L.E.A.P. 8th Grade Leadership Retreat & 7th Grade Pay It Forward

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Years ago, the Junior High School embarked on a mission to re-create, re-frame, and re-purpose advisement in our middle-school division. To make a long, and wonderful, story short, we re-crafted the backbone of advisement to provide a spine of leadership development. Sixth grade focuses on the “intrapersonal” aspects of leadership, seventh grade focuses on the “interpersonal” aspects of leadership, and the eighth grade focuses on the “extrapersonal” aspects of leadership. Because leadership, at its core, is really about service and interdependency – not egocentric, authoritarian independence – the entire program maintains shape thanks to the glue of service learning and project-based group initiatives. We call the entire scope and sequence “L.E.A.P.” – the Leadership Experience Advisement Program. What follows are two brief slices of time for pieces of the seventh-grade LEAP program and the eighth-grade LEAP program.

7th Grade LEAP Day: Pay It Forward

Yesterday, our seventh grade participated in a LEAP day called “Pay It Forward.” Here is a copy of the email summary and thanks that our grade chairs sent:

Many, many thanks to you all for all that you did to make Tuesday such an amazing experience for our seventh graders. I have received positive feedback from many of the students and faculty members. Thanks so much for the time and effort you all put into the day…here’s what we all accomplished together:

1070 sandwiches made for Atlanta Union Mission
18 canvases touched up for Hospital Art
$4,000 in coins rolled for Habitat for Humanity
Two new beds planned and created in our on-campus garden
Over 30 large trash bags (and a wallet) collected in campus clean up
175 letters written to the troops serving our country to be sent by the USO
103 cheerful artwork pieces created and laminated for people in assisted living facilities
17 double sided fleece blankets created for the Atlanta Union Mission

Impressive! It would not have happened without each one of you…so thanks! And please, as always, send along any feedback or ideas for the next go ’round!

James and Jan

Below is a short iMovie* of one of the initiatives – Hospital Art:

8th Grade LEAP Retreat – A Double Overnight at Blue Ridge Assembly

In eighth grade, our LEAP program is threaded with aspects of the NAIS 20/20 project – the 20 biggest global issues to be addressed in the next 20 years. Over the course of the academic year, our eighth-grade advisories take on a global issue and address it with a local project. For several years, we made the pilgrimage to Blue Ridge Assembly in February, and the trip involved a lot of indoor project planning. Since the last retreat, the grade chairs and deans and advisors decided to change the retreat to early November so that the advisory groups could focus on team building and interdependent leadership…in order to establish a stronger foundation for the project planning and implementation that will occur next in the multi-phase advisory plan.

Our leadership retreat involves a number of adventure-based, challenges or initiatives. You can peruse a set of initiative descriptions through the embedded Scribd document, and you can view a 13:00 iMovie* showing highlights of the retreat.

[*NOTE: iMovie video effects have been added to the movies because of a new school policy about student images on faculty blogs.]

The Wise Routes Project Blog

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If you are anything akin to a regular reader here at It’s About Learning, you probably know that I am fascinated by the various, creative approaches to “schooling” and education. Because we are in more of a “learn anything, anywhere, anytime” developing culture, school will likely adjust to these cultural shifts, or school as we know it may become increasingly irrelevant. On a regular basis, I attempt to stay current with research and experiments and practices related to this school-transformation in which we are involved. Blended learning, DIY University, and unschooling are just a few of the emerging educational practices complementing, supplementing, and recreating “traditional,” industrial-era schools.

Recently, a parent sent me a link to a blog entitled The Wise Routes Project Blog, and specifically to a post entitled “Ride Somewhere Far.” Many thanks to the parent…my interest is peaked, and I thought some of you might like to join in the investigation. Enjoy. It’s about learning.

Sharing Curiosity Paths and Resources – #Design, #Engagement, #PBL

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I don’t have a lot of time to write this morning, but I do have some time. So, it occurred to me to use my time to share a bit. This week, I benefited greatly from various colleagues sharing their “curiosity paths” and resources with me. My colleagues know that I am interested deeply in design thinking, learner engagement, and project-based learning. Among many shares this week, I highlight three below by embedding three videos and the links to the sites that contain these videos and additional resources about design, engagement, and PBL. In my mind’s eye, I see these three strands as a braided whole – I see them synergisticly. I am not sure that design thinking, learner engagement, and project-based learning could ever be un-braided into silo-ed parts. They are intricately connected parts of an entire system. Enjoy. It’s about learning.

http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/

http://edu20.bretford.com/index.html

http://www.edvisions.com/custom/SplashPage.asp

Synergy: Complexity~Simplicity, Collaboration & Brainstorming

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Our Synergy team is at the halfway mark, time wise, of the semester.  For the past 9 weeks we have been recording images, questions, and thoughts in our observation journals.  We use a common space, a Posterous group, to communicate, collaborate, and connect ideas.

The challenge now upon us…What data mining strategies should we employ to uncover community issues that, as a team, we want to study, investigate, problem-find and problem-solve?  We have over 300 posts.  It seems daunting, almost overwhelming to sift through our data.

Via his talk at TEDGlobal 2010, “How complexity leads to simplicity,” Eric Berlow was our “guest expert” to help us think about and learn that “complex doesn’t always equal complicated.”

A couple of key insights that stuck with us include:

[Use] the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity to just encourage you to ask questions you didn’t think of before.

and

The more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers and it is often different than the answer that you started with.

Here is a quick trailer and then approximately 4 minutes of video from Monday’s Synergy learning experience to show one of our attempts to find simplicity on the other side of our complex task of data mining for new projects.

  • If you facilitate project-based learning, how do you empower students to determine the team projects?
  • What other methods would you recommend to us for putting students in “that driver’s seat?”
  • How does assessment for learning change when immersed in PBL?
  • How would you assess the various learning demonstrated in the video?

We would love your feedback.

[Cross-posted at Experiments in Learning by Doing]

A future of synergists and dot connectors…for enhanced customer experience

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I am a synergist. I love to work at the intersection and collision of ideas, disciplines, and departments. Of course, like anything, I have to practice this skill, and I hope to continue progressing in the synergizing of things. As Carol Dweck has taught me to say, “I am not yet the synergist that I will be!” I believe Howard Gardner that one of the five minds of the future is the “synthesizing mind.” So, I practice synthesizing and synergizing.

How do I practice? I look for the connections between and among things. I purposefully look. I risk and experiment and take chances. Often, I fail. But I keep synergizing. I work to connect those parts that might result in a whole whose sum is greater than I originally imagined. Also, I get a lot of help from others. WE are smarter than ME when it comes to colliding and synergizing ideas.

This morning, I watched another synergist on TED. In just 4 short minutes, Nathalie Miebach demonstrated to me that mathematical data collection, weather science, 3D art, and music are marvelously integrated. What if school promoted and empowered this type of work…

Then, I remembered a blog post from Garr Reynolds in which he quotes Steve Jobs from a 1997 interview:

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try and sell it…we have tried to come up with a strategy and vision for Apple, it started with “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?” Not starting with “Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that?” And I think that’s the right path to take.”

And, so, here is some of my synergy practice this morning: I see Miebach’s TED talk and Job’s quote as inextricably linked together. Schools are envisioning a transformation towards more integrated studies. Some schools are already doing so with great success. Researchers are studying such schools and writing about the Powerful Learning that is happening in such places. Among other shared traits, the schools that are transforming successfully are putting “customer experience” far ahead of “awesome technology.” The successful ones, it seems to me, are guiding students to discover the intersections – the synergies – among such things as mathematical data collection, weather science, 3D art, and music. Then, they are engaging various technologies as tools with which to explore and deepen understanding.

Yesterday, at our faculty meeting, we also took a step in synergy practice. For the second meeting in a row, we told “campfire stories” of some exciting “customer experiences” from our classes and courses. We identified some points on our faculty graph. Now, we have a greater potential to play that great game of motor skill – connect the dots. Wanna play?