creation, the problems we had, how are final product was, and much more; but within this teamwork week, I was impressed by how as a group we got to an agreement, just by narrowing down millions of ideas and deciding which one was the ideal. T I M E T O W O R K |
The work we did, and our ideas, were brilliant. I believe that the experience was very valuable, especially because we had to work with a big team, and having the same ideas and preferences was not easy. And even now that our cohort is stunned by the activity, we need to be open to any suggestions that we receive in the evaluation this coming monday. Something I've learned, is, that it takes a lot of time to find the perfect pieces so that everyone likes an idea, and even when those pieces are determined, there are other ways to improve it, either to make it better, or to perfectly fulfill the rubric. | As a group we found out that the idea of secret santa was joyful and creative, yet it was not as personalized as we wanted. We wanted each teacher to feel special, with something that they already liked, such as a choice in chocolate, their favorite tea, etc. So once we polished the idea of personalizing each secret santa we went for interviews again, were we got detailed information about each teacher. This idea was very successful and we were able to package up different surprises for the five teachers we tried the activity in. |