In October 2023, more than 40 educators from across California came together at CZI headquarters to share their diverse experiences and distinct role expertise with our team as part of our first-ever Innovation Day.
It was an opportunity for us to explore design concepts for education tools, iterate on these concepts alongside educators, and gain a deeper understanding of the current education landscape from our attendees’ perspectives.
Imagining the future of edtech, together
A core element of Innovation Day was brainstorming and fostering collective efficacy — the shared belief that the group could create meaningful change and positively influence student outcomes by working together. Research shows that high levels of collective efficacy among educators are strongly correlated with improved student achievement.
We organized the day as an abbreviated design sprint — a broader framework for solving problems through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas — to provide a structured approach to collaborative problem-solving and to help build attendees’ confidence in their ability to create impactful solutions.
To kick off the ideation process, we broke into eight teams, each focused on exploring ways to improve the experiences of students, educators, and caregivers within schools. The teams tackled various topics, from closing student skill gaps and addressing teacher burnout to helping students explore their passions and experiment with different interests. This diverse array of challenges set the stage for a day of dynamic collaboration and innovative thinking.
Phase 1: Understand + define
We established a shared knowledge base among all participants to set the context of specific design challenges with each team. CZI facilitators led short “lightning talks” that summarized the problem areas and ideas the Render team has been working on to address them.
During lighting talks, educators took notes on things they felt worked well, as well as opportunities, new ideas, and concerns. They leveraged these inputs to create a framework for brainstorming ideas and solutions.
Phase 2: Sketch
During this phase, everyone reviewed the ideas and drew sketches to bring them to life visually. The goal of the sketching exercise was to push beyond an initial idea and generate a wide variety of solutions to a challenge, thereby quieting the inner critic and giving creative impulses space to flourish. Then, each person voted on the three features or concepts from sketches that resonated with them most.
Phase 3: Refine + decide
Each team finalized the concept to pitch to the broader group during this phase. Facilitators instructed everyone to complete a pitch template — giving their product a name, spelling out its features, and explaining how it will benefit students, classrooms, and schools.
Phase 4: Pitch + discuss
After the individual team sessions, all participants reconvened for the pitch round, where one educator from each team presented their proposed product solution. The CZI team carefully reviewed all the ideas generated during the event, identifying key themes that could inform future product development.
Building on the success of Innovation Day with Render, our new edtech innovation studio
Attendees said they walked away from our inaugural Innovation Day feeling inspired, engaged, and hopeful. Together, we conceived over 225 product concepts, pitches, and solutions that address common classroom challenges.
“Everyone was so grateful for what should be a standard and ongoing way of working together. It's clear that schools and educators should play a larger part in edtech development, and they should benefit from what they contribute.”
This was our first Innovation Day, but it won’t be the last. The insights, feedback, and ideas we gained help lay the groundwork for future, similar co-building sessions with educators through our new education technology innovation studio, Render.
With the launch of Render, we will continue to leverage more of these events as an integral part of our work to co-build alongside educators to develop impactful solutions.
