What if we never said, “It can’t be done?”
#GrowthMindset
#SolutionSeeker
HT @MikeyCanup
#AK12DC = The Atlanta K-12 Design Challenge
The Atlanta K-12 Design Challenge lives as a collaboration among 11 Atlanta schools – half of them independent in governance structure and half of them part of the Fulton Co. public-charter system. The original grant proposal leapt from a jumping-off point of believing that public and private schools in Atlanta could partner as an innovation nucleus to amplify the trajectory of powerful educational transformation for ALL Atlanta schools.
Through generous funding from the Howard R. Dobbs Foundation and an operational collaboration precipitated by The Center for Teaching and bolstered by connections with Stanford University’s d.School, this inter-school workforce (read “dream team”) is employing design thinking to explore the needs of educational users and to expand the power of iterative prototyping to enhance learning for virtually countless people throughout Atlanta.
The Summit
On Friday and Saturday of this week (March 21-22), the 11 schools gathered as a whole cohort for a second time (the first time was January 14). This mid-stream design summit provided time and opportunity for schools to advance the empathy gathering they’ve been doing at their schools by defining their challenges, developing their POV (Point of View) statements, and iteratively prototyping solutions for the needs of a particular user they met during their initial discovery immersion.
Below are a few links that provide windows into the work accomplished on Friday and Saturday, March 21-22.
What’s Next?
The next stage (“Stage 2”) involves continuing the school-based work through further testing and iterating of prototypes, implementing emerging solutions, and transforming practices.
Stay tuned. It’s exciting times in Atlanta education!
Windows:
It’s citizens who saw things that could be working better, and they decided to fix them. Through that work, they’re creating a 21st century ecosystem of participation. They’re creating a whole new way for citizens to be involved besides voting or signing a petition, or protesting. They can actually build…
How might school transform into a place/time/organization/peoples/network so that more collective energy and impassioned effort is put into hacking for participatory citizenship? For engaged citizen leadership?
Not only preparation for…BUT participation in…now.
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RELATED:
For more than a decade, this question has lived at the heart of my research and practice as a professional educator. While I worked at Unboundary, we created a Brain Food devoted to exploring this question.
A number of educators and school transformation agents connect to this question through an entire branch of educational practice known as “authentic learning.” At the end of January, #EdChat Radio featured the topic of authentic learning on an episode. And Dr. Brett Jacobsen, of Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation (where I work), recently interviewed Dr. Yong Zhao for his podcast “Design Movement,” and much of their conversation connects with this topic of authentic learning.
Given the habits formed by decades of industrial-age, delivery-based pedagogy, though, educators must explore and experiment with different structures in order to make room for more authentic learning – learning that is meant to serve a greater purpose than only a grade in a grade book and a future locker-clean-out session in late May or early June.
Exploring such new structures can be challenging for schools. In fact, some structures point to entirely different paradigms for schools – like “giving an education” rather than getting an education, taking a course, or whadya-get-on-that-test assessment.
Some school people imagine such paradigm shifts would lack structure – that it would be too free form, loosey-goosey, or soft-skills heavy. This is really a false set up for thinking about the structural-shift needs of schools in transformation. How “loosey-goosey, really, is your project work and real-world problem solving in your career and life?
As Tony Wagner says in Creating Innovators, it’s not a choice between structure and no structure to allow for more authentic learning. It’s a choice to build a different structure for School 3.0 – one that allows for student-learners to explore their passions and real-world purposes while engaged in challenges that exist in the world and yearn to be defined and solved. Structures that empower learners to engage in more authentic learning flows.
But how do educators make such shifts and create different structures? I believe one way we do this is to explore avenues and portals to empower students to engage in real-world problem solving. Instead of only organizing the curriculum – the track of learning – around subject-siloed disciplines, at least part of the curriculum could be organized around exploring and venturing into authentic, real-world problem solving as organizers of product-and-process-oriented work.
In my own life and work, I’ve explored opening such portals through #fsbl and #Synergy. Much of this work involves immersing oneself and other learners into the Innovator’s DNA traits – observe, question, experiment, network, and associate – through the methodology of observation journaling and curiosity-curated curriculum.
Of course, other ways exist to open those portals and explore into those worlds of authentic learning and real-life problem solving. Here are but a few inspirations and possible ways in…
#GoExplore
Resources for engaging in real-life solution seeking:
Open IDEO
http://www.openideo.com/
Open IDEO is an open innovation platform for social good. We’re a global community that draws upon the optimism, inspiration, ideas and opinions of everyone to solve problems together.
NPR – All Tech Considered: Innovation
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/195149875/innovation
An exploration of interesting ideas that solve problems, introduce new experiences or even change our world.
Do Something
http://www.dosomething.org/
DoSomething.org is the country’s largest not-for-profit for young people and social change. We have 2,439,780 members (and counting!) who kick ass on causes they care about. Bullying. Animal cruelty. Homelessness. Cancer. The list goes on. DoSomething.org spearheads national campaigns so 13- to 25-year-olds can make an impact – without ever needing money, an adult, or a car. Over 2.4 million people took action through DoSomething.org in 2012.
Choose2Matter
http://choose2matter.org/
Choose2Matter is a call to leadership and an accelerator to connect individuals and communities with a conscience. It combines technology, innovation and mentorship to solve problems that matter. It’s an important opportunity for business, brands, and communities to join forces in the causes and issues most important to those they lead and serve.
What has been inspired by students, has led to the official launch and creation ofCHOOSE2MATTER – a crowd sourced, social good community.
50 Problems in 50 Days
http://50problems50days.com/
I’m on an adventure – to explore the limits of design’s ability to solve social problems, big and small. To do this I attempted to solve 50 problems in 50 daysusing design. I also spent time with 12 of Europe’s top design firms.
Peter Smart
Innocentive
http://www.innocentive.com/
InnoCentive is the global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems to the world’s smartest people who compete to provide ideas and solutions to important business, social, policy, scientific, and technical challenges.
TED Prize
http://www.ted.com/prize
The TED Prize is awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change. By leveraging the TED community’s resources and investing $1 million dollars into a powerful idea, the TED Prize supports one wish to inspire the world.
Ideas for Ideas
http://www.ideasforideas.com/
If school is supposed to prepare kids for real life, then why doesn’t school look more like real life?
This question lives at the heart of my research for the past decade. This question largely drives my work.
Many people ask me, “So, Bo, what do you mean by ‘real life?'”
Well, one aspect of blurring the lines between school and real life involves reimagining the kind of work that students engage in during their school experience. What if more of the student work had real-life application? What if more of the student work were aimed at targets well beyond the grade-book columns and end-of-year locker clean outs?
For example, what about the question, “Paper or plastic?” You know – at the grocery store. How should we respond to that question at the conveyor-belted check-out counter? (If, of course, we don’t bring our own reusable bags.)
From that question, a group of student designers and solution seekers might find themselves on a path leading to the investigation of the refrigerator and the crisper drawer.
“What?!” You might ask. What if student-learners actually worked on product design for such things as refrigerators, water boilers, etc.? What if students really knew the best answers to “Paper or plastic?”
Watch this TED talk from Leyla Acaroglu, and you might just see what I’m talking about – what I dream about…
Student-learners engaging in real-life work that goes well beyond a grade in a grade book and provides the weave-work and relevancy hooks that integrate and amplify the core purposes of our school-segregated subject areas. Work that recognizes and respects the systems of which our products and our persons are all parts of the whole…
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it's about learning 