Blog – Page 8 – Exhibit Change

EdCamp Design Thinking is next weekend!!!

Posted on September 27, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

The first ever EdCamp Design Thinking is happening on October 5, 2013 at Bitmaker Labs!!! A good EdCamp starts with space. Where you have it effects the flow of conversation, the transition from space to space and the comfort of the attendees. We are so super excited to be at Bitmaker Lab, not only for their innovative work as an education experience as well as their inviting space and culture for supporting the community.

What is an EdCamp?

It is a free, volunteer run, participant driven unconference. EdCamps emerged after original EdCamp Founders from Philly, attended a BarCamp in November 2009 and the movement was born. Since then, educators across the world are taking back professional development and having face to face meet ups to talk about education on Saturdays! The days are organized around conversations, the content for the agenda is generated by the people who attend and they almost always flow over to the bar.

What is EdCamp Design Thinking?

It is all the good stuff of an EdCamp plus a focus on design thinking. EdCamps are open model unconference and support hacking and tweaking as necessary. The growing conversation about design thinking online and offline pushed the organizing committee to see what they could do with the question “How might we understand the impact of design thinking on education?” It is evident by the nearly sold out event that there is definitely an overwhelming energy.

What can attendees expect at EdCamp Design Thinking?

For those who have been to an EdCamp before, attendees can expect to see some old faces, connect with people that they know are like-minded and drive them to think. For those who have never been before, they will be welcomed by all the seasoned attendees and the organizing committee. The day takes a slightly different approach to the EdCamp model with some additional unconference techniques layered with some design thinking terminology. We felt that the best way to build deep conversations was to do what the people are asking for, which is more context around design thinking and the space to talk about where they are at with the mindset and tools. Every one attending comes from a different place in education, whether they be a student, parent, designer, educator, administrator, yoga teacher or general EdCamp enthusiast there is something from absolutely everyone at EdCamp.

There are just a few tickets left, but if you are feeling like you can’t live without this event – show up and we will find space for you! And you can follow along from home in your Pajamas too #EdCampDT or @EdCampDT

Learning at //fuse 13

Posted on August 29, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

Over 2 days, 100 educators from 10 different States gathered together at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta, Georgia for an intensive design thinking workshop.

The design challenge: How might we improve the first week of school?

Earlier this year, at EduCon in Philly, I had the opportunity to connect to two amazing educators who are just as enamoured with design thinking as we are. Mary Cantwell is the coordinator for the Centre for Design Thinking at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and Greg Bamford is the co-founder of Leading is Learning, these two made me feel more than welcome as part of the facilitation team.

W hat is Fuse? “Fuse is the circuit that sparks new action. It’s the fusion of two people working together to make something new.” Together, Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and Leading is Learning created a jam-packed two day adventure to bring educators through the process of design thinking and the task and maintenance of team work. It was a lovely blend of learning the complex process of solving for wicked problems while navigating the complexity of working with people you don’t know on wicked problems. It honoured the fact that as learners, we are used to a certain level of comfort and in this case we were purposely putting you in an uncomfortable space.

As part of the facilitation team, I got to learn and share with a team who are practicing and doing everything they can to spread design thinking throughout education and to co-facilitate with Scott Sanchez, Stanford d. school instructor was simply phenomenal. I am thankful for Mount Vernon’s open and collaborative approach to //Fuse. It was clear that we were learning together and that we were all facing similar challenges that we didn’t have the answers to. I specifically remember our facilitation meeting after the first day and the time we spent going over the participants experience, the iterations we need to make to build their learning experience and our reflections as a team and as individual facilitators.

I was honoured to be a co-facilitator of the Empathize phase. At Mount Vernon, they have adapted the design thinking process to work for their whole school. They use D.E.E.P – discover, empathize, experiment, produce. Empathize is the phase where they get to know their user. It is hugely important that participants make the shift of seeing themselves as users towards seeing themselves as designers. This is the part that I find most people struggle with and the fog continues as you move into defining your “Point of View” and coming up with your own “How Might We”. Together with figuring out your team, going through the process while trying to connect and relate to your design challenge; this is the combination for a tiring day 1 and I am always grateful when everyone still shows up for day 2.

Being part of //Fuse was seriously so rewarding. To see a school that has embraced design thinking for nearly 5 years, go to Georgia to meet fellow #dtk12 educators and really get to build a lasting bond.

Benefits of Creative Tuition

Posted on July 23, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

We hold a variety of workshops all year long, some on our own and some with partners. There is one thing in common with them all. We are entirely open to creative tuition. So, what is creative tuition you ask? At its most basic form, creative tuition is a financial model to keep our workshops accessible.

Creative Tuition works off a few basic principles:

Pay what you can and a little bit more
Value what you get
Offer your skills

So, it is essentially a hybrid of bartering, PWYC and a self-reflection exercise.

We put a lot of careful consideration to how much we charge for our workshops, it is a calculation of time and effort put into planning, designing and facilitating along with the hard costs of supplies, food and room bookings. We are honoured when someone shows interest in our workshop but are not able to pay the full fee. This is where creative tuition comes into effect.

We ask everyone to consider a few things:

How much do you think this workshop is worth to you?
What are you willing to offer?
What do you think you will gain?

And, we ask you to consider this carefully. If you are asking for others to give to you, you are likely a person who gives a lot too. This is a trend that is perpetuated through the community and someone is always losing. There are always people who take more than they give and vice versus.

We believe that this reflection process will return to us the participants that truly see a place for themselves in the workshop and will in turn be able to contribute what they have to offer to us and to the group in a way that is clearer because they have personally decided what their time is worth. This policy is not a hard and fast rule. However, we have seen a difference in participation from individuals who take the time to gather their thoughts and submit a proposal that is reflective of our work and theirs.

Professional Development – Design Thinking for Impact Workshop | August 22 & 23

Posted on July 21, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

Design Thinking For Impact

This will be a 2 day training on the design thinking process and working for social impact. Over the course of two days, participants will get the opportunity to learn design thinking, practice the process and to work with others on how they are bringing it back to their work places.

Participants can expect a hands-on experience for building an understanding of design thinking, learning to work together to build new ideas and get the opportunity to navigate some of the uncertainty of working with complex challenges.

Together, participants will:

explore a wicked problem
be able to tackle deepening of empathy
defining the questions we ask
creating valuable solutions
testing out assumptions in an iterative process

Who should come to Design Thinking for Impact?

Individuals working to make a difference. Participants coming from a diversity of backgrounds will learn how unusual collaborations can lead to innovative solutions. This workshop is for participants eager to gain knowledge about design thinking and how it can be applied to their work. Learn the methodologies, mindset and process of iteration, prototyping, empathy and problem-framing.

Logistic Details:

August 22 – 23 9am – 5pm
Centre for Social Innovation
720 Bathurst Street
Meeting Room #1 (2nd Floor)

Exhibit Change has recently been doing design thinking workshops at Glen Shields Public School, read more here “How might we bring design thinking to Glen Shields Public School?”

Resources:

Virtual d.school Crash Course

Stanford’s & IDEO Founder David Kelley on Design Thinking video

IDEO Human Centred Design Toolkit

Art of Social Innovation Training | Postponed

Posted on July 21, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

Art of Social Innovation

Full Invitation: Art_of_Social_Innovation_Toronto

Fee: $900 for corporate, $750 for non-profit, $650 for youth/student

participatory leadership in times of change

3 day training

LEARNING IN COMPLEXITY

THRIVING IN CHANGING SYSTEMS

WORKING WITH REAL DIVERSITY & DIFFERENCE

The complexity we are facing in the world right now is pushing us to ask some new questions about how we act, what our organizations do and how to respond:

How can we increase our capacity to learn?

How can we thrive in complexity and shifting systems?

How can we create initiatives and socially innovate within complexity?

How to work with relationships, difference, real diversity?

In Toronto and beyond, social innovators and pioneers of new ways of doing things are popping up all around us. We can’t predict the results. This by nature is complex. The complexity can be overwhelming – halting our learning, making us feel stuck, tense, and even perpetuating fragmentation and conflict – with and among those who are also trying to make a better world a practical reality.

This training will explore:

How we can use methods and practices of collaborative and participatory leadership to connect social innovation efforts, learn from one another and address the complexity of the challenges facing communities and organizations today?

This is for people who:

– are not shying away from all the work it takes to make a better world a practical reality

– see that making a better world cannot happen in isolation

– want to increase their capacity to learn

– need to work with diverse voices and invite real diversity into their work

– are ready to develop their own capacity, and the capacity of those doing good work around us

WHAT IS AoH?:

art of hosting is a technology of social learning.
art of hosting is a practice of personal and collective leadership that makes the world a better place.
art of hosting is about adaptive knowledge and not getting addicted to best practices

The Art of Hosting is an intensive three day experiential personal leadership and professional development training designed to build community and explore powerful participatory leadership practices to address complex community, organizational and societal challenges.

WHAT TO EXPECT:

– Learn practical, participatory tools — and how to use them — including: chaordic project planning, world cafe, open space, pro action cafe, and more.

– Immerse yourself and your team in a supportive and co-creative space.

– Experience the connection between personal transformation and the capacity to create change in the world.

– Connect and learn with a community of leaders working to bring change into diverse settings in Toronto and beyond.

– Explore tools for resilience and systems change

– Learn how to work within the systems all around us, to see how systems are changing and shifting and exploring how can we thrive in complexity

Register Here!

EdCamp BootCamp Training | August 21, 2013

Posted on July 21, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

EdCamp is a uniquely powerful movement growing through out education professional development. It is a way to connect to other educators, to other people thinking about what is happening and will be happening in education, to explore your own questions and curiosities.

EdCamp BootCamp is a way to explore the mechanics of the unconference.

This will be a one day training ALL about unconferences and facilitation. Unconferences are participant-driven, the content is created on the spot by the people who are in the room. This training will give an overview of a few different techniques and facilitation methods that can be used for EdCamps. Coming to EdCamp and meeting like-minded people is awesome and being able to facilitate when you get back to your place of work is equally as powerful.

Nathan at EdCamp HK — From EdCamp Hong Kong – a little lesson on how to make coffee before we got going for the day

This training is intended for individuals who have organized or are thinking of organizing an EdCamp in their own community and is looking for some basics on how the facilitation happens. Participants will learn about unconference models, practice unconference techniques and dynamics. Learn strategies of how to design the day, how to facilitate conversations and how to capture what happened to share beyond the day.

Tickets for participation for EdCamp Design Thinking are still open. October 5th, 2013, join educators, learners and designers who will be discussing “How might design thinking impact the future of education?” An opportunity to meet other EdCampers and practice.

*All proceeds/fees from EdCamp Bootcamp will go to funding EdCamp Design Thinking*

Register for EdCamp Bootcamp – August 21, 2013

To read about other EdCamps:

EdCamp Hong Kong : Reflection Blog from Bad Kids Collective – The Amazing Race

EdCamp Toronto: Reflections from EdCamp Toronto

How might we bring design thinking to Glen Shields public school?

Posted on June 11, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

We are doing design thinking at Glen Shields Public School. We started this process with a conversation about the school and what the culture was like and how might we be able to work together on professional development, student engagement and learning design thinking.

Glen Shields is a school that hosts a community of diversity, equity, inquiry and empathy. Their principal and teachers are committed to bringing opportunities to their students and engaging their school community.

We are starting our work with Glen Shields through teacher training on design thinking, workshops with students on design thinking and working towards building a language and foundation for work to come next year.
We have requests for more workshops and teachers saying that they are already bring the ideas back to their classrooms. It is exciting to see where this is going. The students are just embarking on their journey and we meet with them again this week. Can’t wait to see where they go!This year we are focusing on the design thinking process with 44 students and 11 educators to prototype the process.

EdCamp Hong Kong – “The Amazing Race”

Posted on June 11, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

Reblogged from Bad Kids Collective

Across the ocean from home, EdCamp Hong Kong satisfied a few of my curiosities and fueled a ton more. When I arrived in Hong Kong nearly 4 months ago I didn’t know much about the Hong Kong education system and I had no intention of planning an event, and yet my curiosity got the best of me. I was struck by the number of tutoring companies, art centres, Montessori schools, various universities and colleges; it was clear that education was important. I sent a few tweets out in the world and was quickly connected to Neil and it seems like all the piece just fell into place after that.

Neil is the vice principal at Quarry Bay School and the proud host of the day. I was ecstatic when our conversations of alternative learning spaces landed us in the kindergarten classroom at QBS. The room was the perfect setting for our conversations of curiosity and connection. The room is colourful, has thoughtful signage, pictures of kids on the door, water play table and designated zones for learning, I don’t see why all classrooms and offices for that matter don’t look more like this.

As with any first time event, I always get a tingle when the first few people trickle in, it means our curiosity will bond us. Without failure, this day brought many curious folks who each sparked and shared ideas and questions.

Here are a few of my take aways:
– labels and categorizations of people don’t ever seem to be helpful
– the words that are so important in education are the ones that seem to mess us up the most; success, motivation, assessment, learning, purpose, passion, school…
– whenever we make something standardized, it becomes outdated
– where is the trust in school?
– the connections that matter are the ones that stay with us
– participation and learning doesn’t look a certain way

– culture and context are not secondary in education

My biggest take away was that no matter which side of the ocean we are on, the challenges seem to be the same. There is a lot of work to be done and it will be an uphill battle and where to start is just to keep going. Every one of these conversations leads to another and another and together we will figure out the next step. The race to get to the top, to be the best, to compete for more has long been tied to success, but it is the same race that makes us fall further behind?

EdCamp Hong Kong was the first EdCamp in Asia, I surely don’t think it will be the last. And I will just need to book my plane tickets accordingly!

Jenn

NOISE for Change – New Opportunities for Innovative Student Engagement

Posted on June 10, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

It was a cold and rainy evening when we arrived on the York University campus and found our way to the workshop room. The participants were lining up for the dinner before the workshop took place. The NOISE for Change group had been meeting since August to do work together and now in March, it was easy to see that they had clearly forged new relationships and were making an impact on one another. Meeting at York University, the high school students from Emery High School were introduced to the world of University and were embraced by their York University counterparts from Bachelors and Masters of Social Work. The NOISE for Change project is an amazing testimony to bringing together youth leaders and inspiring peer to peer projects. It was inspiring to see the investment everyone had made into the project and to each other.

NOISE for Change has been making some big bangs in the Jane-Finch neighbourhood from their pilot project out of York University. “NOISE for Change, an opportunity for innovative student engagement, brought together 20 grade nines, 20 grade twelves, 20 Bachelors of Social Work students, 20 Masters of Social Work students and 20 York Social Work Alumni for such a unique program.”

In Community Action Pods, the groups worked together on projects for the community, many of them focused on bringing positive attention to the neighbourhood.

We were delighted to come and offer a Design Thinking 101 workshop for the Pods who are in the thick of their project work. As per usual, we opened up the workshop with the Oreo Cookie workshop to make an analogy to how we are all design thinkers. This activity always breaks up any apprehension that the participants have going into a design thinking workshop and put a little bit of sugar in their systems for the next bit of work.

For the design thinking workshop, in our short time together, the groups explored a few possible design challenges that have popped up as projects brought forward by the community during past design jams at Green Change. Groups designed for community gardens and parking lot parties, no one wanted to take on the Tool Library, but we can come back to that another time.

The groups worked quickly at coming up with stakeholders and ideas for how they could make some of the projects a reality. As the groups are working on their own positive change projects in the neighbourhood, it was great to see them take what they have learned so far and apply that to these new challenges.

We are looking forward to seeing what comes from NOISE for Change next year as the take on new projects and youth leaders, it is inspiring to see their great work.

Engineers Without Borders – If change isn’t systemic, it isn’t change at all

Posted on May 16, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

As the engineers get ready to be deployed on their international assignments, they go through and intensive amount of training with a focus on human-centered design and empathy problem solving. Engineers Without Borders is famous for shifting the way international development work is done;

” We co-design systemic innovations with local partners, with the goal of fixing a broken system or introducing a new model.”

As well as they way they are reporting and documenting their work, EWB was the first NGO to introduce the Failure Report to learn from mistakes happening in the field directly from the staff working on the ground.

The unique way in which EWB is investing in people is what made me most excited to be delivering a Design Thinking 101 workshop to them in a week where they also focus on systems thinking, foresight and experience design. Admittedly, I was a little nervous to be bringing design thinking into a room of engineers who are heading out on some absolutely amazing ventures in Africa, each one doing something that sounded more and more complicated and I just had to check-in with myself and reminded myself that these are exactly the wicked problems that design thinking can facilitate.

In just under 2 hours, after getting a breakdown of design thinking, the engineers took on a wicked problem to practice. The two designs that emerged were a self-contained shelter for a homeless person who has been kicked out of the Salvation Army for violence or substance abuse during a snowstorm in Vancouver including some augmented reality software and a floatation device that can be used as a food and health sanctuary in times of flood and conflict in Africa for women and children that could dissolve to feed and nourish the fields.

Both teams were able to dig into the challenge and emerge with some great ideas, in the reflections they realized the importance of framing the problem and being able to focus on select stakeholders, to evaluate where an “impossible” idea may feed into a realistic solution and to continue to unpack where they made decisions and had biases.