#MustRead Shares (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

“How do we educate young people to thrive in a world of possibility?” #ImaginingLearning #ListeningSession @Unboundary

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A Listening Session’s purpose is to discover each young  person’s deepest knowing about how they would answer the question, “How do we educate young people to thrive in a world of possibility?”

– from Imagining Learning…About Listening Sessions

On Thursday, November 15, 2012, Unboundary hosted Charles Kouns and Stella Humphries from Imagining Learning to facilitate a Listening Session for seven Atlanta high schoolers. Sophomore Tara Subramaniam initiated the opportunity with Charles Kouns and asked me to help her organize the event and invite a group of students from surrounding schools. What inspiring vision and determination from Tara.

The session unfolded in three stages. In stage 1, Charles explained the purpose of Imagining Learning’s U.S. tour of Listening Sessions, set some general guidelines, and opened the sharing with eight writing prompts to which the students responded.

For stage 2, the students wrote and shared a story about a seed of life wisdom that someone else had provided them during their lives. And during stage 3, students co-created a piece of original art to express what they imagined as their ideal learning journey.

As Charles’ partner Stella recollected at the closing circle of the session, “It was beautiful to watch and listen to you as your participation grew and crescendoed in energy and expression throughout the three hours.”

I assured Charles that I would not give away too much of the content and take-away from this session by way of this post. By traveling the country to listen to young people about what they imagine education could be, Charles and Stella, along with David Loitz, are conducting invaluable research – and to their credit, they are thoughtful and deliberate about how they gather their research. They don’t want sharers like me to overly taint the authenticity of future sessions.

Also of note, they are staying true to a fundamental tenet of design – start with empathy and a genuine desire to understand those for whom you are designing. Seek first to understand and then to be understood.

Combining these seven Atlanta voices with the hundreds of other student voices, Imagining Learning will contribute the collective wisdom of our young people to our national discussion about how to improve and enhance education – how to “educate young people to thrive in a world of possibility.”

As Stella and Charles departed, Charles did say he trusted me about what I would post immediately. And I just could not resist sharing this 60-second piece – hoping that Tara’s efforts and the information here might inspire you to organize a Listening Session yourself.

Many thanks to the seven young people who shared their profound wisdom about what school could be, and many thanks to their five schools who helped make it possible for them to attend and participate. And many thanks to Charles Kouns, Stella Humphries, David Loitz, and to Imagining Learning – for Listening.

If you want to learn more about Imagining Learning and the Listening Sessions, I highly recommend the following:

To Tara, this Atlanta Listening Session cohort, and Imagining Learning. And to all of the invaluable voices of our young people – in both their individual strengths and in their collective power.

Brain Food: Education @Unboundary #BrainFood

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Like others, UNBOUNDARY sees education as one of the linchpin design challenges of our time. And like others, too, we’re drawn as if by a tractor beam to play a role.

That attraction, no doubt, is fueled by the parallels we see to our quarter century of helping some of the biggest and best-known enterprises in the world rethink and transform themselves.

We enter into this challenge with a declared bias: our belief that the transformation of education is interconnected to the transformations happening now in both corporations and the social innovation space…

This bias has shaped the structure and practices of Unboundary, which now has interdependent practice areas in corporate, social innovation, and education transformation.

We also enter this challenge offering Brain Food: a proven approach for shifting the din of idea-sharing into a useful design-thinking discussion.

Brain Food is curated provocation. It is both question and answer. It is both perspective and focus.

We welcome you to Volume One, Number One of Unboundary’s Education Brain Food. And we look forward to the discussion it opens among us.

Brain Food: Education, vol. 1, no. 1

Gijs van Wulfen’s map for innovation

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This map from Gijs van Wulfen, one of LinkedIn’s thought leaders in innovation, is worth exploring. In van Wulfen’s Nov. 12 article, “The best innovators are need seekers,” he summarizes Booz & Company’s three fundamental innovation strategies, and van Wulfen adds his own Fourth innovation method. Definitely worth exploring.