A site to explore and work on accelerating Innovation in Milwaukee Area Schools
We’ve set the schedule for this year’s Collab Labs. In Collaboration with SafeNet Consulting, we’re kicking off the season on October 11th with a look at developing computer science talent. Through the continued support of The Commons, we’ll be back in Ward 4– now with street car service (well, tracks).
At the end of March, we met with a group of group of students from Reagan High School who were working in or looking for internships in STEM fields. We heard three key concerns:
If students don’t get a chance to grow and learn, an internship is “just a job”, and those take a lot less effort to find.
In our May session we’ll dig in to the opportunities for, and barriers to, creating effective STEM internships for high school students– what it takes to create internship experiences that students value, how we raise the visibility/number of internships available in a broader range of STEM fields, and what does it look like when the goal of an internship program is talent development rather than simply low cost labor.
Come share ideas with your colleagues at public, private, and charter schools from across greater Milwaukee, as well as some folks outside of K12 who offer an interesting perspective on the topic.
5:30 – 6:00 Grab something to eat and drink, say hello
6:00 – 8:30 Let’s learn from each other.
Food and beverage will be provided. There is no charge for participation but space is limited!
Among others, you’ll have a chance to talk with:
Tamera Coleman– Internship Coordinator, Milwaukee Public Schools
Tamera is responsible for the development and implementation of a viable internship program at the district level. Tamera spends time facilitating student learning by assisting students to secure appropriate internships to enhance overall academic experience while learning essential skills. Tamera also initiates and builds partnerships with employers to develop student opportunities for endeavors locally. Tamera is also a proud MPS alumni, a mother of 2 young children, a wife of an educator and a Milwaukee native truly committed to youth empowerment.
Matthew Hunt– College & Career Readiness Specialist, New Berlin High School
Matt previously worked as an Account Manager in the Professional Services Division of Aerotek, the largest staffing firm in the country, where he worked with businesses across multiple industries to help them find talent in Accounting/Finance, Supply Chain, Marketing, Customer Service, and Administrative Support. He later served as a School Counselor at New Berlin West for 3 years and took a leadership role with the district’s Career and Service Based Learning Program. During the 2017-18 school year, Matt transitioned into a newly created role as the District’s College and Career Readiness Specialist and now manages Youth Apprenticeship and Internship programs at both New Berlin West and New Berlin Eisenhower high schools.
Ariana Radowicz– University Relations, Rockwell Automation
Ariana leads recruitment for Rockwell Automation’s high school internship programs as well as their scholarship/specialty programs. She also participates in ADVANCE, the company’s young professionals employee resource group and works to build a diverse pipeline of students for Rockwell’s early career programs.
Molly Schuld– Science Teacher, Ronald Reagan High School
Molly is a science teacher and a personal & professional skills teacher at Ronald Reagan High School. She came to Milwaukee through Teach For America and has now been teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools for four years. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Marine and Atmospheric Science and a Master of Education in Educational Policy and Leadership.
Molly also serves as the Ronald Reagan High School’s NAF Director for the Academy of Health Sciences, which involves connecting students to career-based learning experiences in the community. She secures STEM internship opportunities for Reagan’s upperclassmen in Milwaukee-area. Molly has also developed and continues to lead several programs including Reagan’s International Travel Program, SMART Team, and Girls In Technology Program.
Laura Schmidt, Strategic Advisor to the Superintendent – School District of New Berlin
Laura has an MBA (Leadership Studies) from Marquette University. She worked for 15 years for Northwestern Mutual and was responsible for enterprise software, usability testing, and technology research. She served as the Executive Director of an Education Foundation for 4 years before joining the School District of New Berlin as a consultant. She represents the Superintendent in local, regional and state efforts designed to support a strong talent pipeline for the benefit of students as well as the state’s economy. She holds a Scaled Agilist certification to inform strategic planning and implementation efforts.
Erica Steele– Manager, Workforce Development, Froedtert Health
Erica Steele is the Manager of Workforce Development at Froedtert Health focused on driving innovative workforce strategies internally and externally to grow and diversify the healthcare talent pipeline to meet current and future industry needs. This includes collaborating and partnering with educational institutions, workforce agencies, community based organizations, internal stakeholders, and others to identify, engage, train and create pathways for talent to enter and advance in the healthcare field. She provides subject matter expertise on the topics of workforce development, education/training, program development and management, volunteer management, public speaking and fund development.
Collab Lab 17 was a chance to further develop an idea that came out of our December session. One of the three projects proposed would engage students in real world issues around obesity and nutrition– the Healthy Food Passport. Participants in our December Lab noted that the specifics of the program would vary by age group, but the goal is to have students research a culture or cuisine and then craft a healthy version of the selected dish. Even better would be to have the students grow the ingredients. Inspired by the notion that “Food is how culture talks”, the team envisions a food fair where families are invited to sample the dishes, and stories about the dish may be shared.
Through the project, the team aims for students to gain an understanding the food production process (e.g. where food comes from), help build family connections to the school and increase exposure to different fruits and vegetables.
At this session, we used a version of the Lean Startup Canvas to guide our thinking and capture our assumptions about the goals for the project, and how it might be structured. We started the process with a discussion of the problems we are trying to address through the project, and then stepped through the remaining sections of the canvas. We closed with a discussion around the importance of starting with validation of the key assumption– that the problems we identified matter to the students engaged in the project. The end result is available here:
Thanks again to The Commons for providing the space, and to our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:
Shelley Jurewicz, Executive Director of FaB (Food and Beverage) Wisconsin
Marisa Wall Riepenhoff, Vice President of Education SHARP Literacy
For an overview of the Learn Startup Canvas, visit https://medium.com/@steve_mullen/an-introduction-to-lean-canvas-5c17c469d3e0
In our conversations around makerspaces over the past year and half, we’ve heard several concerns around the cost of materials for student projects, and the effort involved to secure material donations.
Schools need material for student projects but:
There are a parallel set of concerns on the industry side. Companies are willing to donate material for use in schools but:
We started exploring a model for getting excess material from industry available for use in area schools last January when we partnered with Betty Brinn to sponsor a challenge through The Commons. That work continued over the summer and fall as we experimented with pulling equipment from Gooodwill’s E-Cycling stream for tear down events to recover useful parts.
The challenge of getting excess materials to educators has been addressed in the Bay Area through a non-profit called the Resources Area For Teaching (RAFT). While they do a great job at pulling material in and packaging it up, the relationships that develop with donor companies are with RAFT. Given all the efforts we see to help schools develop relationships with area firms and career based learning experiences (CBLEs), we see that as the wrong model for Milwaukee.
We’d like to see schools use up-cycling as another point of engagement with the companies around them. The idea is to develop a network exchange model, where participants have access to materials their counterparts are able to pull in. That network could include not just K12 schools, but libraries, museums, and other organizations who can provide or use up-cycled materials for student projects.
In a network model, we need a way to create a view of inventory that is spread across nodes. It turns out that a couple of the leading thinkers on network resource planning live in western Wisconsin. They have developed an open source platform that facilitates the kind of network we envision. We’ve paired them up with a team of MSOE students who are working to tailor the application to see how it would work for us. We’re starting with the simple stuff– let me see who is in the network, and what is available.
The model we proposed looks like this:
During Collab Lab 16, we walked participants through our model and had them beat up the idea in both small group discussions and a sharing out of key points to all participants.
Participants listed the following as key questions/concerns for each player in the model:
Donors
Aggregators/Distributors of Donated Material
Recipients
We then prompted the discussion groups to think through experiments that could help validate potential solutions to these concerns. That generated:
We like the idea of prototyping with a shared spreadsheet that can serve as a directory of folks at schools and other organizations that have material or skills that may be useful to others, or have something they are looking for and could use help finding it. Here it is: https://tinyurl.com/y7uas8h3
Feel free to add/edit/share. We added attendees from schools as editors, but the link is set to view only for everyone else. If you’d like access, let us know.
We also want a better understanding of how schools work with companies who make material donations on an ongoing basis. If you have a such a relationship, we’d like to sit down with you and your contact at the company to walk through your current process, talk through what works, and what gets in the way, and what would help make the process better. If you’d like to bring along a student who is, or would like to be involved in the process, we’d more than welcome that. We have time to schedule six of these discussions between now and the first week of March. If you’d like to be included, let us know.
Thanks again to The Commons for providing the space, and to everyone who joined us for the insight they brought to the discussion. We had several folks from outside of K12 join us (thank you). For those who asked how you could find them, here you go:
Rachel Arbit — Senior Director of Programs, SHARP Literacy
Ben Dembroski — Open Lab Manager, MIAD
Kelly Ellis — CEO, Einstein Project
Jeff Hanson — Executive Director, Digital Bridge
Lisa Perkins — Re-Creation Station
Owen Raisch — Associate Director, Student Run Business Program, Marquette University
We thought we’d try and find some. Last night we pulled educators from across the area together with healthcare researchers and professionals. We asked Brian King, a Collab Lab regular and former Director of Innovation for the Milwaukee Jewish Day School to facilitate. Brian’s work with students to develop and launch student run projects with a social purpose help make him the right person to guide the group through what we wanted to accomplish. In short, to generate ideas for projects that:
The thinking here is to get beyond programs that may link a single school or small group of students to a single organization. Those connections can still happen through any of the project ideas that came out of the process. We see a better chance to scale up the number of these connections with more open-ended projects that can grow and evolve as schools find their own ways to participate based on the interests of students, drawing in new community partners at the same time.
Participants started the evening with some Post-It Note brainstorming on the top five health related issues faced by school-age children. Three volunteers grouped these by topic. We talked through each cluster, did a bit of rearranging and pulled out our blue dots for a vote on which topics were most important.
The result was three topics that would become the focus for the next stage of our work:
Brian split the workshop participants into three groups to sketch out what a prototype program around each issue might look like. The groups talked through our threshold considerations:
And then addressed our guiding questions for their prototype:
Here’s what we came up with…
Recognizing that the use of social media can amplify the stress of school, this project challenges both students and staff to go screen free for 24 hours. In preparation for the challenge, students/staff would lay down the ground rules for what counts as a screen, and develop plans to address tasks they currently use a screen to complete– how will we report attendance, how will students let their parents know they are ready to be picked up?
Both students and staff would document how they expect to react to a screen free day, the choices they made during the day when they otherwise may have used a screen, and a post challenge assessment of what it felt like. The project will require the cooperation and support of student’s families. Media coverage could help spur participants to live up to the challenge and encourage other schools to participate.
This project would partner high school students with those in elementary grades to design and build playground that will encourage positive risk taking and problem solving. Perhaps guided by a community planning organization, the high school students would work with a group of younger students to determine what the younger students would find engaging.
To complete the work, the project envisions connecting students to mentors who can help them with selecting a location, design, engineering, construction, marketing, and considerations for students with special needs. The team also envisioned connecting the group to mentors who could help tie the project to curriculum goals and understand the impact of design decisions on the level and type of physical activity users of the playground were likely to engage in.
The specifics of the program would vary by age group. but the goal is to have students research a culture or cuisine and then craft a healthy version of the selected dish. Bonus points if the students grow the ingredients. Inspired by the notion that “Food is how culture talks”, the team envisions a food fair where families are invited to sample the dishes, and stories about the dish may be shared.
Through the project, the team aims for students to gain an understanding the food production process (e.g. where food comes from), help build family connections to the school and increase exposure to different fruits and vegetables.
If you’d like to get together with others to flesh out one of these projects in greater detail let us know.
Thanks again to Brian King for facilitating, The Commons for providing the space, and to our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:
Christopher J Simenz, PhD, NSCA CSCS*D- Clinical Professor,
Department of Physical Therapy- Programs in Exercise Science, Marquette University
Jennifer Tarcin – Menomonee Falls High School Healthcare Academy Coordinator; Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin Community Memorial Hospital Healthcare Career Academy Faculty Liaison
Jonathan Wertz — Director of Clinical Risk Management, Medical College of Wisconsin
Kristina Kaljo, PhD — Assistant Professor and Co-Director for the Third-Year Obstetrics and Gynecology Medical Student Clerkship, Medical College of Wisconsin
We put together our November session with help from Susan Koen and Stacey Duchrow from Milwaukee 7’s Regional Talent Partnership. In their work to help develop the talent pipeline for industry in southeastern Wisconsin, they see a number of systemic issues that get in the way of effective career based learning experiences for students. We set up the session with the aim of mapping out factors which contribute to successful CBLE’s and identifying the key places where collaborative efforts might make a difference.
For this session, we split the attendees across 5 tables, where each participant shared their thoughts on key goals, and came together as a team to share those the felt were most important with the entire group. These included:
We followed this with a second round of where participants shared their thoughts on key factors which help reach those goals or stand in the way. Again, each table came to a consensus on on the key factors to share out with the larger group. These include:
As we talked through each of these factors in turn, we built up a map that gave us a first draft how these factors influence each other, and thereby, the goals we have for CBLEs. We ended the session by having the participants identify, by placing dot stickers on our map, the factors they felt were most important. The key items for the group as a whole:
We’ll be working with Milwaukee 7 to pull together follow on sessions to drill into each of the top three factors and from that, identify where collaborative efforts could make a difference. Interested in participating in one of these sessions? Let us know:
Bring King joined us for Collab Lab 13 to walk us through an exercise to identify problems worth solving at attendees’ schools. The idea was to give participants the feel for a process they could use with their students to identify challenges students could take on as authentic learning experiences. Thanks also go out to David Howell (MSOE/Epiphany Consulting) who, with Brian, helped us pull together the process (below).
Our participants look to take the process back to their schools to see what their students might come up with. We’re scheduling a follow up meeting at the beginning of December to re-group and share feedback from the process, see what problems students are willing to take on and, and share ideas about how to help the students dive into a problem solving exercise. If you are interested in joining in, let us know:
Mixing the cards ensures that members are exposed to ideas from outside of their own team
If the teams had a hard time coming up with an initial set of problems, prompt for additional ones to consider by asking
In teams, but remaining all together in the room, consider the following questions:
Each team then drafts a revised list:
This was the first working session for a group of educators focused on middle school math that is part of a collaborative effort with Milwaukee Succeeds. We began our October 9th session with a silent discussion: using post-it notes to determine what is missing on the causal map, and dots to determine what three factors have the most impact on student learning. Our goal in doing so is build a model that can help us chart a course to improved student performance.
At the end of our first session we challenged the group with a reading assignment (Making Number Talks Matter: Developing Mathematical Practices and Deepening Understanding) and to experiment with meaningful discourse in their math classes. The group took a bit of time to reflect on what worked, what was challenging, and ways to we get past that.
What stuck with you
If you had a chance to experiment, were you able to? What worked and what didn’t work?
For the bulk of the evening, Kevin McLeod from UWM’s Department of Mathematical Sciences led the group through a discourse session on a single math problem appropriate for middle school students. This helped provide context for the higher level conversation which ran in parallel around the reasoning behind the process. The problem and his notes are available to download here.
Yesterday’s Collab Lab was a joint effort with Milwaukee Succeeds. We pulled together a small group focused on middle school math– what factors lead to student success and what gets in the way. We’ll reconvene the group in October as they work as a cohort to implement the strategies we discussed. Notes from our session are below.
If you’d like to participate in a Math cohort like this, please let us know:
Contributing Factors |
Strategies |
High quality instruction*
Committed leadership* Teacher support (coaching/mentoring) Culture of taking risks and experimentation Parent engagement/advocacy/attitude Curricula Common Core State Standards Cross-sector collaboration and best practice sharing Math enrichment programs
Growth Mindset of principals, teachers, parents, and students Role models mirror students |
Increase discourse in math class
Build committed leadership
Predict where students may struggle and set them up for success Continued Learning for teachers:
|
Hindering Factors |
|
| Student and/or teacher fixed mindset*
Teacher content knowledge Math licensure Communication/language barrier ACEs Curricula
No K-12 math scope and sequence within schools, districts, and/or the city Metrics can be misleading
Teacher evaluations Prior school experiences of students Student motivation Challenges at home Students living in poverty Reliance on computer instruction Prior school experiences of adults Lack of resources in the classroom
Absence of early interventions “Tracking” students |
Key:
Items discussed by the group
Items that were noted but not discussed
* designates strong support around the factor
We held our final Collab Lab for the 2016-17 school year on Thursday June 15th, where the topic for the evening was “Creating a culture of innovation in schools”.
We prompted the discussion with three questions:
Our notes from the evening are below. Thanks again to all who were able to join us. It was a great group and a really interesting set of conversations!
