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In the Spring of 2019, I was asked to build on the excellent work Mr. Andrew Poolman had done steering and organizing the IC Day experience at Haverford. My two goals for the year were to 1) record more student and faculty data on the experience and 2) begin to envision what IC Day might look like moving forward.
For the first goal, I developed several surveys gauging the enthusiasm around the IC Day project and saw that IC Day remained a favorite moment of the year for both students and teachers alike, and that there was interest in growing the experience into something beyond a single day. I worked closely with the faculty to develop IC Day experiences that demonstrated their interests and expertise. Additionally, for the first time teachers created a guiding question to focus students on the designed outcomes of the experience to which the students responded at the closure of the day. I also created the role of student leader for those students who had participated in the experience before and who now wanted to take an active role in helping the faculty develop and facilitate the experience further. I worked closely with two students to develop a program for maximizing the pairing of students with their preferred choice and we succeeded in matching 84% of students with one of their top choices. Finally, we collected data from students at the end of their experience and found that 87% of students would like to see more of the kind of learning experiences had during IC Day integrated into the standard curriculum.
For the second goal, we succeeded in forming a small committee of faculty members to brainstorm what IC Day may look like in the future, but our work was cut short by the transitioning of learning into the virtual environment due to Covid-19. However, I was able to attain valuable feedback from both students and faculty as to what a preferred vision of IC Day would be and briefly half of the respondents reported wanting to extend the time duration of IC Day into a 3-7 day period or even a 2-4 week period chunked into one continuous time frame, welcomed more student involvement, resisted mandated student product and assessment, and welcomed content tangential to the traditional curriculum.
All-in-all, I viewed my first year running IC Day to be successful on a number of fronts and I am able to identify areas of improvement and growth for next year.
