Developing a designer's mind

Back in September I attended the Presenter's Forum in Denver in order to further my goal of becoming a Cognitive Coach trainer.  I was also hoping that learning more about presenting would lead to me delivering better presentations in the future.  At the time I was working on designing an online workshop for the IB on digital citizenship, preparing for a tech integration workshop for Consilience, and preparing to lead a 3-day Making the PYP Happen workshop in Mumbai.  One of the things I really hoped to do was to develop a designer's mind so that the presentations I would eventually give would be really useful for the participants.

According to Bob Garmston, design thinkers ask 4 questions when planning a presentation:

• What do I want the participants to learn?
• How will I know they are learning it?
• What strategies or approaches will I use?
• What can I learn by designing and delivering the content and how can that inform refinements?

When I thought about it, the first 3 of these questions reminded me of the Learners Constructing Meaning model that we find in the PYP:

The Pathways to Learning Model, developed by Lipton and Wellman and referenced by Garmston in his book The Presenter's Fieldbook is similar:

When designing my recent workshops I tried to put these ideas into practice.  For example in the activating and engaging phases I tried to show my adult learners that we are all experts - we bring with us a wealth of teaching experience and we know about the context in which we work in our schools.  Often as teachers we already have a lot of prior knowledge, so the initial step is to activate this, to have the participants talk about what they know and to get this knowledge into their working memory so that new information has something that it can stick on to.  At the start of each day of the workshops I tried to have the participants actively engage with each other.  The message I was trying to get across is that adults socially construct their understanding - I expect them to be interactive, not just passive recipients of knowledge.  I explained to them that I would not be talking for more than 20% of the time - they would be expected to work together and share their knowledge with each other.  Garmston explains that using interactive strategies right from the start provides psychological safety for the social construction of meaning.

Once the participants were active and engaged, I then planned my next set of engagements, which was to have them explore and discover.  This is the point where new information can be introduced. At times I did give a short lecturette (for example a short history of the IBO), and at other times I expected the participants to read and interact with articles and publications (for example through paired reading, jigsaw or visible thinking protocols).  All these activities were designed to tap into the participants cognitive processing skills.

Finally we moved into the organize and integrate phase.  Here participants had to organize and integrate the new material to make it their own.  Again I employed various strategies such as KWL charts, diamond rankings, making visuals and so on as a way of re-ordering knowledge.  Garmston tells us that this stage is "the work of the learner, not the presenter ... it is the stage at which learners crystallize meaning for themselves."

At this point in the design process, it's important to think about the balance between content and process.  At the Presenter's Forum this was likened to chewing gum, the gum being the content and the chewing being the interactive engagements that are designed to help the participants receive, process and apply the content.  When designing a presentation it's vital to consider how much gum and how much chewing is needed:  the content has little or no value unless it has been chewed.  The following image, taken from the ASCD website, explains this in more depth:

If your aim as a presenter is simply to raise awareness or to share knowledge, possibly you want to give a lot of content, interspersed with short periods of processing.  If you want to develop skills, then more time is needed for processing.  With attitude development you will need to process at the start, and then introduce the content later.  Finally for application you might want to design a lot of content at the start and then time at the end to apply what has been learned.   I tried a combination of all of these approaches in my workshops, though often had to think on my feet.  At times things took much longer or shorter than I'd anticipated.  Sometimes I had to provide more gum.  Sometimes I had to let people chew it for a bit longer.  A couple of things I decided to leave out altogether in order to allow more chewing time.

Generally I feel I learned a lot from the Presenter's Forum that I was able to put into practice right away.  I also videoed myself presenting - I haven't yet had the opportunity to watch this video, but I'm hoping that by reflecting on it I'll be able to hone my presentation skills even more.

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Micro-schools

A friend of mine who moved from London to the north of England put her daughter into the local village school.  There were 2 classes, what we would call in England the "infants" class from ages 5 - 7 and the "junior" class from ages 8 - 11.  Both classes involved mixed age teaching.  My friend's daughter is now about to embark upon her Ph.D.  An early education in a "micro-school" clearly worked for her.

In last month's R&D meeting we discussed micro-schools - not really schools set up by themselves but more the concept of a "school within a school".  We discussed how a micro-school could be one way of testing new ideas about personalizing learning.  A micro-school is one that would serve less than 153 students (the magical Dunbar's number, mentioned in a previous post) as research has shown that when a school gets beyond 150 students it becomes difficult for adults to keep track of individual students.  In a micro-school learning is mainly student-led, with students given more power to determine how they spend their time.  Teachers in such schools are most definitely the "guides on the side", managing a wide variety of learning styles in a community of learners where students are free to follow their interests and curiosities and where they have autonomy and ownership over their work.

Although all micro-schools vary, there are a number of commonalities, including the push to make learning more authentic.  The focus is on interdisciplinary learning, customized for each child, where students construct their knowledge and skills through inquiry. Today's micro-schools use technology to capture data on student progress, and so can easily evaluate what each student is learning, and at the same time many of these schools empower the students to collaboratively create and define the standards of the class.  These schools generally focus on one project at a time, and allow students to go through several iterations of the projects when creating and redefining their work.

Research into micro-schools brought us to The Future of School website, where there are posts about creating tiny schools.  The following quotation is taken from the article about micro-schools:

Obsolescence - not brokenness - is the problem.  We need to explore entirely new methods of organizing our schools, distilling what the most important role for schools might be instead of heaping ever more requirements on an old model.

At our R&D meeting we started discussing what a micro-school would look like, based on the school within a school model.  We looked at The Innovation Academy at the American School of Lima in Peru, and we made a very early start on ideating what a micro-school could be like in our community. Watch out for future updates as we continue this work.

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Future Forwards Volume 5 - from shining stars to connected constellations

Today ASB published the next volume of Future Forwards. The online edition is available at this link. Future Forwards is a collection of thoughts, hypotheses, discussions, and reflections on practices, research and ideas that are relevant to emerging new paradigms of teaching and learning.  Previous volumes of Future Forwards have focused on how ASB's R&D has built a culture of active innovation at the school.  However we are aware that to effect transformation across education worldwide, we need more schools to "move past being distinct and shining stars of innovation, to become connected constellations of innovation."  Volume 5 of Future Forwards therefore contains explorations of the frontiers of education from 3 other schools around the world.

Paradigms - Looking to the Future
These chapters are about paradigm shifts - different approaches that radically challenge established conventions. Here you will find chapters on professional development, design thinking, multi-age classrooms and social entrepreneurship.

Ideas - The Next Step
These chapters are about how current research is changing or impacting existing practices or established norms. In this section you can read about ASB's partnership with a local school, research into digital wellbeing and social media use among third culture kids, the future of higher education, gender equity and meeting the diverse needs of language learners.

Practices - Innovating in the Now
These chapters describe the application of an instructional practice in a completely novel way or the successful mash-up of different practices. In this section you will read blended learning, student leadership in technology, curiosity projects in art, Maker, using sensors in the classroom and creative coding.

These eBooks are completely free - enjoy and please consider sharing them with others in your professional network.

If you missed the earlier volumes, here are the links:

• Future Forwards Volume 1
• Future Forwards Volume 2
• Future Forwards Volume 3
• Future Forwards Volume 4

Integration -v- Implementation

Many people ask me what makes technology so successful at ASB.  One of the things I think is that for many years there has been a clear division of roles.  Each campus as a Director of Educational Technology and each campus has a Director of Technology Support.  I spend my time focused on teaching and learning, supporting both teachers and students to make thoughtful decisions about how to use the technology.  I never have to worry about networks, cables, budgets, hardware, subscriptions and so on (things that I did sometimes do in previous jobs, but which I never enjoyed). We each have a clear area of focus.

I was really encouraged on reading the new IB document Teaching and Learning with Technology, that this model is one that is promoted.  This model, shown in the diagram above, is "the thinking that separates the concepts related to technology from the things we use that are technology.  Integration is about pedagogy and it is the focus on what teachers and students are doing.  Implementation is the tools and infrastructure that supports the teaching and learning.

Now if you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know that in the past I have worked in a place that was not so balanced.  Where the people involved in the implementation were seen as being much more important than the teachers and learners - and so their voice was the one that was heard when decisions were made.  The IB is very clear on this:

Without integration, implementation doesn't work.  Integration drives implementation, not the other way round.

Another model is also discussed in the recent publication:  the AID technology integration framework of technology literacy in the IB programmes:

• Agency:  ways of being - the skills and concepts related to academic honest, digital participation and internet safety that leads to being safe and responsible online.
• Information:  ways of knowing - searching, analyzing and manipulation information and the responsible use of data.
• Design:  ways of doing - ideating and creating products (design thinking, Maker, robotics and so on that connects "real world" experiences with conceptual learning)

What do you think of the new ideas that have been published by the IB?  How will your school be using them?

Thinking like a designer: creative spaces for creative work

When ASB was building a new campus we researched space.  We looked into designing "campfire" areas where students would receive direct instruction, "watering holes" where students can collaborate together and "cave" spaces for quiet, individual work.  Reading on in the book inGenius by Tina Seelig, I'm at the part where she writes about Ewan McIntosh's 7 types of spaces that can exist in both the physical and online world.

1. Private space - places where we can be by ourselves.
2. Group spaces - where small teams of people work together.
3. Publishing spaces - designed to showcase what is going on - these occur in both the physical and virtual world, for example publishing on websites.
4. Performing spaces - where you can share/act out ideas.  These spaces are designed to bring ideas to life and so stimulate the imagination.  They don't need to be permanent spaces, but should be available when needed.
5. Participation spaces - places that allow personal engagement with what is going on.  The example Ewan gives is turning a school yard (group space) into a garden where students tend to the plants.
6. Data space - a library or database where information is stored - it needs to be easily accessible either physically or online.
7. Watching spaces - allowing us to be passive observers of what is happening around us, rather than being active participants.

I've been walking through the school and thinking about these spaces.  As well as our private "cave", "watering-hole" and "campfire" spaces I have seen we have others.  We definitely do also have publishing and performing spaces.  Our iCommons area can also be described as a data space. Possibly we need to think a little more about participation and watching spaces.

What sort of spaces do you have at your school?

Original artwork by an ASB student

Thinking like a designer: using memory to focus attention

Earlier this week I blogged about how I used Keri-Lee Beasley's CARP videos to help students understand design principles when they communicate using posters and presentations.  I've also read further in Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's book Storytelling with Data to consider how to focus the attention of your audience so that we are in control of how they interact with our visual communications.

Cole explains that we see with our brains - in particular as a designer we need to think about the different types of memory and how we can utilise it as we communicate:

• Iconic memory - information stays here for just a fraction of a second and mostly we are not even conscious of it.  However this memory evolved as a survival mechanism to pick up differences in our environment. Tapping into the iconic memory can certainly be used for effective visual communication.  This memory is the one that reacts to the Contrast part of the CARP model (here known as preattentive attributes) - making sure the important data contrasts with the rest is one way of ensuring our audience's attention is drawn to what we want them to see.
• Short-term memory - here it's important to be aware that people can only keep about 4 chunks of visual information in their short-term memory simultaneously.  This is one reason why we shouldn't have multiple symbols, colours and so on as we try to communicate a message.
• Long-term memory - once something leaves the short-term memory it either vanishes completely or it moves into long-term memory.  We know that images often stick with an audience, therefore combining a visual with a verbal message will be an effective way to trigger long-term memory in our audience.

We only have around 3-8 seconds with an audience before they decide to continue looking or focus their attention somewhere else.  Therefore we need to create a visual hierarchy so that the audience pays attention to what is most important first.  Preattentive attributes, such as colour, size, shape and position means that the audience doesn't have to work hard to process all the information, but instead is guided through the visual in order of what is most important.

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Reframe to create empathy

Over the past few days my Facebook feed has been dominated by the attitudes of people towards migrants following the recent atrocities in Paris.  There are some people who seem to think that by closing their borders to migrants, countries will remain safe. There are others who point out the benefits of migration, the consequences of not allowing innocent people to flee from hostilities, and who point out that religions encourage us to take care of our neighbours.  Of course this is just one example, but whatever the situation it is usually possible to look at it from different angles and perspectives, and in so-doing come up with more imaginative and creative solutions.

A few summers ago, when I did the Design Thinking for Educators workshop at the Henry Ford Learning Institute in Detroit, I learned that the first stage of the design process is empathy.  It's important to start with this because it allows you to put aside your own wants and needs that will bring you to what could be the ideal solution for you, but not necessarily for the wants and needs of another person. Walking in someone else's shoes is important so that you design a solution for them. Basically when you empathise you change your frame of reference by shifting your perspective to that of the other person.

Empathy forms part of both the IB Learner Profile and the PYP Attitudes.  The learner profile caring describes people who show empathy, compassion and respect towards the needs and feelings of others.  The attitude of empathy encourages students to "imagine themselves in another's situation in order to understand his or her reasoning and emotions, so as to be open-minded and reflective about the perspectives of others."

Being able to reframe situations is also an essential life-skill.  Our students will need to be able to reframe themselves and the way they view things to adapt and thrive in a world that is changing.

Image by Ronald Tan 

Thinking like a designer: storytelling with data

Several years ago, in a previous school, I attended a staff meeting where we were shown the results of a survey that had been conducted at the school several months before.  This presentation had been put together by an experienced educator, and data derived from the responses to the survey were all visualized as Excel graphs.  However it was one of the most incomprehensible presentations I've ever attended - it was hard to follow and the design got in the way of communicating the message.  I did learn something though.  Thinking that there must have been a better way to present data, I went out and read Garr Reynold's book on Presentation Zen, and following this I made sure that I shared these design principles and techniques with both students and teachers.  Last year, following a Google Summit hosted at AST, I also came across a free iBook from Keri-Lee Beasley called Design Secrets Revealed on iTunes.  This iBook contains 4 short videos that explain some simple principles of design (Contrast, Alignment, Repetition and Proximity).  I have used these videos with elementary students to have them understand how using the CARP principles can really help them to communicate in an impactful way using both posters and presentations.

Today I've started reading a new book, Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic.  Cole writes:

In school, we learn a lot about language and math.  On the language side we learn how to put words together into sentences and into stories.  With math, we learn to make sense of numbers.  But it's rare that these two sides are paired:  no one teachers us how to tell stories with numbers .... This leaves us poorly prepared for an important task that is increasingly in demand.  Technology has enabled us to amass greater and greater amounts of data and there is an accompanying growing desire to make sense out of all this data.  Being able to visualize data and tell stories with it is key to turning it into information that can be used to drive better decision making  ...  Being able to tell stories with data is a skill that's becoming more important in our world of increasing data and desire for data driven decision making.  An effective data visualization can mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to communicating the findings of your study ... or simply getting your point across to your audience.

I'm hoping that I will learn a lot from this book, and be able to share this learning with students to help them tell better stories with the data they are collecting.  I'll be sharing thoughts about this in future blog posts too.

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Future work skills and the future of education

I'm moving this week an having a good sort out, and while doing this I came across 2 articles that I had put on the coffee table some time ago and meant to get to but never did.  This post is about these 2 articles.

The first one is from KnowledgeWorks and is entitled Glimpses of the Future of Education  (click here to see the infographic that has been created about future learning - the graphic to the top left of this post is a small part of this infographic).  KnowledgeWorks has studied future trends for the past 10 years and predicts deep disruption for education.  One forecast is that learning is going to diversity leading to a flexible and radically personalized learning ecosystem that meets the needs of all learners.  The new ecosystem will include building relationships with museums, libraries and other cultural institutions enabling learners to move seamlessly across many kinds of learning experiences and providers.  Learning will therefore no longer be simply defined by time or place but can be designed to include individualized "learning playlists", with formative assessment leading to the approaches being tailored to each learner.  Formative assessment will use digital tools to collect rich data about what will be the most effective strategies for success.  In this scenario educators' jobs will diversity, with new roles emerging to support learning ("teacherpreneurs").  Virtual learning communities will also be part of this infrastructure, leading to more diverse forms of credentials, certificates and reputation markers.

The second article that I've been meaning to blog about for some time is simply entitled Future Work Skills 2020 from the Institute for the Future and the University of Phoenix Research Institute.  The report is around 4 years old, but still very relevant to consider when thinking about how close we are now to 2020.   Here the six drivers of change are seen as extreme longevity which leads to an ageing population that will work long beyond 65 with multiple careers (and so will need to be lifelong learners), the rise of smart machines and systems, a new media ecology, a computational world, superstructed organizations and a globally connected world.  At the same time that these factors are causing change, there are new skills that are in demand - in particular the sorts of skills that can't be done by machines.   These skills are:

1. Sense making - the ability to determine deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed.
2. Social intelligence - the ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.
3. Novel and adaptive thinking - coming up with solutions and responses beyond those that are rote or rule based.
4. Cross-cultural competency - in particular linguistic and an ability to sense and respond to new contexts.
5. Computational thinking skills - the ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning.
6. New-media literacy - the ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms and to leverage these media for persuasive communication.  The next generation of workers need to be fluent in forms such as video and to be comfortable creating and presenting their own visual information.
7. Transdisciplinary - understanding concepts across multiple disciplines.
8. A design mindset
9. Cognitive load management - social filtering to allow the more relevant information to rise above " the noise", and understanding how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques.
10. Virtual collaboration - the ability to work productively as a member of a virtual team.

According to the report, the sort of education that needs to be in place to promote these skills has to change.  There should be additional emphasis on developing critical thinking skills and analysis, and new-media literacy should be integrated throughout the curriculum.  Experiential learning is becoming more important, and that gives prominence to soft skills such as collaboration.  In addition there needs to be more focus on continuing education into adulthood.  More emphasis should be given to interdisciplinary training that allows students to develop skills and knowledge in a range of subjects.   

When I look at the list of 10 skills needed for the 2020 workforce I can see some schools are embracing them more than others.  Programmes such as the PYP are transdisciplinary in nature, and assessments are designed to show understanding, rather than simply factual recall.  In recent years at ASB we have also seen the introduction of design thinking in many different areas of the curriculum.  However 2020 is only 5 years away.  One of the things that these reports has made me realize is that the changes that need to happen to get our students ready for the workplace of 2020 are still long overdue.

Future Forwards Volume 4

Today ASB published the next volume of Future Forwards.  The online edition is available at this link. Future Forwards is a collection of thoughts, hypotheses, discussions, and reflections on practices, research and ideas that are relevant to emerging new paradigms of teaching and learning.

Paradigms - Looking to the Future
These chapters are about paradigm shifts - different approaches that radically challenge established conventions. Here you will find chapters on experimenting with drones, creating an app to support French language learning, exploring a walking workstation in school, yoga and meditation for adolescent decision-making, and creativity and innovation.

Ideas - The Next Step
These chapters are about how current research is changing or impacting existing practices or established norms. In this section you can read about engineering design and the STEM crisis, improving reading for English language learners, and Day 9 prototyping

Practices - Innovating in the Now
These chapters describe the application of an instructional practice in a completely novel way or the successful mash-up of different practices. In this section you will read about designing for environmental sustainability, the journey to standards-based assessment and reporting, problem solving (the Global Social Entrepreneurship Summit), using technology and analyzing data as key assessment, making and tinkering in the PYP, Community and Social Responsibility (CSR): a model for 21st century learning, inquiry in Kindergarten, iPad apps for creation in Early Childhood, using student data profiles to visualize student success in the Middle School, improving the world (the Technology, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Summit) and finally a chapter written by my colleague Sharon Brown and myself on coaching your colleagues about our Technology Integration Coaching programme.

These eBooks are completely free - enjoy and please consider sharing them with others in your professional network.

If you missed the earlier volumes, here are the links:

·        Future Forwards Volume 1

·        Future Forwards Volume 2

·        Future Forwards Volume 3

Human-Centered Design

This past weekend at ASB Un-Plugged Impact we worked with social entrepreneurs in India who are facing "wicked problems".  The enterprises are mostly small, for example a designer who is working with local women making handmade products, an industrial hemp company, an organization that builds model villages in rural India, an enterprise that is revolutionizing the reintegration into society of victims of sex trafficking and so on.  We went through a Design Thinking process over 2 days to look at questions such as "How can we define and measure our impact?", "how can we keep farmers safe in times of crisis?" and "how can we educate adolescent girls to bridge the gap between their aspirations and community expectations?"  The idea was that we would professionally develop our teachers, using authentic issues, so that they could use Design Thinking to approach any challenge in school, be it curriculum, spaces, processes or systems.  At the same time we were living ASB's mission, to enhance the lives of others.

On my return to school on Monday I received an email sharing a link to a great resource - that I am now sharing in turn.  The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design is a full-color, 192-page book from IDEO.  It's licensed under a creative commons licence, and you can download a PDF of the book by taking a short survey.  Human-centred design is all about believing that all problems are solvable and that the people who face these problems every day are the ones who hold the key to the solutions that the world needs, such as gender inequality, poverty and the lack of clean water.  This process goes through 3 phases:  inspiration where you build empathy, ideation where you generate ideas and design new solutions and implementation where you maximize the impact of the solutions in the world.  The book contains 57 methods and a variety of exercises and activities that work through getting a design challenge onto the market.

To download your own copy of the Field Guide Design Kit click here.

Making and the Learner Profile

Over the past couple of years I've written several posts about the Maker Movement at ASB.  I attended an ISTE pre-conference workshop in 2013 on Maker with Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez, and both Gary and Sylvia came to ASB to help us empower students through making.    We launched Maker Faires and Maker Saturdays at ASB and currently have these every month.  We have also incorporated Maker into a number of PYP units of inquiry, for example in Grade 4.  In Kindergarten we have an entire unit of making.  In their How the World Works unit, KG students explore the central idea "The way materials behave and interact can determine how people use them."  This is a PBL unit with the driving question "What do makers need to know?"  Our key concepts are form, function and change and our lines of inquiry are the behaviour and uses of materials, the changing properties of materials and manipulation of materials for specific purposes.  Students are assessed on their understanding through the creation of a Maker Studio - they explore the materials and create an end product that shows their understanding of the types of materials used and how they functions in their new state/version.

Yesterday at our faculty meeting it was time for the teachers to have a hands-on experience of Maker - our task was to design ScribbleBots.  Scot Hoffman, our R&D Coordinator, then shared several ways teachers could take this further.  The idea is not that the Re.D Studio team come into classrooms and lead Maker activities, but that they provide professional development, consultation and guidance so that teachers are supported to empower their own students to become makers.  Scot shared several other ideas (PrimeTime and the Curiosity Project which will the be subject of an upcoming blog post).  However one of the things that I found really interesting is how our Re.D Studio has looked at making together with the IB Learner Profile, making it a perfect fit for several of our PYP units of inquiry.  Here are a few examples of what teachers can look for in maker activities that support the Learner Profile:

Risk-Takers

• tries something new
• approaches uncertainty with forethought and determination
• takes intellectual risks

• transforms failure into new insights or approaches

• offers explanation(s) for a strategy, tool, or making outcome

• displays motivation or investment in learning through making

Reflective

• shares experiences and insights from making
• reflects on learning strengths and needs during making

Inquirers

• strives to understand
• persists to achieve goals
• expresses and uses curiosity
• inspired by new ideas or approaches
• inspires others with their making

Are you teaching at a PYP school?  Have you started to include Maker in any of your units of inquiry?  If so please leave me a comment as I'd love to learn more.

Click here for more posts about Maker at ASB

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Future Forwards Volume 3

This weekend ASB hosted the Future Forwards Summit.  This was a global conference on educational innovation with the mission of empowering schools in developing their capacity for innovation.  The goal was that the 15 schools who attended would leave the summit with their own prototype model of an R&D department for their school.  

One of the things I'm often asked about our R&D department by teachers in other schools is what do we actually research?  This question was answered by Craig Johnson, ASB's superintendent, as he drew the line between innovation and implementation.  Craig's message was that 

A lot of important ideas in education, that don't exist at your school, don't need to be researched, they simply need to be implemented. So, are you "researching a new topic and exploring new frontiers" or are you designing an implementation plan for something that is best practice already but doesn't exist at your school? 

A great question - that gets right to the heart of why we have an R&D department that focuses on innovation and exploring new frontiers in education.

The Future Forwards Summit coincided with the publication of the 3rd Volume of Future Forwards. These books are collections of thoughts, hypotheses, discussions and reflections on practices, research and ideas that are relevant to emerging new paradigms of teaching and learning.  The books are divided into 3 sections:  Paradigms, Ideas and Practices.

In Volume 3 you will find the following:

Paradigms - Looking to the Future
These chapters are about paradigm shifts - different approaches that radically challenge established conventions.  Here you will read chapters about relevance in a global educational ecosystem, the impact of a school R&D department, essential conditions for effective R&D in schools, the Global Recruitment Collaborative - a new way of dealing with the "talent wars", rethinking PD for the future, and how personal learning devices can personalize learning.

Ideas - The Next Step
These chapters are about how current research is changing or impacting existing practices or established norms.  Here you will find chapters on using visual analytics to support student learning, using technology to shift culture in a local Indian school, and the TRAI (technology, robotics and artificial intelligence) Summit.

Practices - Innovating in the Now
These chapters describe the application of an instructional practice in a completely novel way or the successful mash-up of different practices.  In this section you will read about how our tech audit has transformed the personalization of tech PD, accelerating and innovating intersessions, learning analytics and data visualization in a 4th Grade class, exploring wellness data, new media in art and Maker Saturdays.

These eBooks are completely free - enjoy and please consider sharing them with others in your professional network.

Future Forwards Volume 3
Future Forwards Volume 2
Future Forwards Volume 1

Dream Fairs

As Scot and I thought more about our design thinking challenge yesterday, we realized that the end point of empowering students to puruse their dreams would have to be personalized learning.  We all have different dreams - so we all need different pathways and skills to help us to pursue them.  We had left Day 1 of our deep dive with the idea that dreaming is a "making activity" and that if we see school as a MakerSpace for dreams then we need to design and build a toolkit that can be used to facilitate students' pursuit of dreams.  Day 2 was devoted to this toolkit.

Most dreams are about the future, so we started to come up with a "Futurecasting Framework".  This framework would be made up of 4 parts:

• Collecting data:  through interviews, rubrics and measuring learning styles
• Displaying data:  through student infographics and a "Talent Treasury"
• Using the data to redesign learning: which could involve "Dream Coaches", internships, apprenticeships, curiosity projects and courses to give students the skills they need
• Sharing and inspiring:  Dream Fairs

There were several of these we wanted to flesh out a little more and we looked into what Futurecasting could involve.  The definition we found that we liked the best was this:  a framework of life skills that enable young people to connect who they are today with the person that they will be in the future.  We also discussed what the student infographic should look like - it should be something dynamic that visualizes data about each student's progress towards his or her dream (for example skills acquisition) and the evolution of the dream - these artifacts to be collected into a Talent Treasury.

Yesterday afternoon was spent diving deeper into the concept of a Dream Fair.  The two main purposes of these fairs would be to inspire everyone to pursue their dreams and to personalize learning.  They would give the opportunity to share and tell about dreams and the stories behind the dreams and at the same time would create awareness about the diversity of student dreams.  The students we interviewed about their ideas of a Dream Fair mentioned storytelling, showing the dream and the journey towards the dream including the hardships and challenges and what it took to achieve the dream, and one-on-one conversations about their dreams.  They also saw these fairs as a way of networking and connecting with others (experts, mentors, coaches) who could help them achieve their dreams.  I really liked the way one student described how he wanted to "feel the dream" and experience the dreams of others.  He told us that sharing makes dreams real, but that a Dream Fair can also be a place to explore how the dream can morph into something else.  The students felt that the fair could include both exhibition and workshop - about how to turn a dream into a reality.  They felt it was important to show how a dream has changed your life - both the way you view things and how you act and react.

Do you have any ideas about how to empower students to achieve their dreams?  If so, please leave a comment as we are hoping to develop these ideas further once we return to school.

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The pursuit of dreams

Bring a wicked problem to work on at Fuse14, my colleague Scot Hoffman and I were told.  The most wicked problem we could come up with was contained in our school's mission statement:

We inspire all of our students to continuous inquiry, empowering them with the skills, courage, optimism, and integrity to pursue their dreams and enhance the lives of others.

What does it mean to pursue dreams, we asked ourselves, and how can this be evaluated? By the end of the first day we had come up with an interesting theory:  that dreams are a making activity, and we asked ourselves if a school is a MakerSpace for the dreams of students, what happens in that space and what does it look like?  We decided we needed to design and build a toolkit that can be used to facilitate students' pursuit of dreams.

An early stage of design thinking is empathy.  We needed to interview people, both students and adults, to find out their thoughts about dreams.  These were the questions we asked:

• What dreams do you have for your life?
• What does it look like when you are pursuing your dreams?
• What gets in the way of your dreams?
• Do you talk with anyone about your dreams?

Having interviewed a variety of people we started to look at the common threads - and some that were not common.  For example we noticed that we don't all mean the same thing when we talk about dreams.  Some of us have big dreams and some of us have small ones, and the time frame that they are spread out over can be very large.  We were surprised to find out that most of those we interviewed said they didn't talk to other people about their dreams (some of them found it hard to talk to us about their dreams too!)  Dreams are personal and tied closely to identity, but eventually we found that after a shaky start for some, people did like being asked about their dreams.

Another thing that we came to understand from our interviews was that dreams can morph.  Most of the adults we interviewed did not have the same dreams that they’d had as teenagers - the dreams of adults were more about a meaningful life and making an impact, whereas the students’ dreams were more about doing/achieving something. We also discovered that the ability to change dreams was dependent on the skills that had been developed in pursuit of dreams.

Our dreamers talked a lot about networking - it was a theme that cropped up again and again as they realized that their dreams require other people to come to fruition. We also noticed that when we asked about how they were pursuing their dreams, the people we interviewed all talked about building skills. This seemed to be an interesting observation because while we realized it was hard to evaluate dreams, we believe that it is possible to evaluate the skills that people are building on the journey towards their dreams. We had a long talk about whether skills were more important than passions in this journey.

At the end of the first day of design thinking we realized the following things about our mission statement:

• Dreams are a Making Activity
• There is a need to make dreams understandable, more concrete and buildable.
• We can evaluate if someone has a dream.
• We can evaluate if they are pursuing that dream.
• We can evaluate how talking about dreams affects the prevalence of having them. 
• More students might have more dreams if they had more conversations about their dreams.

Today, in Day 2, we started to consider a "Futurecasting" framework and we talked about Dream Fairs. I'll be writing about this part of our design thinking deep dive in the next blog post.

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Future Forwards Volume 2

I'm pleased to be able to share with you Volume 2 of ASB's new eBook entitled Future Forwards:  Exploring the Frontiers in Education at the American School of Bombay.  This book is a collection of thoughts, hypotheses, discussions, and reflections on practices, research and ideas that are relevant to emerging new paradigms of teaching and learning.  

Inside Volume 2 of Future Forwards you will find three sections:

Paradigms - “Looking to the Future”

These chapters deal with paradigm shifts - different approaches that radically challenge established conventions about traditional subjects.   Here you will read chapters about prototyping, mobile devices and social entrepreneurship.

Ideas - "The Next Step"
This section examines how current research is changing or impacting existing practices or established norms. Here you will find chapters about the maker movement, using Minecraft and gamification.

Practices - "Innovating in the Now"
These chapters describe the application of an instructional practice in a completely novel way or the successful mash-up of different practices. In this section you will read about collaboration and research in international schools, Day 9, project based learning and design thinking.

The eBook is completely free - enjoy and please consider sharing it with others in your professional network.

Click here to read Volume 2 of Future Forwards

Inquiry, questioning, designing thinking and problem solving

This is the first in a series of blog posts where I'm looking back at my learning over the past year.  I've decided to start with inquiry which is at the heart of the PYP programme, and at the same time is important when considering how to solve problems using design thinking.  Here are some of the things that I've been thinking about related to the connections and  synergy between inquiry, questioning, design thinking and problem solving.

Last year I was involved in supporting students in Grades 3 - 5 in Independent Studies.  This was a time when students could follow their own interests and inquire into something they were passionate about.  At the same time, this was an innovative approach to education so I started to think about the connections between questioning and innovation.  What I learned was that innovators ask more questions and these questions are also more provocative:

• They ask "what is?" questions, to find out what is happening in the here and now.
• They also ask "what caused?" questions - both these types of questions are descriptive questions.
• Next come the disruptive questions, the ones that move your thinking forward.  These are the "why?" and "why not?" questions.
• Finally they ask the "what if?" questions, these ones lead to the heart of innovation.

During Independent Studies I worked with our iCommons Coordinator, Ms Heeru, and she introduced me to the "question formulation technique".  This started with the difference between open and closed questions. A closed question is one that can be answered with a simple phrase or one word answer.  Examples include "Where are you from?" or "Do you speak English?"  Closed questions are:

• quick and easy to answer
• fact based
• keep control of the conversation with the person asking the questions

The first word of close questions is often a word like:  do, would, are, will and if.

Open questions are ones that require longer answers because:

• they are about opinions or feelings
• they involve the respondent thinking
• they give control of the conversation to the person replying to the question

The first word of open questions are often words such as: what, why, how and describe.

The question formulation technique was devised by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana as a technique to teach students to ask their own questions.  It is a process that allows them to think more deeply and refine their questions and one that encourages divergent thinking, convergent thinking and metacognition.  As I considered the process of divergent thinking (generating a wide range of ideas, thinking creatively) and convergent thinking (analyzing and synthesizing information while moving towards a solution), it reminded me of the flair and focus stages of Design Thinking, which is something I became really interested in last year as a result of being part of ASB's Design Thinking Team and going to the a DT workshop in the summer at the Henry Ford Learning Institute.

In Design Thinking the first stage is Empathy - this is where there is a flair with ideas coming from all over the place and where you consider both the explicit and implicit needs of others.  This is followed by the focus of the Define phase where some ideas are thrown out in order to come up with a unique, concise reframing of the problem, grounded in the insights developed in the previous stage.  After Design comes Ideate, which is a huge flair.  The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) uses divergent thinking as the flair where students are generating ideas about possible research topics, perhaps using "out of the box" thinking and coming up with inventive new ideas.  It is a process that can be taught to students of all ages to help them handle challenges.

Creativity involves more than simply divergent thinking - it involves synthesizing the ideas and facts.  In the PYP inquiry cycle we talk about tuning in and finding out.  After this comes sorting out which to me matches really well with convergent thinking.  During this stage of the inquiry cycle students look at all the facts they have collected during the finding out and try to make sense of them all.  It is suggested that fostering creativity involves planning for both divergent and convergent thinking and that metacognition, being able to reflect and think about your own thinking, is essential for learning.  The QFT is a process for fostering these skills.

Since the summer Design Thinking institute, I've been thinking about how DT it can be used in education as a way of solving "wicked problems".  There are many definitions of wicked problems:

• a wicked problem is difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements
• it's an incomprehensibly complex and messy issue that we have trouble defining as well as attempting to solve
• it cannot be reduced to a single cause explanation - it's complex because of the interconnectedness of things
• it's not governed by simple cause-effect relationships
• it hides below the surface of our immediate perceptions
• it's a divergent problem - the more it is studied the more people come to different solutions and interpretations

Design Thinking for wicked problems goes through an inquiry cycle.  As previously mentioned, some parts of this cycle can be used by students to formulate questions before they start their inquiries.  Let me elaborate a little more now on the process, which starts with empathy.  It's important to start with this because it allows you to put aside your own wants and needs that will bring you to what could be the ideal solution for you, but not necessarily for the wants and needs of another person. Walking in someone else's shoes is important so that you design a solution for them.  This stage is the intellectual identification of the feelings, thoughts and attitudes of others - it deals with you listening to both their explicit needs and trying to hear the implicit ones too.

The next step in the process is to define or reframe the problem and to make sure you are clear about who the person is who needs the solution.  You need to listen in a focused way so that you can choose your goals.  Whereas empathy allows for a lot of diverse opinions, define narrows the focus and form a clear picture from what could be a lot of chaotic data.  At this point you may end up throwing ideas out.  Defining the problem involves making a problem statement, also called a User-Needs-Insight statement.

The third step of the process involves ideating - brainstorming the many different options available and writing down all ideas no matter how crazy they might seem.  It still includes listening to the ideas of others and possibly deciding on the best combination of ideas.  It's important to bring together a lot of ideas and diverse perspectives.

Prototyping comes next - often this might involve making a model, trying out an idea or bring an idea to reality.  This allows you to see in a practical way what does and doesn't work.  It's a place where you have have failure with low risks, and will allow you to move forward.

The last 3 parts of the process have mostly been about your own ideas, but feedback brings us back to the "client" again and this feedback will allow you to know what will or won't work for him or her.  You can then change or refine the design to make it better and more personal.  At this stage it is important to allow honest feedback.

Reflection is the final stage of the process.  Looking back allows you to move forward as you will only improve if you can reflect on what didn't work - knowing this allows you to work out how to overcome any new challenges.

We have used DT in a number of different ways at school this year, including trying to re-design a local sports club to meet both the needs of the teachers at ASB and the needs of the local Indian community.  If you would like to know more about any of these things that I've been thinking through this year, click on the links below to read my blog posts in full.

Connecting the Unconnected

Open -v- Closed Questions

The Question Formulation Technique

What is Design Thinking?

Digging Deeper into Design Thinking

Using Empathy to solve Wicked Problems

Design Thinking - the process

Design Thinking - rapid prototyping

Design Thinking - deep dive

Design Thinking - continuing the deep dive

Design Thinking - prompts and provocations

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