Impact from the Middle

  Almost two weeks ago, we officially launched iDL. We had researched, planned, scrapped, weighed, planned some more, scrapped again...and arrived at our launch plan. It took precisely two class meetings to run into a dilemma. In a conversation about the purpose of the course, we led discussions on what "inquiry, innovation, and impact" meant. Those three terms appear not only in our school's mission statement, but inquiry, innovation and impact serve also as guide--a Polaris--as we chart the course for iDL. During the discussion, on class number two, a student raised his hand with an question: "Wait...what is innovation?" His question drew some suppressed chuckles from the class. Both his question and the reaction of the class were honest responses. As students at our school, they hear this term innovation all the time, so he should know the definition (right??). Laughter. Yet...after turning the question to the class for others to chime in on, nobody else cou...

Hello!   Welcome to our little slice of the internet we are calling Impact from the Middle. Hoping to document our progress (and hiccups), this blog aims to serve as an inspiration to ourselves and others to make an impact on our world. Who are we and what are we doing? We are three middle school educators rising to the (design) challenge of creating and facilitating a course called Impact Design Lab at The Mount Vernon School in Atlanta, Georgia. The course, offered to every 8th grade student, meets every other day for the entire academic year.  What is our why? Simply put, we hope to expose our "student-designers" to many laps of the design thinking process at gradually increasing scale, beginning with a partner in class and increasing to a partner in the community. The hope is that the student-designers will be empowered by the invaluable mindsets inherent within the design thinking process and that those mindsets will be transferrable to all facets of the student-designer...