We R trying An insight in...
This week, I had the opportunity to visit Atlanta's The Children's School to participate in a talk Tamara Weinstein, TCS's Educational Technology Specialist, conducts with 3rd graders called, "Success Stories" . This past summer, @TCS1970 sent some of their teachers to my school, (Mount Vernon Presbyterian School) to our annual design thinking experience, //fuse and learned how design thinking can be infused into their instructional and learning practices. Tamara contacted me in September to see if I would be interested in brainstorming with her on how to take their "Success Stories" project which she has done for the last five years and redesign it to become a design thinking challenge.
- "Each year I do a project with third graders that engage them around the issue of homelessness. Last year and this year we are focusing on homeless veterans. After learning about the issue and interviewing formerly homeless veterans, they write letters. Here’s a link to the letters they wrote last year to Mayor Reed. http://thechildrensschool.com/dearmayorreed2013/" TW
I met with Tamara at Mount Vernon and she shared her experiences with Success Stories and we brainstormed ways to redesign the project into design thinking challenge. As trusted EDU design thinker, Leonard Medlock once told me, for you to call it design thinking you must have empathy & users (people). Tamara already had these two vital elements in her project and with a little reframing, shifting, and added DT methods her "Success Stories" easily moved beyond research, Q/A, and writing a letter. (btw this is a very simplistic statement of Tamara's efforts, scope of project, process, and learning outcomes---- as what I really want to share with you in this blog post hasn't even been written)
On Thursday, I sat in with 3rd graders as they listened to stories and experiences from veterans about life after being discharged from the military. Prior to this day the students worked together in preparing interview questions to help them gather more information that would take them way beyond their research on veterans, the VA, and homelessness. As the vets shared their experiences, what I encountered were students completely absorbed and engaged with the storytelling, capturing as much as they could in their notes, and then asking follow up questions and "tell me more" requests of their shares. Students did not stay on script with their prepared questions because in all needfinding the art of listening to what is shared routinely takes conversations down different rabbit holes for more meaningful connections. Just looking over my captures in the snapshot below, so much was shared, dived deeply, and brought out by the curiosity and compassion of little ones :)
Fast forward to the purpose of this now very long blog post...this morning I created a google doc to brainstorm with Tamara the structure & timing of our next meetup this Monday when her 3rd Graders will take their captures, synthesize them and try to identify the major needs of homeless vets. As this will be their first time going through the DEEP DT process, the POV/Define aspect will not be as intense and we will bridge the gap between the Empathize mode and Experiment mode with already preselected HMW...statements. The google doc started out pretty loosely in terms of direction & purpose but when Tamara joined me in brainstorming and thinking out loud, all I can say is "Wow". I am kicking myself because I so wish I had a screencast of what the happened the next 45 minutes or so. Dialoguing, questioning, riffing, ah ha moments, rabbit hole tangents, partnership, collaboration, brainstorming, plotting, planning, wonders, big picture stuff, zeroing in, etc all occurred and so much more. Here is the "live" google doc (shared w/ permission by Tamara).
By sharing this "live" google doc, I hope you will see it as I do... a great learning moment between two people who are thinking out loud together in a trusted space and failing up along the way.... And when I say failing up, I mean the doc is not perfect (it actually is quite messy), the process is not perfect, and the execution on Monday will not be perfect...but WE are Trying. And if we wait for perfect, well, we will never get off the ground.