Live Curious, Go Beyond: The Story

The Live Curious, Go Beyond 2019 Tech and Innovation in Edu Conference was the 5th prototype of a redesigned half-day PD experience. In 2015 we at the then “Tech Integration Department” and our partners, “Digital Teachers”, took on the task of exploring how we might make a “Tech PD Day” Friday afternoon awesome. When we asked teachers how they wanted to feel when they attended Tech PD, they stated they wanted choice, enthusiasm, inspiration, and connecting.

One of the ideas which floated to the top was the taking a previously scheduled ½ PD day for the Middle and High School and run it like a conference. We kicked off the day with inspirational “mini-keynote” presentations, offered a wide variety of sessions facilitated by leaders from our community, and brought the teaching faculty together as one, nursery through 12th grade. This had not happened prior to this experience.

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Presenters and Leaders 2015-19

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2019

Earlier that year we leveraged the Design Thinking process to connect with the community and articulate a vision statement to guide our next steps, projects, and areas of impact as a “Tech Integration” department at ASFM. Hence when we were searching for a name for our redesigned Tech PD experience the Live Curious, Go Beyond_________ vision statement was an immediate fit. It became the culmination and celebration opportunity for numerous community driven projects and moonshots from the school year.

The feedback from that day was overwhelmingly positive. With little budget to speak of, no external speakers, and really just a change in mindset, we were able to redesign that ½ day Tech PD day into a Friday afternoon awesome experience that February of 2015. We were on to something.

We were immediately curious if other schools in the region might be interested in a Tech for Education conference for teachers by teachers. We sent out invitations, brought in a keynote speaker, David Jakes, and expanded to a two day event (Friday and Saturday). It turned out 17 schools and roughly 138 external attendees were interested and joined us for the 1st Tech and Innovation in education professional learning event in the Tri-Association of American for International Schools throughout Latin American, Northern South America, and the Caribbean. We had responded to a need which had been waiting to be filled for a while.

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Keynote Speakers 2015-2019

David Jakes

Gever Tulley

Christian Long

Jennie Magiera

Ken Shelton

Since that first event in February of 2015, the conference has continued to grow exponentially but there have been some significant pivots along the way. One being the sole focus on “Tech”. Like many schools in the region, we had “Technology” present in our schools for ages, rolled out 1:1 programs, and were now at a point of focusing on enhancing the learning experience with and outside of “Tech”. Therefore the theme of “Innovation” was added and enhanced as a key aspect of the event. This led to the addition of strands such as Blended Learning, Design Thinking, Maker Edu, STEM, Beyond, <2.5%, Parent University, etc. As a leadership and planning team this allowed us to be more agile to the emergent needs of the community.

Secondly, we heard from presenters that while they enjoyed presenting, they also enjoyed attending other sessions. At the first couple events presenters presented up to 5 of 7 sessions which is normal for a typical conference but did not seem to be what our presenters wanted. Since then we have increased the number of presenters we accept in an effort to reduce the number of sessions each presenter is leading sessions. Our initial fear was that this would have a negative impact on the quality of sessions, this has not been the case. Based on our feedback we can confidently say that the quality of sessions has substantially increased. What has happened is that presenters are coming year after year not only to present but also get high quality PD and connect with community and experience.

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Design 2016-19

This was our most significant modification. We have moved beyond a solely Tech and Innovation in education event to a community based event. The 5th event in 2019 event was attended by 52 schools and over 500 attendees from a wide variety of school, public and private. Thanks to the generosity of sponsors such as Apple, EdTechTeam, Google for Education, Turnitin.com, and the Tri-Association to name a few, we have been able to keep the registration costs low. The feedback, general feeling and ambiance is one of community and connecting, a homecoming and celebration of sorts.

When we started the journey exploring how we might redesign the PD experience to be Friday afternoon awesome, we couldn’t have imagined a community event with attendees from Canada to Argentina, over 100 presenters, 200 volunteers, 500+ attendees, and various experiences for students to attend as well. The 2019 event felt like a celebration, a reunion, and a Friday afternoon, even while we were at school on Saturday afternoon. The first five prototypes have been an amazing experience and an unexpected journey. We can’t wait for the next one and we invite you to join us.

Live Curious, Go Beyond Leadership

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Memorable moments

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12 Places to Float Ideas and Prototypes for Students

I think we are at a stage in 2019 where we can all get behind the necessity of what we learn being transferable to the real world. In his presentation, Grant Higgins -Understanding by Design states, and I paraphrase, the largest misunderstanding of Understanding by Design was that people missed the necessary balance between content and performance with the goal being student autonomous and authentic performance similar that of a soccer player during a match. The problem we continue to see is the lack of fields and authentic competition.

How this manifests this is schools is, students, creating representations of learning, awareness posters, pieces of writing, performances, product and prototypes, and sharing them for the most part, within their internal community. Anyone can get their family and friends to identify with their cause or garner a purchase of their new hip prototype of a t-shirt or food product. My question is, how does this prepare this for the real world?

In 2019, the most valuable commodity of any organization is it's ideas. We live in a time where the largest taxicab company, owns no cars. The largest hotel chain owns no hotels. The largest shopping market owns no malls. Etc, Etc. When Facebook acquired Instagram for one billion dollars, it wasn’t for it’s capital investments, it was for it’s intellectual property, their ideas. Ideas are the currency of 2019. Since that is the case, how can we teach our students to be better at creating, cultivating, curating, and floating ideas? I believe we have to do so in the most authentic way possible and that buy not holding our students to authentic standards by floating ideas in a public democratic marketplace, we are handicapping their creative capacity.

Below are a collection of places where students can float ideas, share prototypes and get real feedback from a real audience. Uploading a product to Kickstarter or entering a design contest on Instructables is a real as it gets. It doesn’t matter if students win, what matters is they are going to be more conscious about what they develop, get feedback from a real audience, and will get better while immersed in a real-time marketplace. If at first, they get no feedback, then obviously what is being created isn’t that great, yet. To have good ideas, you need to have lots of ideas. The more our students are active in the process of creating content for the real world, the better they will be.

1. Instructables: This is an amazing site and community to plug your students into and for teachers to get started with      Engineering Design and Maker education. If you are teaching the IB or Common Core standards, they are rooted in Design and this resources can get you started. Students are also given clear instructions and guides to submit an “Instructable”. This goes far beyond just posting an idea, but postions  students as teachers in the creation of their ideas, thus truly embracing collaboration. There is also a community which shares skills via classes for free. If students can’t bring their ideas to life, start learning how to. If they are experts at skill, teach someone else and share here.

2. Etsy:If your students are creating products for sale, Etsy is the market to leverage. “Sellers” can build profiles telling their story, build their brand, and get feedback based on more than sales with a review system with stars and comments. No different than amazon or ebay but for Makers.

3. Kickstarter: If your students have an idea but don’t have the capital to get it off the ground, give Kickstarter a try. Their deliverable becomes a marketing campaign rather than product development. In 2018, if you need funding for an idea, Kickstart is the place to go.

4. ThingiVerse: A great space to share ideas and engage in contest that involve 3D printing. Student can submit solutions to the various “Challenges” which again helps engage with an authentic audience and gives them real world feedback.

5. Story Wars:  A collaborative writing platform for students which can be gives them the opportubity to write the next chapter in a story in various genres. To quote:

“Story Wars is a place where random writers with amazing ideas in their head come to express their thoughts.  Any person can pitch an idea and create a story, but the moment the story is published, it is no longer truly theirs, but it is adopted by the Story Wars Community. Different users can write a chapter to a story that they like and want to contribute to. The twist is that for your chapter to be official, it has to be voted in. By going up against different authors, you actually have to try. Because of that, you slowly start to become a better writer."

If you want to stop writing a certain book, you can. You can give it to the hands of the community, and watch it flourish into something beautiful.In short, Story Wars is a place that challenges you to be the best that you can be, while having fun and enjoying the experience.

6. Teen Ink:  Teen Ink, a national teen magazine, book series, and website devoted entirely to teenage writing, art, photos and forums. Students must be age 13-19 to participate.

7. GitHub: Currently our Near Space program is hosting and sharing a variety of files here. If your students are developing software. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for version control using git. It is mostly used for computer code. It offers all of thedistributed version control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. GitHub brings together the world's largest community of developers to discover, share, and build better software. From open source projects to private team endeavors.

8- 10. Pixabay, Unsplash, or Mourgefile:  Most schools teach digital literacy and have their students publishing photos online. Not many though have their students upload their photos to an open source database which can give them exposure, feedback, and help them build profile for their work. Pixabay Unsplash, and Mourgefile are great places to share high quality royalty photos for all photographers.

11. Hit Record: HitRecord is an online collaborative production company founded and owned by actor and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The company uses a variety of media to produce such projects as short films, books, and DVDs

12. The Guardian’s “Blogging Students”: The Guardian has created a great platform to showcase student writing and they aren’t at all afraid of controversial content. Imagine the reaction your students would have being published on one of the worlds largest newspapers.

From Plastic to Fantastic

This is the story of the ReDesign of an Elementary playground into an adventure challenge course which brings nature back to play and adventure limited only by one’s imagination. This new installation brings a variety of learning experiences and a high ropes course to life for our community. All are welcome to accept the challenge.

ASFM Adventure Challenge Course

As a result of the successful 2019 Edge of Excellence Campaign, we were able to bring to transform the typical playground into an Adventure Challenge Course. The manifesto/story of this transformation is coming soon. Until then, enjoy this preview of the new possible at AFSM.

ASFM Moonshots: Interpretation > Ideation

Listening to students express their hopes and desired for a different learning experience has been some of the best PD we could have hoped for. I wish I would have done so more often as a classroom teacher. Throughout this process we have been intentional about honoring the Design process and gaining empathy into the user experience, in this case school/education experience for our high school students. The better we listen to understand and position ourselves as ethnographers seeking to learn more, the better can facilitate the development of another experience at ASFM, a school within our school.

This has been a continue process of prompting, listening, circling back, asking why, and digging deeper, over a period of literally months. I fully recognize many schools, ours included, do not have time, or make time to do this but in doing so we have been able understand more than we ever thought possible and move forward with conviction.

A challenging, yet simple concept to dig deeper into has been, What is School for? What is the real purpose of it education? Our student group consistently kept coming back to this concept during our group empathy sessions and to be honest, we couldn’t find a collaborative or community agreed upon response. The ASFM vision statement reads that, “We believe in OPEN MINDS, CARING HEARTS, and GLOBAL LEADERSHIP as essentials for a healthy and successful life.” and resonates at a high level of frequency with our student population. Yet, we when we ask how this is expressed in common behavior patterns there is little consistency or alignment. That made us curious.

How might we prototype a series of experiences to inform and mould the future ASFM Moonshots academy? After much discussion around what a prototypes might look like it we eventually arrived at some understanding that we this needed to be a personalized experience for all students. That we had to honor their individual needs and differences in two key ways. We had to customize and personalize their learning experience as it applied to the structures of school and the structures of learning.

By “Structures of School” we are referring to the non-academic components of school. The schedule, location, classrooms, “graduation requirements”, generations, etc. Students we talked with expressed that there where various constraints to the confinements of the structures of schools but that these were not equal to all experiences. For example, one student may prefer to a classroom setting for their literature course but would like to experience science externally with an expert or mentor.

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By “Structures of Learning” we are referring to the academic components of school. The standards, nature of courses, assessments, projects, assignments, tests, etc. Students expresses that in some cases they prefer to learn about a topic in isolation but in others they would like to explore cross sections between subjects. For example, what might we learn about chemistry when we explore through the lens of literature and art? These types of curiosity statements are unique to each students.

Combining this framework with the emergent ASFM emergent drivers drivers can now serve as to fuel ideas to launch prototypes of what an ASFM Moonshots experience could be like.

The Redesign of a Character Ed. Classroom

As part of our ongoing journey to redesign a representative sample of all learning spaces nursery - grade 12 at ASFM, we recently redesigned a High School Character Ed. Classroom. It was an amazing experience which challenged us to think differently about how community, connection, and social learning can be enhanced through spacial concepts. To learn more about the experience explore the manifesto above.

ASFM Strategic Innovation Plan: 2015-2020

In 2014 we at ASFM gathered as a community to develop our next Strategic Innovation plan which would guide the general direction of our school until 2020. As we approach 2020 after many years of hard work, numerous prototypes, and meeting upon meeting, it is nice to be able to look back and see where we were, where we are, and be excited for where we are headed. The video below showcases the culmination of the work we as an Innovation department have been working closely with since 2014. Produced by our stellar Communications department, I hope it provides insight into some of the projects that have come to life.

Innovative Quality teaching and Learning

ASFM Edge of Excellence Inspiring Spaces 2016-2019

In 2014 we at ASFM gathered as a community to develop our next Strategic Innovation plan which would guide the general direction of our school until 2020. One such project was the Edge of Excellence Annual Giving program headed by our Superintendent Michael Adams. While programs such as these are common in many Universities and International Schools, it was a very new concept at ASFM. What has been remarkable has been the creation of spaces which would not have been able to be brought to life with out this campaign and the generosity of our community.

Produced by our stellar Communications department, I hope it provides insight into some of the projects that have come to life.

The ASFM Innovation department has been involved with not only the leveraging the Design Thinking process to bring a human/student centered approach to the development of learning spaces but also to the whole process of engaging with the community to bring these concepts to life. Throughout the year we engage with our community through various empathy building experiences. We draw upon these experiences as we come up with ideas for the annual Edge of Excellence campaigns and connect them with the pillars from our Strategic Innovation Plan. Our ASFM L2E2 Design Process refers to this as the “Languages and Landscapes” of the community and serves as a primary filter. Once we arrive at a compiled list, we then wash it through various community groups including, parents, students, alumni, board, etc. to see what potential projects resonate the most with our community.

Designed by David Jakes Designs

From there, we select a set of 2-4 projects to build prototypes for to pitch to potential donors. Each project requires developing a design team of expert teachers, administrators, maintenance and facility leaders, and Innovation Coaches as Designers to develop a series of deliverables which translates the mission and vision of the school and for the project into a spacial concept.

This becomes the primary document/manifesto we reference as we work with architects as we translate a provocation into a set of drivers and constraints, to spacial concepts to prototypes, layouts, sketches and renders and eventually blueprints and construction documents. By the time we inaugurate a space we know it as well as our favorite book or spot on the couch and we work for about a year afterwards to optimize use, effectiveness, and to align desired behavior with a spacial concept. These need to be living spaces which are agile and responsive to student needs for learning.

The progression to this point where we have a clearly defined Design process with clear deadlines, deliverables and tasks to be completes has been a hugely collaborative and iterative process. Each year we learn from the last and optimize for impact with the student learning experience at the heart it. This is a very brief summary of said process but I hope it provides a glimpse into the great projects brought to life when leveraging the Design Thinking Process.

Special thanks to Dr. Michael Adams, Helen Trevino, Marcela de le Garze Evia, and the whole Edge of Excellence Campaign team who made this possible and continue to “Dream Bigger” for our students.

ASFM Moonshots: Discovery > Interpretation

Since November we have been engaging with our Moonshots students on an almost weekly basis. The invitation brought students who were interested in redesigning school yet were unsure what that meant. Truth be told, we as a teacher group were a bit unsure as well. Our next step was to engage with students to provide some clarity and direction in regards to where we were going, how we were going to get there, and start putting some work in.

What has been amazing is that our students have gone far further than we could have ever mandated. As mentioned in a previous post, in our first few meetings we explored the current reality, a desired result, and a better plausible future. As a design team, this allowed helped us develop Drivers, (Choice, Autonomy, Motivating, Personalized) and Constraints (Tired, Homework, Stressed, Tests) but we needed to understand what students meant by this. In design we call this activation and validation, the process of saying to the user group, this is what we heard, did we hear correctly? Can you tell me more? What did we miss? Over the next few weeks, a series of group empathy activities took place where we prodded and probed for deeper understanding of the students experience and future desires for learning. Below are the initial findings from that series of meetings.

When we dug deeper for understanding we were very impressed with the level of sophistication to which our students could express and advocate for choice, autonomy, personalized and autonomous learning. We couldn't have scripted better responses if we tried. For example, “ we’re learning at a superficial depth in courses and there are topics which I would like to spend a significant amount of time on because I am interested and this would further develop my general understanding in the course or topic.” For personalized learning students would express that , “in a class of 20+ students I am always held up or holding up other students as we go through the content. This always results in non-optimal learning for everyone.” These are not students who are trying to escape from learning, they are trying to escape from learning which does not respond to their needs and enhance their talents and passions nor is the learning applicable in the “real world”.

When it comes to understanding constraints we had to really understand what they are enduring and what obstacles to learning exist. I used to think that students were playing a collective con on teachers by claiming they were “tired”. By far when we have asked students how they feel when they are at school this has been the most frequent response. It’s impossible that they coordinated at this level. We had to dig deeper.

Something we mention to students as we are going through this process as “Designers” is that everyday they are victims of design and I can think of no better example of students being a victim of someone else's prototype which is entrenched in tradition and ignores the needs of a user group than the “school schedule”. The user group it does respond to is parents, business, and adults in general but with what we now know about brain research ,sleep patterns and the needs for youth now, how is it that we we have not dramatically altered how we schedule school? This seems to be a major obstacle to optimal learning for this student group and greatly contributes to their stress levels and anxiety. Second to this is the general nature of assessment they are experiencing, mainly homework and tests. They are not seeking to absolve themselves from work but rather work which they see useless, irrelevant and uniformed.

An example of their passion for learning and willingness to work, is the behind the scenes, out of the sight of us, creation of an ASFM Moonshots Project website. While we were working on facilitating this process and meeting with them once a week during their Access period, they were continuing the conversation and exploration among each other and with other students, even elementary students, on topics they felt were work challenging. Such as, schedules, sleep patterns, extra-curricular activities, teacher’s mindsets, and the overall purpose of school.

Again you couldn’t have scripted this and we cannot be thankful enough. We just have to be the best we can be to listen to understand and guide the process with as little bias as possible. The challenge and opportunity continues.

ASFM Storytelling Studios Deliverable: Coming to life August 2019

As part of the 2018 ASFM Edge of Excellence annual giving campaign we are pitching the redesign of our hacked studios into a Storytelling Center. Watch this space as this project comes to life.