What exactly is I-Think?

We are often asked what exactly I-Think does, so here goes ...

I-Think is an education charity that began at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. An MBA candidate also happened to be a K-12 educator, and recognized that the problem-solving methodology, Integrative Thinking, developed by the Dean of the school, Roger L Martin, needed to be learned at a much younger age.

The idea was tested with kindergarten students! It worked!

I-Think has evolved over the years and our main work today involves building challenge kits around messy, real-world problems. Problems where there are tensions, and different perspectives, and maybe even entrenched positions. Where there can be many 'right' answers to a question.

Recent Challenge Kits have included:

How do we (re)build community in our schools? (especially post-pandemic?) and the one that I lead on Artificial Intelligence, "How might AI enrich the lives and possibilities of every student in our school?

We've built kits on climate change, Afrofuturism, Food Banks, and are about to launch our first French-English Challenge Kit on well-being which I am so excited about as we have 12 French Language school boards in Ontario as well as French Immersion programs and have not until now been able to offer kits in French.

We often have community partners who engage us because they have Real-World problems that need to be solved and they are interested in student voice and agency around the problem. Recent examples of this include the Remembrance Day Challenge Kit funded by Veterans Affairs Canada and an Ontario school board using the AI Challenge with high school students to help them develop an AI Guidance policy for their board.

The problem-solving methodology is grounded in deep critical thinking and empathy and equips students with a tool-kit for taking on messy, complex problems that might occur in their own lives. It provides students with a process for having thoughtful conversations around issues where there are tensions. It fosters creative thinking grounded in insights. It also helps students not get stuck negativity which can often grind people trying to solve complex problems to a halt. The most common insight we see from students about the 'Pro Pro' tool is how it helped them stay out of the negative - that it is possible to do that - and that it is liberating to think in this way.

As a charity we would love to bring this opportunity to more students and encourage funders who might be interested in equipping more students with a powerful problem-solving toolkit to reach out.

Registration for our Spring 2025 Challenge kits, which includes the AI Challenge, is open until the end of January. Please reach out if you are curious about how to bring this opportunity to your board or school. And yes, it is accessible outside Canada - we had our first UK school participate in the AI Challenge last spring.

I'll be sharing insights from the Fall 2024 AI Challenge which just ended. As always, we learn so much from student thinking.

Heidi