Our First Design Fellow Partnership is Announced!
Angie UyHam
We’re honored to announce our first design fellow, Angeline UyHam. After 20 years in education and having recently completed an MBA in entrepreneurship, Angie founded the Cambridge Educators Design Lab. This new organization provides an opportunity to foster educators’ creative ideas by linking entrepreneurial and designing thinking concepts to the classroom in order to create new ways of supporting students.
The Design Lab engages students, teachers, families and community members in action-based collaborative problem solving. This iterative process involves gathering information about educational issues, developing possibilities, and evolving them into viable solutions for improvements. These potential solutions are tried in various classrooms and afterschool programs in the community.
Some examples of the work coming out of the Design Lab include: a novel approach to individualizing daily math instruction, a tool for educators to better communicate about students receiving specialized reading instruction, and ways to co-create high school and college level courses with students.
The Design Lab’s first partnership is with the Cambridge Public Schools and the Center for Artistry and Scholarship. In the upcoming year, some collective goals are:
- Creating opportunities for more educators to invent novel solutions to persistent educational challenges, ultimately improving student outcomes.
Shifting the historically top-down approach in education by changing the roles teachers have on school district policies and initiatives.
Strategically leveraging community partnerships resulting in powerful new ways to support student success.
Participants commit to regular meetings as a design team, and are coached on their ideas. The Design Lab guides participants through an iterative process that involves gathering information, developing possibilities and evolving them into viable solutions. We learn together, from each other, and through the new information we gather.
The Design Lab reframes the way we look at educational problems as a community. It encourages us to see problems as opportunities and to collectively find solutions together. It promotes partnerships between schools and their communities and represents a powerful system for local, sustainable innovation.
The Center for Artistry and Scholarship will support the Cambridge Educators Design Lab through technical support, development and promotion in the 2017-18 school year.