Ignition: Trust and Innovation as Tension Rods

Allison Persad • Cahn Fellow 2019

Imagine attending 45-minute meetings about disparate topics, eight in a row. How could anyone deeply process, communicate, and create in such an environment? We asked ourselves how we could rethink time and space in our school to provide students with a chance to dive into one particular project that spans many skills. In our Intensives, they spend 50 hours—close to the amount of time of a regular year’s course—immersed in their work in this one area. But Intensives is only two weeks of our school year where the magic of interdisciplinary innovation lives. How can students and teachers begin to see themselves as the engineers and artisans that can help shape and solve some of the world’s greatest inequities? Our Cahn project asks: How do we build a school where trust and innovation are our tension rods that ignite us? How do we find a way to balance creativity and innovation while maintaining the expectation of state and city standards? How does failure as feedback thinking become a part of our language?