Tom Tod Ideas Inc

Classes: TomTod's school-based classes guide students through TomTod's community-centered design thinking process to explore and create ideas for their community. Through twelve weekly sessions offered over the course of a school semester, TomTod staff and partnering educators lead students through community projects tailored to each community that complement middle school learning standards. TomTod's classes center on student voice and focus on growing students' critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creative problem-solving skills. The goal of each TomTod class is for middle schoolers to use their newly acquired community knowledge and skills to formulate ideas that serve others. TomTod classes take the best of project-based, problem-based, place-based, and passion-based learning in ways that unlock middle schoolers' innate creativity and altruism.

Collabs: Outside of direct service, TomTod collaborates to provide curriculum, professional development, training, and more. Community Idea Quests connect our in-house-developed curriculum to specific communities, empowering partners to bring TomTod programming into their own schools with support from TomTod staff. These collaborative programs provide partners with a contextualized, developmentally-aligned curriculum as well as technical support through professional development, team training, and program monitoring and evaluation. TomTod also offers on-demand training for educators, youth development professionals, and community partners, sharing expertise in early adolescence best practices, covering a variety of topics including curriculum development, program design, pedagogical approaches, and continuous improvement models. Partners have included school districts, educational service centers, youth development organizations, out-of-school-time collaboratives, libraries, and more.