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My name is Mariela Muñoz Fuentes, I'm the director of "Centro Técnico Profesional",
institution located in the comune of Maipú, that receives students from first grade to
fourth medio.
The Ed-Lab was a meeting organized by Fundación Chile, which convened sixty
innovative teachers and managers from all places of our country, for us to be ambassadors
of innovation. They teach us different methodologies, by eight national and international experts.
We had the possibility of visiting and listening to each one of the experts, in a day that was
at times a little marathonic in the morning, because we passed from one set to another, and
then, in the evening, we could participate in the workshop that we had registered.
In my case, I chose the Elisa Petrides workshop, "Diseño del Pensamiento (Thinking design)".
The design challenge we are going to work on for the next hour,
is how we are going to be able to bring corageous conversations to your schools,
to enhance instructional leadership.
But I just want you to get a look at this now, so you could understand what these are and how you may use them.
My name is Lisa Petrides and I'm from Iskme, the Institut for the Study of the Administration
of Knowledge in Education, and we have develop a process of "collaboration in action".
"Colaboraton in action" incorporates the "Design Thinking", and is a way of taking actors of education,
like teachers and school directors, and other managers, to resolve the educational problems
in a realistic way, allowing to create solutions for this problems. In this way, you take a
design challenge, you make a brainstorming and quikly design prototypes or solutions,
that can be tested in a short time, and can be refined to then again be modified and tested.
It's a much more faster way and an expeditious form of prototyping that allows creating solutions to this problems.
The "Design Thinking" can be applied to all school subjects. You can use it specifically over the curriculum, if you are trying to create
educational resources with math teachers, for example, or also they can be used if
directors try to find a better process or methodology to work with teachers around
the pedagogical leadership. And in this way, the first thing that a teacher can do is,
maybe, interviewing those students to understand, from an empathic point of view, what they
are struggling with, what are they interested in and how can they get over it.
That's why the second step would be making a brainstorm about the type of design that could
really work in this case. The idea is to make this brainstorming in a very short time and very
fast. Usually we use sticky notes or something similar to get the idea out. The next step
would be to group these ideas and categorize them. The next stage is propotyping.
So in same cases it can be built a replica in 3D of how the process would be.
One thing is to talk about something and the other is to see it. And as educators we
are used to talk and talk, and to write and write, but when you really try to build something
with your hands in the phisical plane and look at it and explain it, we learn a lot more
about it. It was to teach us a methodology
through which we could identify, working in team, we could identify a need, identify a problem. Where all the workshop
participants had the possibility to talk freely.
The courageous conversations are those that, at times, we could think of them that
it's better not to have, because they are difficult conversations. Conversations in which
we are going to face situations that maybe, in some point, we could think of them that
they don't have a solution, that we are in a tunnel, that there's no chance
of advancing. But if we, the directors and managers, are capable
of establish those conversations with teachers, listening to teachers and searching together
the improvement for the problematic that exists, our pedagogical process and work
in attention of students will be obviously better. And there we used the concepts "and"
and "yes". We are going to work together using design thinking.
Before you start we have a rule that we say... for this exercise. One is
"yes" and "and". The next rule is you can't be wrong.
In that moment we played one of us was the expert teacher and the other was the researcher.
The others were the researchers. How to innovate in our habitual pedagogic
practices. I remember it was repeated a lot how to captivate the today student,
how to innovate with an strategy without having great resources, how to be very creative
in what I'm proposing to be able to recieve that student, that maybe is so different
from how we were in the moment we were students. We registered them in a sticky note,
in a little and colorful one. One word, two words, no more. After having all this brainstorm, from all of us
with our sticky notes there, completed, we stick them on the wall, all the group was
sticking, and then we organized them. Now we can see all the image, all the view,
of what these interviewees told us was important to these
conversations.
But I want you to think about. So, ¿how might you design for this issues if money were no problem?
When she says "don't think about money", came out a lot of ideas too, and we saw that it
existed the possibility of doing a lot of things without the need of having money,
that money was not a problem in achieving progress in our projects.
Solving the problem is having the problem and positioning ourselves beyond,
where you think it might be the solution. And prototyping from there, to then step back.
The solution with which you end is much better and goes far beyond than the immediate solution
that you could may have if you only were trying to solve the problem and only thinking.
We have to symbolize through a scheme, made of reusable materials. We think in teamwork,
of all the participants in the educational community, so we can make shared desicions
in an environment of trust, and believing in others, to obtain an opportunity of development
where the student is the beneficiary through his learning and the achievement of goals.
I feel is visualized what you want to do, these are not words. As we are working in
team, the problem belongs to everyone, not only to one person.
In this age, there are lot of things that are changing fast: children have access
to technology and information, but there are some problems of the 21st century that we are
facing, and teachers have to be much more flexible and quick to adapt to the type of teaching that students
require. The old method was that you had an idea, you looked into it for three or four
years, then you implemented a program and tested it to see it. In all five years,
and that's a lot of time. Now we have neither that amount of time, nor is that effective for our process.
So the idea is to take this "design thinking" and to work much more faster to obtain solutions.
Break it down, because you have to stop doing what
you were doing before. Break it down, because Ed-Lab could perhaps be a seminar. But all that they
showed us and all that they did with us, and the specialist that they brought,
and to share with other teachers of our country, we were breaking with what we were usually
doing, we were creating. Innovation for me is to stop doing things the way I did until today,
are the ideas that are in my mind and the ones I can execute. Innovate is to create for the benefit, in this case, of my school.