Mass IDEAS hosts its final School Design Institute of 2018!

Mass IDEAS hosted its third School Design Institute (SDI) in Babson Park this October to support teams from across the state working to build the great schools all Massachusetts students deserve. School Design Institutes are weekend-long working sessions during which participant teams dig into challenges they’ve surfaced in their school communities and design prototypes for testing potential solutions. The teams participating in the October Institute were:

Building on feedback from the previous two SDIs, programming focused on keeping the end users (students and families) at the center of each team’s innovative school design vision; each team included a student or parent among its membership to bring that important stakeholder perspective. Teams drilled down into specific challenges and needs unique to their school communities in order to workshop thoughtful and original prototype solutions to be tested following the weekend. All teams were supported through the weekend by coaches with direct experience in school design, organizations within and outside Massachusetts like STEM Learning Design, CityBridge, LEAP Innovations, and ReNEW Schools. By the end of the Institute, all teams had focused their thinking around the issues they sought to address and produced potential solutions for addressing them back in their home communities.

Following the SDI, all participant teams were eligible to apply for grant awards of up to $15,000 to support their work to implement solutions they developed during the Institute. We continue to appreciate Mass IDEAS’ support from the Barr Foundation and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, which makes grants like these possible.

We celebrate the work of all of these dedicated teams, who gave up their weekend to develop strategies to improve schools for students across Massachusetts. We look forward to what comes next for these bold designers.


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