Original Post 7/11/13
While planning for Innovation Day, we built into our schedule a night for the parents to come and see not only the work of their students , but the work of all the students throughout the grade level. The presentation for the parents was scheduled from 7:00-8:00 and the students needed to arrive 20 minutes early to set up their projects. This 20 minutes of preparation time is always awkward for parents and teachers. It isn't enough time for the parents to really do anything else and if we allowed them to help their son or daughter set up it would be way too crowded in the rooms. I discussed this problem with one of my colleagues, Dani Marangon, and she suggested we play a slide show of pictures she had taken of Innovation Day for the parents in the cafeteria as they waited to see the final product. The photographs show the students at the early and middle stages of their work, but never a finished product. We also then created a Parent Program created by the students and Dani. I made a Google Form asking the kids to input their name, classroom, title of their project and a brief description. Dani then copied and pasted this information into Microsoft Publisher to make it a bit more eye-appealing. As the parents watched the slideshow they were able to look in their program and start different exhibits they wanted to see.
In the back of the cafeteria we set up eight computers with a survey already loaded on to it. We asked the parents to stop by and answer a few questions before they left. I also recruited our School Community Association President to help us steer parents back into the cafeteria after they had seen their son's or daughter's project. The verbal feedback from the parents was tremendous; they really were impressed by the work the students were able to produce. The mayor was so impressed he sent in Ice-Pops for the students the next day.
I was a little nervous about the feedback I would receive on the survey though. It is easy for parents who found Innovation Day to be a great idea to come and tell me. Those who might not have had the same opinion would go to the survey. We asked the parents four questions about the project and then asked them to comment on anything they really liked, or suggestions to improve it for next year. Out of 129 students we had 63, almost half, of the parents answer the survey. I am still trying to figure out a way to have more parents complete the survey next year. If anyone has ideas, I'm all ears. Below are the results of the four survey questions.
The question I was most interested in the parent response was: My student's motivation to create a great innovation day project was... . Because this project was done at the end of the year, I was nervous that it would be difficult to motivate students to put forth their best effort. It was great to see 97% of parents said their student were either highly, or extremely highly motivated to create an Innovation Day project.
This is a project I look forward to working on and improving next year. If anyone has any comments or suggestions on how we might improve I would love to hear from you.
Again I would like to thank @pernilleripp and @stumpteacher for blogging about their experiences with Innovation Day so I could learn from them. I would like to send out a big thanks to @kls4711 whose class Skyped with mine and provided me with a blue print to follow and build upon. I consider myself lucky to have educators like these in my Personal Learning Network.
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