Explanation

This Collaborative Innovation Prompt blog is about creating a platform where I can post activities that students can engage in to develop collaborative skills and the ability to innovate. To me, collaborating means the ability to talk with and listen to others in an equal fashion in order to come up with synergistic ideas (i.e., ideas that are greater than the sum of what each indivual could've come up with on his/her own). Innovating means being able to analyze a situation, recognize an issue with it, and improve upon it.

In my classroom, students usually sit in teams and are in those teams for 4-5 weeks. To strengthen their specific team's connections, their general ability to collaborate, and their capacity for innovating, I start class once a week with one of these prompts. You'll notice that the prompts are pretty spartan. That's the idea. The whole point is for students to come across something that makes them go "hmmmm..." and then go through a series of steps I mixed together from the scientific method and the engineering design process.

Here are those steps with brief explanations (the time allotted for each step varies depending on the task and the day):

1. Make Observations & Ask Questions: I have the prompt on the board when students come in, and they're trained to open their notebooks and start writing down things they notice, observe, and have questions about. After 1-2 minutes, I have the students share what they wrote with their team and select some of the most common, significant, or interesting ideas that came out of their discourse. The teams then share their top ideas with the class, which I usually jot down on the board or have another student jot down. As a class, we then discourse about what observations and questions we have about the groups' contributions.
2. Define a Problem or Form a Hypothesis: After talking about all the possible observations and questions we came up with, I have each team pick one to focus on as a problem to solve or a hypothesis to prove/disprove. (Problems could be real-life, local, or global issues; specific math or science computations; or something else entirely.)
3. Develop a Plan: Teams then need to work together with their specific problem or hypothesis to outline a series of steps they would take to go about solving the problem or proving/disproving the hypothesis. (Sometimes, due to time constraints, we might end the activity at this point by having teams explain their steps.)
4. Conduct & Analyze an Experiment: If time allows, teams then implement the steps of their plan. In this step, I use the term experiment loosely to include any step that could be taken to solve a problem or prove/disprove a hypothesis, including simply doing further research, using math equations, or actually physically experimenting with something.
5. Communicate Results & Improve: In this step, students communicate results in a fashion conducive with the time we have - either sharing them verbally or writing them up in a formal or informal description. More important than the mode of communication, though, is the following step of having teams discourse about each others' results, processes, and initial goals. It is at this stage that they learn from each other and gain new perspectives on their own issues. With these new perspectives and learnings in place, students are in an excellent position for the final and perhaps most important step: improving their own work. This final stage is where the real innovation comes in as they evaluate, tweak, and retry their previous efforts.