ISKME’s Action Collabs are dynamic workshops that use the design-thinking framework to innovate new ideas with actionable next steps. Collaboration and ideation happen in four steps: research, design, prototype, and scale and spread. Throughout the experience, participants engage in improv activities (the improvisational method of achieving cooperation) to accelerate meaningful collaboration that results in tangible action plans.
With support from the Metlife Foundation, ISKME has been facilitating a Knowledge Collaborative for Cross-Organizational Learning (KCCOL) for seven grantee organizations, including: Learning Forward, Asia Society’s Partnership for Global Learning, New Teacher Center, College Summit, Education Trust, New Leaders for New Schools, and the Center for Teaching Quality. The goal of this project is to foster collaboration across the participating grantee organizations to create a shared voice and joint action around education reform issues of importance to them.
As an innovative approach to faculty professional development, SCOPE was an NSF-supported exploratory project led by BioQuest that investigated the development and use of Problem Spaces with respect to 1) their utility as a focus for faculty teaching scholarship; and, 2) their potential impacts on students' biological problem solving skills. Introductory biology faculty from disparate institutional settings collaboratively developed online curricular resources and strategies to support students' work on contemporary scientific investigations.
The annual Big Ideas Fest is an extraordinary immersion into collaboration and design that focuses on transformational change in K-20 education. Creative doers and thinkers from diverse levels of education gather to learn from and share with each other. Breaking down silos and empowering champions, Big Ideas Fest places learning at the front and center of all that we do. The participants are inspirational. The work is dynamic. And the results are revolutionary.
ISKME inaugurated and runs the EdForum to provide the educational community in the San Francisco Bay Area with a regular, on-going opportunity for sharing ideas face-to-face about effective educational improvement. It is the only Bay Area forum that brings together education leaders, practitioners, board members, business leaders, and innovators to share and collaborate on effective knowledge management strategies and practices for the improvement of education.