Week 4

This week was our first visit to Stengard Skole and my first experience of a Danish Folkeskole. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, and was very different to schools I am used to in Northern Ireland, but when walking around it and seeing the different aspects of the school system, while thinking of ways to be innovative and solve the problems of the school, it seemed to be the perfect place to practice innovation.

How can innovation be organised into processes?

innovation can be organised easily into phases and processes, and on Thursday we started the first phase of our design thinking/innovation project. We visited
Stengaardsskol to complete the discovery/empathy phase of the project. I found this phase of the project very interesting, particularly because it was my first experience of a Danish school. We were given a tour of the school by Lonni, and to our surprise there were children working in the hallways and the library, instead of in their classrooms. This is a concept that is very unfamiliar to me as all written work done in a Northern Irish school is completed in the classroom with a teachers supervision.

work stations in the hallways

The atmosphere of the school was very different to what I was used to, as teachers give their students breaks every couple of hours, meaning that there were children walking around the school a lot of the time we were there.

Another thing I found very interesting was the use of technology in the school. Every child was provided with their own iPad, for use both in class and in their spare time. When walking around the school we saw these being used in several ways. Children were using their iPads for playing games, both educational and non-educational, and they were also using them to create projects and presentations. It was hard to tell whether the iPads were being used efficiently or not.

We interviewed some children and teachers to get an insight into what the school was like, with particular focus on how the space in the school was used. The participants were happy to answer us and gave us a lot of information to use in the next phase of our project.

Interviewing 2 sixth graders

Innovation can be organised into processes. This field work or gathering of information was the first process, and after this we had to organise the stories and information that we found. We did this by each telling a story that we heard at the school. while we did this, the other members of our group took some postits and wrote down any thoughts that the story provoked. We then organised these thoughts by grouping them and giving them headings, picking out the key concepts/themes e.g. use of space, ipads etc. 

After doing this, we looked at the postits under these headings and gave each of them a key insight that we had taken from them.

This organisation will help us move on to the next phase of our project.