We embed Dream Directors in schools—a new character that we invented after listening to what students and teachers believe is missing most. They’re the only true cost of our model, and they make magic happen.
Part human catalyst and part social entrepreneur, Dream Directors recruit and train volunteer Future Coaches from the community and clear the way for students to dream up and build Future Projects of their own, each with potential to reawaken entire schools. We saw that last year—and this year we’re taking it one step further, committing to inspiring at least eight in ten students in each of our partner schools to either become part of a Project or lead one as a Fellow.
What if we all did more to support missions like The Future Project’s?
We’re on a mission to transform America’s high schools into Future Schools. Places that value taking risks and taking action. That show students they have what it takes to innovate and to lead. That unleash passion. And power. It’s a whole new vision for education, and a revolution in which everyone wins.
When I was an engineering student, many of my professors assigned me to a team and asked us to solve invented problems, like how to propel a ball across a room using only cardboard and rubber bands or how to build the tallest structure out of toothpicks and marshmallows. Other professors asked us to design specific things, such as laparoscopic suturing devices or fetal monitoring devices. But my favorite professors allowed me to choose my team and encouraged us to find our own problems to work on. Those assignments were the ones that made me feel I was helping others most. As a design engineer, I wanted meaning—and I wanted to choose my team.
And, a bit later:
What kind of community could I create to help students think that they were capable of helping others? What kind of process could I teach that helped students to think that they could collaboratively tackle the messiest and more daunting problems such as our obesity epidemic, failing schools, and polluted waters? As a professor, my job is to teach students how to reliably and creatively come up with answers to engineering design problems. Could I create an organization or environment that, like the Obama campaign, would inspire students to carry out their mission—as they envisioned it—in their own creative ways?
Here’s what I created: Design for America pulls together teams of volunteer faculty, students, and professional mentors in a local community. Interdisciplinary student teams meet weekly. Anyone who wants to be part of a design team can be. The only requirement is that participants must work, not just talk about the enormity of the problems. DFA doesn’t give students problems to solve; it guides them to walk around their community to find problems they believe are meaningful.
It’s like Synergy 8, but for college. (Link to the Synergy 8 category on It’s About Learning)
(HT to @SAISNews for making certain that I saw Liz Gerber’s DFA piece!)
Do you really believe that all students can learn? At high levels?
Do you see learning as the constant… and time and support as the variables? Or do you still see time and support as relatively fixed, so learning must then vary? (Think As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs – learning variability in alphabetic symbols.)
Are you willing to rethink entire educational structures in order to facilitate high-level learning for ALL children?
Is all of the above worth at least a half hour of your time – if only to stretch your thinking about what’s possible?
Esselman explains her experience with blowing up the construct of age-grouping and re-imagining school such that students of current understanding are “grouped” regardless of their chronological age.
Shelton shows examples of modern one-on-one tutoring that make new learners as cognitively agile as veterans – even more so. And he makes a strong case that echoes recent words from Sir Ken Robinson – that schools should be asking students, “How are you smart?” not “How smart are you?”
Also, another hat tip to @GregBamford for helping me to think a bit deeper about educational structure (versus individual scapegoating) after I participated in his #EduCon session on organizational development – “Teaching Frameworks for Creative Collaboration.”
Received this blast email from Udemy. I thought it was intriguing and thought provoking on a number of levels…
Hey Bo,
I’m Eren Bali, the CEO and Co-founder of Udemy. I want to thank you for making Udemy such an amazing community.
Recently, a lot of people have asked me why I started the company. The answer lies in my personal story, and I wanted to share it with you today.
I was born in a small village in Turkey. My primary school was a one room schoolhouse where a single teacher tried her best to teach 5 different grades at the same time. That meant we were often left to try and learn from books on our own. As a kid, I was interested and somewhat talented in subjects like mathematics and science, but there was very little room for me to advance my skills.
One day my parents bought my two sisters and me a computer and Internet access for a few months. At the time none of us had any idea how it would change our lives. But once I started using the Internet, I knew I had found a new way to learn.
That’s where I discovered several math forums where people were exchanging problems to work on and a few websites with problem sets used in the Math Olympiads. Even though these forums were clunky and disorganized, they had a huge impact on my life. Long story short, by teaching myself math online, I eventually won a gold medal in the National Math Olympiads in Turkey and a silver medal in the International Math Olympiads.
Later on during college I studied computer science and mathematics. It was there that I met my good friend, and Udemy co-founder, Oktay Caglar. Together we started experimenting with the possibilities offered by the Internet.
So with the power of the Internet, combined with our own challenging educational experiences, we imagined a world where anyone could learn anything — from any expert in the world. It didn’t take us long to realize how much this idea could change people’s lives.
But the journey wasn’t easy.
We first created a product with Udemy’s vision 6 years ago in Turkey. We failed. So we packed our bags and moved to Silicon Valley to give it another shot. We were rejected by more than 50 investors before we launched the company in the Valley. But through it all, we didn’t give up because we believed in the power of the Internet to change how people learn.
We learned from the challenges we faced and eventually our hard work paid off.
It’s on that note that I want to share some exciting news with you. As a result of Udemy’s amazing growth, we just raised $12 million in Series B funding.
As a small thank you, I wanted to share a collection of Udemy courses [link] that I wish I had access to while growing up in Turkey.I hope you enjoy them.
Education faces a design challenge. From what I know about design challenges, it seems that the best designs begin with intensive stages of immersion and discovery – putting the designers in the positions of chief empathizers.
One of the best examples I know of related to this commitment of being chief empathizers comes from Dan and Chip Heath’s book Switch. The story of Dr. Jerry Sternin harnessing the local wisdom of Vietnamese mothers who were rearing healthy children amidst a malnutrition epidemic stands out to me. Actually, the story inspires me. Dr. Sternin did not swoop in with pre-conceived notions and ready-made solutions. Instead he committed to a process of immersion and discovery to find sustainable, scalable solutions that came from within the community. He leveraged empathy to create a most-likely-to-succeed solution that honored the end users.
Countless other examples come to mind, but I’ll restrain myself and offer only a few here:
When I enrolled in a design-thinking course from IDEO and Design Thinking for Educators, we began with a mini design challenge, and step 1 was to interview someone about their morning commute. “Learn how they feel, what they wish for, what gets in their way. Your job is to ask great questions, listen, and learn. TIP: Don’t be afraid to ask ‘Why?'”
When I participated in Mount Vernon Presbyterian School’s Design Institute, before we began designing our ideal outdoor classroom, we interviewed students. We collected insights from them before we even thought about preparing solutions to our own notions of classroom design.
When Emily Pilloton asked her student designers to imagine a better chicken coop and design it, they started with observing how chickens behave. “In three days, students would get to know their feathered ‘clients’ by observing their behavior. How do they eat? ‘They like pecking out of the straw, not eating from the trough,’ noted Kerron. How do they sleep? ‘They huddle together up in the roosting box,’ said another student. After three days, our students knew far more about chicken behavior than they ever imagined or wanted.”
So, for all of the schools facing essential questions of innovation, I am wondering how you are factoring in “immersion and discovery.” How are you building empathy into the design challenges?
When I was a school principal, one of the most valuable things I ever did was to shadow a student every year. For a day, I would partner with a student – most often a sixth grader – and I would trail along beside them and pretend to be a student for a day. I was off limits as a principal because I wanted to be completely immersed in the experience. In the years that I was most committed, I would even do all of the homework assignments that night of the shadow. Often, on blogs like Connected Principals, I read of other administrators engaging in such empathy gathering. Now, I am wondering if schools should not build this process into their regular routines and habits.
Maybe schools need innovation teams. Among other jobs, these innovation teams could commit to shadowing students, interviewing students, observing school days and after-school activities, talking with parents about what family life is like at home after school, etc. I bet devoting just three days a year to such immersion and discovery would yield invaluable insights and empathies. [Why the arbitrary number of three days? Well, if it’s good enough for the chickens in Bertie County, NC, I figured it was a good starting place!]
Our school innovations might improve mightily if we designed with the students’ voices at the core – if we committed to “outrospection.”
it's about learning 