Questions to Ask - Work Writing Project 2

Today my mind is racing with what questions to start asking for my work Writing Project.

We had a meeting with the school district that we’re working with on our District Wide NextGen Furniture Installation project.  So far, we’ve spent over a year working with the school district to complete a Pilot Program where we gathered information from the district, teachers, and students about what types of furniture solutions they would like and what solutions could help achieve their Project Based Learning goals.  It’s been quite the wild ride, but has truly been an exploration for us all to study how we can work together to support the teachers and students in their journey to providing the best education for the greatest number of students.

In our meeting this week, after we finished discussing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the project – the next steps, schedules and budgets – we took a few minutes to reflect and talk about what we can learn from this experience and what we can teach others about this experience.

The head of this project for the district is fully supportive and truly believes this has been the best way to study the needs and provide the closest-to-ideal solutions for teachers.  He even said:

“I think this is one of the 

most exciting projects in the whole district 

that will touch more students 

than many of our much larger projects.”

So today, I wanted to spend some time brainstorming some questions to ask so we can get further information and quotations to use in the series of articles that I’m eager to get started on.

·         At about 1 year in to the project, how has this project met your expectations for the vision you had for the Pilot and getting to the first furniture order?

·         How has the project exceeded your expectations?  And what has been missing that you were expecting?

·         How can we better breakthrough to administration to provide the other missing key – training and coaching – for the teachers in what solutions we are providing and how to link them with the curriculum of Project Based Learning?

·         What has been the greatest moment from your perspective in this project?

·         We’d like to use this research to suggest similar solutions to other school districts AND to suggest similar Pilot Programs to other school districts.  We could consider publishing this study and articles in school trade publications, what other methods would you suggest to get this information in front of the largest receptive audience?  (PBL courses might be a start).

·         What furniture solutions or features do you think are the biggest impact to creating a NextGen classroom?

·         We’ve gone back and forth on the ‘one-size-fits-all’ furniture set vs. the ‘tailored’ solution set, how do you anticipate teachers and principals will react to the furniture once it’s in place?

o   How do you think they’ll react over time?

·         Do you feel the transition from the Test Pilot program with a huge variety of furniture solutions to the district’s furniture spec has made the furniture implementation easily scaleable and do you think it will be an overall success (TBD of course)?

 

That’s absolutely not an exhaustive list, and creating these questions and the conversation will be a collaborative project, but I feel great about the fact that I’m still making progress!