FINALIST SOLUTION
Experienced Awards: Social impact
Claar Education: Empowering School Leaders Through Visual Facilitation
Solution summary
Claar Education is a digital environment that aims to develop an approach to school leadership through visual facilitation, empowering educational leaders to foster a shared vision and drive effective collaboration within their teams. This ecosystem provides a comprehensive suite of tools and resources designed to simplify complex processes, enhance team empowerment, and promote effective leadership practices.
By equipping school leaders with the visual facilitation tools, Claar Education fosters meaningful collaboration, sustainable cooperation, and a collective focus on achieving common goals. This, in turn, creates a conducive environment for teachers to empower students, nurturing their personal growth and aspirations.
The impact of Claar Education's visual facilitation tool is multifaceted, offering benefits such as better management and teamwork, empowered teams, improved focus, and transparent communication of outcomes.
Read the full description below.
Solution details
Our solution is an educational ecosystem that offers tools and resources created on the principle of visual simplification for professional development, team empowerment, time management, and effective leadership for education leaders. Education leaders acknowledge that there is a lot of wisdom and competence in both themselves and teachers, but there is a lack of tools to help create and maintain a shared vision and facilitate more effective collaboration in the hectic school environment. This educational ecosystem would support them to deal with this. We have implemented our ideas so far in Estonia, but we believe that we could expand our reach in different countries as well. We believe that the important competencies of school leaders must be present in every leader Our educational ecosystem consists of a digital environment that provides materials and instructional videos for team empowerment. It also includes a database containing theoretical knowledge, like descriptions of useful visual simplification tools and guidelines for creating them. The categories within this ecosystem cover tools supporting deep learning, effective meeting management, performance reviews, curriculum updates, development planning, self-directed teaching and learning, teamwork, change management, leadership, the promotion of mental well-being, sustained creativity, and more.
Tweet / Slogan
We empower school leaders through visual facilitation, that allows to see big picture and engage team members. We believe that a good school starts with effective leadership, and we all want our children to learn in excellent schools that bring out the best in them and more.
Claar Education
Context
We interviewed over 30 educational leaders, who pointed out that teachers do not feel connected to the overall vision of the school, and therefore it is difficult to implement changes and development processes. The 2021 Estonian Management Field Survey emphasizes the importance of employees understanding their mission and organizational culture. Organizational goal setting is key to engaging and guiding employees. The Educational Development Plan for 2035 underscores the urgent need for tools and methods to empower teachers and school leaders, facilitating their active participation in driving educational innovation and improving institutional effectiveness.
Who Benefits?
Our target group is school leaders. The solution helps them to be more competent in their work while engaging and empowering their team.
It affects This affects both teachers and students. A good school starts with good leadership. If the school leader sees the big picture and understans processes, it is easier to involve the team for cooperation. Then the cooperation can be more meaningful and suistanaible and everyone work towards a common vision. If school leader empowers teachers, then teachers can empower students. Students are supported to follow their personal path and dreams, and to grow as brave worldchangers.
Impact
Our visual facilitation tool helps schools in these important ways:
• Better Management and Teamwork: Visual facilitation makes it easier for schools to work together and manage things efficiently.
• Empowering Teams: It gives school teams the confidence to collaborate and achieve their goals.
• Staying on Track: With visual facilitation, it's simpler to stay focused when working on projects and plans.
• Showing Results: Visual facilitation helps display and explain the outcomes of school efforts.
By using visual facilitation, school teams can improve their leadership and teamwork skills. They can also manage their time better and keep their attention on what matters. Learning to simplify things visually helps individuals see the bigger picture, understand connections, and show them clearly.
In order to measure the impact, questionnaires are included in our solution at different stages, and we will definitely conduct a focus group interview with the testers.
Team work
In our team there are education, healthcare and youthwork experts, HR and marketing managers and web developer. We are all active practitioners of visual facilitation who have experienced the significance and magic of this technique in supporting both our personal and professional well-being and in making sense of processes. We firmly believe and understand that it helps engage people in various processes and teaches them to grasp the big picture. We have already done one incubatior and we have grown as a team. We plan to work futher. We already have first buyers so we don't need to work totally voluntarily and our goal is to start doing it full time.
Team members: Kati Orav, Ingmar Orav, Epp Reedik, Ulvi Salundo, Liia Sizask and Reelika Lepik.
Innovativeness
We can consider our competitors to be environments that offer visual solutions or companies that offer similar training and strategic consultations. We have combined the two. Our process is unique because we offer a tool that relies on the user's own wisdom and competence. This, in turn, increases change management capability and monitoring. Our solution is innovative because we bring together digital accessibility and a manual look into deep processes.
Transferability
We can see that in the future it will also be scalable for school leaders in other countries. With a few changes, it is also possible to create a similar platform for teachers for better teaching and integration.
We also see that with a few changes it can be scaled to leadership in general.
Sustainability
We develop the first processes, which are the most important for school leaders' personal and professional competencies. We involve experts and test it with some school leaders. We sell it to schools and local authorities. We develop it conceptually and technically. The bigger plan is to develop the environment for teachers and further for management in general.