Bringing Design Thinking Crit” from Design School to Your School’s Faculty

Critiques Are an Empowering Event That Your Faculty Deserves. It’s posts on Twitter or conversations with teaching peers like this that remind me how skilled we are as teachers at being critical of student work but how rarely we are able to be constructive with criticism about our own work. There is no teacher at fault, it is a systems problem. Critiques are the Objective, … Continue reading Bringing Design Thinking Crit” from Design School to Your School’s Faculty

Design Thinking Fans, It's Time to talk about Causation and Correlation.

Causation and Correlation in Design Thinking Let me see. You and your peers (or say students) have been able to identify a problem through empathy, or some other framework. Also, your ideation went swimmingly and the project went into prototyping with enthusiasm. Yet, coming out are projects and innovations that take some effort to celebrate, are not long lasting and are soon to be buried … Continue reading Design Thinking Fans, It's Time to talk about Causation and Correlation.

Design Assessments to Leverage Cognitive Bias

A group of middle school students are reading well below grade level, different schools take different approaches: School A: Baised and imprecise – These teachers love the latest unproven brain research, they want to train for brain balance, train vision one eye at a time, some want to meditate still a few others want to train brain stamina with reading. A theme exists, but is … Continue reading Design Assessments to Leverage Cognitive Bias

Set Meaningful Goals With Students

Goals help focus all of this data presented to the student as a way to put it all into action. Most importantly, they can create a perfect opportunity for reflection about their achievements. Now that students have two graphs to reflect on and their own pretest it’s now time for them to make goals based on that information.  Some goal topics that students might chose … Continue reading Set Meaningful Goals With Students

Use of Data with Your Whole Class – Super Effectively

I first clued into the power of what simple data can do to a class my first year teaching. One day I tallied up the scores to a test and wrote onto the whiteboard how many students received an: A, B, C, D, F or below. This suddenly took each section of science I was teaching to near silence. This was uncommon in my class … Continue reading Use of Data with Your Whole Class – Super Effectively

Team Building Activities – Using Your Observations

Prior to taking your observations back to the classroom, it is important to have a sense as to what the data is that you are assessing. Likely you will have a numbering system for the order students became leaders as well as short but important notes about most or all of your students. First, we will organize the leader order data using a chart and, … Continue reading Team Building Activities – Using Your Observations

The Basic Components of Team Building – Facilitation Planning

The planning of a quality lesson should include thinking through the components to be discussed and picking an activity. No more than 20 minutes should be used to plan an activity. Once done, you should be able to use a successful lesson plan for many years!  The first step is to pick a skill that you wish to isolate. We will isolate leadership, as it … Continue reading The Basic Components of Team Building – Facilitation Planning

The Basic Components of Team Building – Facilitation Styles

Yes, the way in which you lead a team building activity will make or break the outcomes. So, let’s look at three facilitation styles: Passive, Instructor, and Active. After examining all three, we will focus on the ‘Active Facilitator’ and combine it with the four goals and purposes to create a complete picture of the facilitation.  The Passive Facilitator The passive facilitator will express the … Continue reading The Basic Components of Team Building – Facilitation Styles

The Basic Components of Team Building – Facilitation Goals

There are four different facilitation purposes, which I’ve designed to quickly guide you through the pre-planning experience. The four parts are: The Stated goal, The Stated Purpose, The Unstated Goal, and finally, the Unstated Purpose. Their power is to divide what is actually happening from the outcomes you wish to see. Keep these four concepts in mind as you setup your next team building event. … Continue reading The Basic Components of Team Building – Facilitation Goals

The Basic Components of Team Building – Debriefing

This is the most important component to a quality team building session, because this is where all your hard work will bear its fruit. During the debriefing students will discuss and reflect on the events of the activity and connect what is learned during the team building game to their classroom, home and personal experience. There are a few important ways to debrief that will … Continue reading The Basic Components of Team Building – Debriefing