Through generous donations from both SEED and the Excellence in Teaching Fund, Shorewood has been able to work with UW-Milwaukee’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center to create a Fellowship opportunity for secondary school teachers. Shorewood Fellows attend multiple sessions and utilize Design Thinking to focus on curriculum creation (Year 1), differentiated instruction (Year 2), and High School Passages for the class of 2024 (Year 3).
The Design Thinking approach, which originated at Stanford University’s d.school, begins with empathy, which offers a better understanding of the roots of a problem or challenge by seeing it through the perspective of the people who are experiencing it. Once the problem is clearly understood, the next step is to explore a wide range of possible solutions, and then to test these potential solutions through rapid prototyping and piloting, adjusting and repeating as necessary through an iterative process of improvement. The final step is to implement the optimized solution. Design Thinking has been used for a variety of different applications, from developing new products, to overcoming engineering obstacles, redesigning patient experiences in the hospital ER, and for Shorewood teaching fellows rethinking their classroom curriculum and instruction.
The impact of the Fellowship:
Year 1
# of Teacher Fellows: 8
# of New/Redesigned Courses: 4
# of Students Who Registered for the New/Redesigned Courses for 2018-19: 85
This means that 17% (nearly 1 in 5) of SHS students in grades 10-12 are taking courses funded by SEED through the Fellowships program
Year 2
# of Teacher Fellows: 9
# of Courses Affected: 15
# of SIS/SHS Students Affected: 630
Year 3 (In Progress)
# of Teacher Fellows: 10
# of SIS/SHS Students Affected: Class of 2024 and beyond!
Watch this short informational video on the impact of the program, thanks to the Shorewood SEED Foundation.