FOCUS : GOOD IDEAS
research from Harvard University and the University of Michigan , and is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ’ s Future of Education and Skills 2030 goals . HP IDEA contributed to HP ’ s goal of enabling better learning outcomes for more than 100 million people by 2025 — a commitment the company achieved three years early .
HP partnered with leading education consultants to create the rigorous development program . “ It ’ s not about how to use basic digital applications ,” says Mayank Dhingra , HP ’ s Senior Education Business Leader for Southern Europe , the Middle East , and Africa . “ It ’ s to get the teachers to ask themselves , ‘ How do I create outcomes with this technology ? How do I make a difference for my students ?’”
There are two tracks , HP IDEA Fellows and HP IDEA Associates , which run in eight-month cycles . For each HP IDEA school , five to 10 teachers are selected as Fellows , and as part of their curriculum learn about different forms of innovation and the essentials of design thinking , to help them come up with solutions in their own schools . Next , they put what they ’ ve learned into action by creating their own program to solve a community problem . This focused coursework is then offered to other teachers in the Associates track online . More than 3,400 teachers are on the Fellows track and 33,000 are on the Associates track , with some 800,000 students positively impacted to date .
“ The cohorts [ of teachers ] do become a community . They learn about one another ’ s schools and support each other ,” says Christine Nasserghodsi , education consultant . “ It takes so much resilience and commitment to complete a one-year program , and those who stick it out become one another ’ s supporters .”
For HP IDEA schools everywhere , the main curriculum has a strong emphasis on exercises that “ help build empathy for students ,” according to Nasserghodsi . And in Türkiye and Ukraine , HP IDEA recently added trauma-informed and social emotional learning modules to support teachers and students facing extraordinary challenges .
Building empathy and resilience Alpay , for one , says collaboration is the most important thing she ’ s learned from HP IDEA . She brainstormed with the other HP IDEA Fellows at her school at their weekly workshops , and they decided that one way to incentivize students to read more would be to reward the children with seeds or a sapling to plant for each book they finished .
The program is simple but effective , producing an array of results that complement and reinforce one another . Because the students want to read and are reading more , they want to talk to the teachers more — both to get advice and , as Alpay says , “ because they ’ re excited about what they ’ re reading , and they want to tell us about it .”
This excitement is backed up by the students themselves . Betül ,
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