Giving Compass' Take:

· At Minnetonka Public Schools, associate superintendent Eric Schneider formulated a system that promotes the ideas of teachers and collects them to allow all staff to vote for their favorites. Through this system, teachers' voices are represented and have an influence on new policies and ideas. 

· How can philanthropy help schools leverage their teachers' ideas?

· Here is how you can support the implementation of teachers' ideas.

Teachers have awesome ideas but it can be challenging for school systems to surface them and turn them into reality.

In my previous column, I looked at two school systems that created structures that did just that. Gwinnett County Public Schools teamed up with The Teachers Guild to help create a mechanism to do this and KIPP LA Public Schools created an in-house mini grant competition. Minnetonka Public Schools, a K-12 school district of 10 schools serving 10,500 students in Minnesota, has also tackled this and come up with a solution of its own: The Big Hunt for Ideas.

When Eric Schneider joined Minnetonka Public Schools seven years ago as associate superintendent, the district was already pretty innovative, but the ideas were coming top down from the superintendent and executive leadership team. Schneider was charged with developing a culture of innovation where the ideas come from the workforce. He looked at private companies in the Twin Cities area including 3M, Target, US Bank, and United Health and learned about their crowd-based internal innovation, where ideas are sourced from within. After modifying these structures for the school setting, The Big Hunt for Ideas was born.

Read the full article about teachers leading innovation by Jin-Soo Huh at EdSurge