Story:
Future Friendly Schools: TakingITGlobal's framework to deepen student motivation and civic engagement

During some initial conversations with educators and administrators of schools, we received consistently positive feedback that developing a certification through an inclusive process would play an important role in helping to raise the profile of the value areas being assessed. Before jumping into the process of designing the certification itself, we were able to benefit from the insights of several members of the steering committee who provided one-on-one insights based on their experiences with creating or seeking certifications. In particular, Lee Fertig at the Graded School in Sao Paulo provided a great overview of a certification his school participates in, and Bob Poole from International Baccalaureate made connections to several IB schools to gain their input. Steve Bibla from the Toronto District School Board, who authored the EcoSchools Certification Guide, provided valuable guidance on establishing the mechanics of the certification, particularly through sharing their experience of requiring top-level schools to have several years of demonstrated commitment before earning the “Platinum” level, and the importance of an annual certification process.

In 2007, UserVoice as founded as a start-up in Silicon Valley with a mission of assisting organizations to collect and benefit from user-driven insights into how they could design or improve their products and services. Fortune 500 companies like Dell and Starbucks have used similar models of customer engagement - Dell’s IdeaStorm site has received over 19,000 submissions and more than 700,000 votes. When thinking about creating this certification, we knew it would be key to ensure that it wasn’t just an echo chamber of us coming up with indicators based on primarily our own experience in program development and education. The generous folks at UserVoice had donated their platform for our use at TakingITGlobal, and we couldn’t think of a better way to implement a participatory design process for Future Friendly Schools, and highlight the value of Student Voice: we would create a UserVoice site to allow anyone, anywhere in the world, to prioritize and contribute the indicators for the certification.

To seed the process with an initial set of indicators for voting and to inspire participation, we reached out to the instructors leading our online professional development courses in each of these areas, combining their suggestions with some ideas from the EcoSchools certification guide, developed by Stephen Bibla for the Toronto District School Board. We also recruited an esteemed group of advisors to form a steering committee (listed in "Credits"), who were invited to an online community where they could provide feedback on the indicators before they were “released” for public comment and “judging” through UserVoice.

On February 26, 2013, the UserVoice site was launched and promoted over the following weeks with an e-mail blast to TakingITGlobal’s network of members and educators, along with the networks of many of the steering committee members. The UserVoice process resulted in over 4,000 votes and 140 new ideas submitted for consideration by the community and our team.

How would we decide which of the indicators to include in the certification’s assessment? As a first step, we exported all of the indicators from UserVoice, and performed a qualitative assessment of the suggestions, grouping them into themes, which would become “Principles” under each value area. We decided that to simplify the process, schools would submit evidence of these Principles, as larger thematic groupings, rather than to the more specific indicators. To select the indicators themselves, we developed a weighted scoring model comprised of the following elements:

• Number of Votes Received
• Relevance to Value Area
• Connection to Project-based Learning
• Connection to Immersive ICT Use
• Ability to measure quantitatively
• Ability to measure qualitiatively

To assign the weightings to the elements, we surveyed our steering committee to balance the elements with their input, resulting in several revisions to my initial thoughts about weighting, as documented in the table above. This process led us to adopt 2-3 indicators for each Principle within the value areas, which will be incorporated into a survey to be provided to students and educators at participating schools. 

To obtain an overall score to be used in awarding (or not awarding) a certification level, several inputs will be totalled. The idea behind combining evidence submissions and quantitative survey inputs is to cross-validate the commitment: requiring evidence means that eager faculty or students won’t be able to earn the certification simply through collusion to complete the survey with a positive score, while the survey helps to ensure that the evidence isn’t simply the product of a single or small group of educators, but that the values are being embedded into teaching and learning across most of the school. The certification inputs will be weighted as follows to calculate an overall score:

A key element of the program will be public school profiles, showcasing highlights from each school’s evidence submissions, and offering a public glimpse into the good practices that help to communicate the core principles in each value area, and also fostering increased knowledge sharing amongst the community. This idea was inspired by diy.org, a new initiative for youth to develop real-world skills, with a similar model of showcasing evidence through a public gallery of videos and photos. While we're sure that some schools may initially be unsure about this public display of their practices, we are convinced that the positive attention, comments and “likes” that these submissions will receive will enable them to see the value of more open sharing over time.