Teachers

Offering a top-tier education, Northeastern blends the classroom experience with that of the real world and is always looking for new opportunities to push the bounds of innovative education. Realizing their students are the true experts on their educational experience, they solicited BIF’s help to convene a group of them to reimagine learning experiences beyond the classroom.

The Minds that Move Us initiative challenges communities to design innovative education and training models that create social equity and economic mobility, driven by the market demands of business and industry as well as the needs of youth and adult learners.

Throughout this project, we saw powerful glimpses of these conditions in action. They enabled us to go beyond surface level solutions to think more holistically about how school and communities could better learn and grow together.

The Student Experience Lab partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage teachers in creating and leading local communities of practice focused on issues of equity and closing opportunity and achievement gaps.

So how do we get the experienced cooks in the kitchen to design thoughtful and lasting solutions? How do we make sure that educators and students close to issues surrounding equity have the power to create change?You can not create successful, equitable solutions unless you are proximate. You can not cook without heat.

Higher education has a business model problem. The business model for U.S. colleges and universities — how they create, deliver, and capture value — hasn’t changed since Harvard, our country’s first college, was founded in 1636. Our higher education system is a national treasure that creates enormous societal value, but its 380-year-old business model fails to deliver affordable access and post-secondary credentials to an increasing percentage of our population.

If deeper learning approaches are going to spread, there must be intentional methods for sharing practices and communicating with a greater majority of educators. In order to reach this majority, these practices must be accessible, desirable, and popular among broader audiences of educators.

Students Design For Education (SD4E) is a groundbreaking initiative to create a school designed by high school students. SD4E is driven by a team of students hungry for transformation, supported by community members and educators passionate about student success, and powered by BIF’s extensive experience in human-centered design.

BIF is partnering with the Hewlett Foundation to prototype School Hackers, a free online platform that inspires and enables educators to share creative ways of repurposing existing resources and capabilities to move their students toward deeper learning.

What do you get when you put 5 classroom teachers, 6 teaching artists, 3 youth development staff members, 3 graduate students, 1 coach, and 1 parent in BIF’s office space for a 2-day intensive “design jam”?  What if they all come with a problem they’re currently facing and want to tackle? During the last weekend in March, we found out.

Through the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and building on the research of Feedback for Teachers, BIF prototyped and tested TD4Ed, an online platform that teaches design thinking and enables teachers to innovate in the classroom, school, and district.

In partnership with Babson College, Entrepreneurs of all Kinds is rooted in a deep understanding of the experiences of entrepreneurs of all kinds and engages them in the conceptual development of wholly new experiences.