Share – Page 6 – Exhibit Change

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.

Our #Educon Session

Posted on March 19, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

Last year I met Andrew Campbell on twitter and since then we have been collaborating and discussing everything in education from how people learn to the spaces we learn in. Andrew is a grade 4/5 teacher and has been teaching for 20 years, we come from extremely different perspectives and experiences which I think fuels the ways we influence one another. In the summer, Andrew shared a story with me about going to Rome and visiting church after church after church just to soak in the beauty and awe of the buildings and he began to question why don’t we travel the world to see schools? In conjunction with my passion for breaking down school walls, we launched into a journey to find where are the beautiful learning spaces? The conversations moved from twitter to a blog of Beautiful Learning Spaces where we collect inspiration for what schools could be.

We were privileged to be able to share our project at EduCon 2.5 on January 25-27, 2013 in Philadelphia at the Science Leadership Academy.

Our session was on Sunday afternoon, right after lunch. We were a little nervous. We planned as much as we could to both speak about where we were coming from and to facilitate a conversation about beautiful learning spaces. We were so pleased with the group that turned out and got fully engaged into a conversation about space, school and learning 🙂 We created this google doc to record some of the conversation.

My biggest insight/take away from the session was how interested people were in co-working spaces and being able to choose where you work on what day depending on what you need.

Jenn

My #Educon Adventures

Posted on February 15, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

I was in Philadelphia for the weekend of January 25-27 to present “Where are the Beautiful Learning Spaces?” with Andrew Campbell. The conference, #EduCon 2.5 was hosted at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) which is a public school that was developed in partnership between the public school board and the Franklin Institute, the science centre. The Franklin Institute, as the founding partner, launched SLA to promote science and leadership in education, the project is highly successful and an inspiring example of putting good ideas to action.

Together, SLA and the Franklin Institute is bringing museum education, inquiry-driven, project based curriculum to life and sharing all the way, as demonstrated by #EduCon.

For me, #EduCon demonstrated to me how schools can be entrepreneurial, thought leaders, provocative and participate in bringing together some amazing people together. While the conference is highly supported online via Google hangouts and the massive twitter feed (actually went trending several times and then we started getting spammed…) there is nothing that can beat being there in person and getting to connect with people.

I got a chance to meet many people who I have talked to online and I feel like those in-person moments will solidify the existing relationships. Here are a few honourable mentions; Christian Long, educator of The Third Teacher, Dan Callahan, EdCamp; Alex Gillam, Public Workshop; Greg Bamford, Leading is Learning. Each of these people are making things happen in education, they are inspiring my work and I was ecstatic to meet them. I also met a slew of new people to add to my inspiration list; Christina Jenkins, designer of Quark Cards; Karen Blumberg, TedxYouth@School EdCampNYC & RoboExpo; Mary Cantwell, Deep Design Thinking and the most important people of all, the ones that come to our session! (More to come on that in another post)

I was surprised and loved the fact that a lot of the sessions were around design thinking. It meant that people spoke my language. Educators and designers who were using design thinking in the classroom, in education consulting and in thinking about the education system. It was simply marvellous!

Like all conferences, at some point we go back to our day jobs and all you can do is try and hold on to the memories to see what it may spark. I can say that there was more then a few ideas that were sparked and propelled by my weekend in Philly. Thanks Educon for inspiration, the cool peeps and the chance to eat a Philly cheese steak IN Philadelphia.

See you again,

Jenn

And an extra special thank you to Patti Walker, President of Marathon Learning Materials Ltd. I couldn’t have done it without you. Your unconditional support is unbelievable!

Launching EdCamp Design Thinking

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

In 2011, I joined the inaugural EdCamp Toronto organizing committee. In 2012, I instigated EdCamp Hong Kong (the first EdCamp in Asia), participated in starting the harvest team for the second EdCamp Toronto and attended EdCamp Ottawa. Needless to say, I am a fan of the EdCamp movement and have been watching it grow over the years. So, I was pretty excited when I passed an idea past the co-founders of Dan Callahan and Mike Ritzius to launch a spinoff of the original EdCamp with the addition of design thinking methodologies.

On February 20th, we will be hosting our first meeting and planning EdCamp Design Thinking!!! I am pretty excited 🙂

At the meeting we will be building a model for all future EdCamp Design Thinking, a model to be tested, to be hacked, to be spread. A model that is going to share the the process of problem finding, idea generation, empathy mapping, to design solutions and to pitch. The goal of EdCamp Design Thinking is to promote the 21st century skills: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication as well as entrepreneurship.

I love the beginning of projects, so much potential! Our planning team currently is made up of designers, educators, innovators and people who are passionate about education.

For more information, check out the EdCamp Design Thinking wiki.

Make it happen,

Jenn

Where are the beautiful learning spaces?

Posted on January 18, 2013September 3, 2014 by Jenn Chan

Imagine a classroom. What do you see? Is it the classroom of yesterday or of tomorrow?

In the fall of 2011, I went for a visit to a school and wrote a blog about breaking down school walls. I was struck by how the physical space of schools were not duplicating the vision of community engagement, creativity and innovation the way that so many are yearning for. I question the culture of learning that schools are promoting when the design leaves little to imagination. Historically schools are designed by institutional architects who also build hospital and jails. Now, I am not saying that none of these buildings have ever been beautiful, but it is not the norm. There are far more beige cylinder block classrooms and rows of desks attached to chairs than there should be.

I think we are ready to start seeing schools as places where we look up to, where we travel to, where we aspire to be more, where schools are beautiful learning spaces.

The role of schools is to keep children safe, to educate them for tomorrow, to learn the ABC’s of life and to pursue the next level. But where?

Last year, Andrew Campbell and I started a blog called Beautiful Learning Spaces, it is a collection of buildings that we find to be lovely and replicate the design principles that we think promote creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking that 21st century skills and respecting the space as the third teacher. We are inspired by the writings of Reggio Emilia and The Third Teacher which both understand the importance of the environment.

Between the two of us, we have been filling the blog with images of high schools, universities, classrooms, offices, libraries, museums and all sorts of beautiful spaces. What works well is that we don’t see beautiful learning spaces as coming from one specific sector but rather taking bits and pieces from spaces we have been or spaces we can only dream of visiting.

Andrew says “I want to find them and hold them up as inspiring models. To show what’s possible in a learning space and encourage educators to think more creatively about the spaces we create for learning. I want to use them as we go forward and remake our learning spaces to better meet the changing needs of our students.”

I want to find beautiful learning spaces and elevate the conversation of what space and environment does for learning behaviour, community culture and collective inspiration. I want to see what happens when beautiful learning spaces are everywhere and we as students and educators are co-designing those spaces. How we we become involved in the conversation of what beautiful learning spaces look like? Understand how they affect us and how we use them?

Jenn