Big Picture Company, BIF Partner to Launch Education Laboratory Alliance
The Big Picture Company and the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) announced a partnership to create an experimental platform for testing new approaches in education.
Through this alliance, The Big Picture Company, a nationally recognized leader in education innovation, will partner in the build-out of BIF's Student Experience Lab and expand its efforts to create new models for teaching and learning. Together, the alliance will:
- Design new learning experiences and solutions that unlock the potential of individual students.
- Bring partners from outside education – business, government, and non-profits – to create and resource non-traditional initiatives.
- Prototype and test alternative learning solutions through BIF's Student Experience Lab platform.
- Actively and openly communicate experimental results to accelerate innovation in education across all communities.
"We need a place to experiment with transformative ideas—a place where innovators can come together to explore and test new ways to deliver value to the student," says BIF founder Saul Kaplan. "By aligning BIF's approach for enabling collaborative innovation with The Big Picture Company's proven ability to redesign learning environments to improve student experience, we will accelerate the movement of big-win ideas into real world application and, in doing so, accelerate our ability to make critical, transformative changes to how we educate."
The partnership will kick off on May 10 when the Big Picture Company hosts a diverse group of industry and thought leaders and educational innovators from across the nation together in Providence to plan a series of symposia that will take place over the course of the 2007/2008 school year. The focus is on The Rebranding Vocational Education for the 21st Century.
The symposia, designed to provoke actionable outcomes, will draw upon a network of partners and stakeholders committed to exploring optimal learning environments and create a forum for highlighting best practices and aggregating best thinking. The Big Picture Company will use the symposia as a platform to influence national education policy, create dynamic new learning products to be used by students, educators, and communities, and to advance their mission of transforming learning across the U.S.
From the concrete designs and initiatives derived from the symposia, collaborative projects will be shaped and resourced through BIF's Student Experience Lab, to be tested in real-world conditions. The outcomes of these experiments—successes and failures—will be shared, evaluated, and used as a basis for promoting system-wide change.
"Big Picture's approach emerged as an experiment that challenged conventional assumptions about what learning environments and learning experiences should look like," says the Big Picture Company's co-founder Elliot Washor. "To continue to innovate we must expand our ability to uncover and experiment with new solutions. BIF will be a great partner in our efforts to create a place where partners can question, analyze, and experiment across the spectrum of educational experience and broadly share the results of these experiments with others."
Changing the Education Landscape
There is widespread consensus among educators and civic leaders that we must move towards an educational model that supports student-directed learning and spans an entire lifetime. This view recognizes that lifetime learning is critical in helping young people prepare for adulthood and older learners adapt to changes in technology, progress in their careers, and actively participate in an increasingly complex, globalized society.
Most experts agree that this model of learning will require learning environments and experiences not found within traditional school systems. But there is much less agreement about what these new and alternative learning environments should look like and how they should be implemented.
"Creating a vision for what learning should look like in the 21st century is a difficult and messy job, but is one that we cannot afford to fail at," says Washor. "I believe the best path to new solutions is one where we roll up our sleeves and start doing the experiments. We can talk about what might work or we can actually try it. With one you have interesting conversations. With the other you have the opportunity to change lives."
The power of this collaboration comes from the pairing of the two organization's unique strengths. The Big Picture Company has built a network of alternative learning environment schools where experimentation and big results are the norm. These schools give The Big Picture Company a clear window into the world where students live and learn and access to students and teachers willing to participate in new programs. In building this network of schools The Big Picture Company has established relationships across the educational community and can quickly assemble teams of experts and practitioners with resources, passion, and know-how.
The Business Innovation Factory, through its Experience Labs, has developed a set of assets, partners and approaches that facilitate collaborative innovation experiments across multiple organizations. BIF brings together non-traditional collaborators from business, academia, government and non-profits to break silos and spur big-win innovation.
BIF has developed a flexible methodology for Experience Lab projects and has expertise in moving ideas from concept to design to real-world experiment. Most significantly, BIF, a non-profit organization, is committed to the principles of open innovation and puts a high priority on sharing results at every step of the process. For all of its collaborative activities, the BPC / BIF partnership will capture and communicate outcomes, report on what works and what doesn't, and refine promising designs into scaleable applications.
"The Big Picture Company defines innovation in education," says Kaplan. "With this partnership we have an opportunity to unite our two communities, connect our resources, and take experimentation in education to the next level. It is an honor and a privilege to be a part of this exciting endeavor."
About the Big Picture Company
Big Picture is a Rhode Island-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to a fundamental redesign of schools and schooling in the United States. Its mission is to catalyze vital changes in American education by generating and sustaining small innovative, personalized schools that work in tandem with the real world of their greater community. Big Picture designs innovative public schools, researches and replicates new models for learning, and trains educators to serve as leaders in their classrooms, schools, and communities. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Big Picture will facilitate the adaptation of its model in approximately 55 sites throughout the United States. Presently, about 45 of these replications are in place in a dozen communities, including Detroit, Oakland, San Diego, and Indianapolis. Big Picture is also facilitating the development of its schools in Australia, Korea, and Ireland.
As further testimony to its organizational capacity for supporting fundamental school reform, Big Picture was selected by the Gates Foundation as the lead convener for its Alternative High School Initiative. Under this initiative, the Foundation is providing funds to 10 youth development organizations (Black Alliance for Educational Options, Communities in Schools in Georgia, Diploma Plus, National Association of Street Schools, See Forever/Maya Angelou, YouthBuild USA) to create close to 200 diploma-granting high schools in the next five years.
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