Reimagining Education and The Teachers' Guild

I know it's almost time to go back to school when I start having the teacher anxiety dreams... and they started this week. I know that most professions don't have two months "off", but teachers don't really take two months off. We are always working, rethinking what we do and gathering inspiration.

This summer has been great. I've worked with many great educators writing curriculum with them and rethinking practice. In every school I visited from Atlanta to New York, dedicated educators were there on their "vacation" working to refine and reimagine their curriculum to better prepare our students for the world today. I met incredible Heads of School, who wanted to support their teachers and created time and space for that to happen. I worked with amazing department heads who started their conversations with me by telling me that their departments contained the best teachers anywhere. And everywhere I went teachers were there because they cared about their students and about giving them the best experience possible.

It is a privilege to work with such caring educators. And I love every second of designing with them. The energy in the room as this work unfolds is phenomenal. I wonder how we might keep this energy flowing during the year, when most of us feel the incredible time crunch of schedules and coverage and the idea of brainstorming feels too difficult because we are all flat-out all the time.

The Teachers' Guild might be one way of continuing that collaboration throughout the year in an easy online platform. It's the brainchild of IDEO, Riverdale Country School and Google and it gives teachers an easy way to collaborate and design together even when we can't physically be together. Last week I went to a #Dare2Design meetup at Riverdale where I met and worked with like-minded educators who were looking to hack the system in order to make education better for our students. It's so empowering to connect with others who work and think in the same way. I am planning on continuing the collaboration throughout the year, because despite the time crunch of our everyday educator lives, it's important to keep that positive mindset. It's easy to get stuck in our own silos, but being connected to others engaged in the same struggle is empowering and imperative. So join us on The Teachers' Guild website and engage in the conversation to reimagine education!

If You Build It... Will They Come?

A blog post for Edutopia written with my husband/architect/designer Blake Auchincloss... So many people talk about putting Makerspaces in schools, but forget that you have to build the culture of Making and Doing and raise awareness about and through Design.
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/school-makerspaces-building-the-buzz-lisa-yokana

Using Design Thinking and Making to Teach Empathy: WWI Memorials

Just published another Edutopia blog post on a great WWI project with social studies teacher Emily Block! Let me know what you think!

Architecture II--the Townhouse Design

By request, here is the second level architecture class townhouse assignment:

Yokana/Architecture II

                                    The Townhouse

You will be designing a townhouse.

Dimensions: 20’ x 50’

·      Two party walls that cannot be penetrated or moved.

·      Front to back orientation

·      Need public and private spaces

·      Some rooms MUST have access to light and air by code.

·      9’ ceilings

·      ¼ scale (1/4" equals 1 foot-use the scale rulers!)

·      Two floors

Program: (minimum dimensions)

·      Entry with closet (2’ depth)

·      Living room—15 x 20’ Needs natural light

·      Dining room—12 x 12’

·      Kitchen—15 x 10’

·      ½ bath—3 x 6’

·      2 Bedrooms—10 x 10’ Needs natural light and air

·      3 closets-2 in the master bedroom—2 x 3’

·      2 bathrooms—9 x 6’ (1 hall access and 1 master)

·      Hallways—3’ wide

·      Stair—3 x 13’ (13 linear feet with a 3’ platform at the top and bottom)(Spiral 8’ diameter)

Begin by working on ¼ scale graph paper and cut out the program spaces. Place them on the graph paper (like puzzle pieces) making three different solutions to the design problem.

Create a client. Who is the user for your design: a family of four? A middle-age career woman? A young man who has a good paying job? You need to design for someone-this is human centered design. Think about what tone, style and feeling you would like your design to invoke. 

Thanks @edutalkradio and Larry Jacobs for a fun show! 

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/edutalk/2015/01/22/the-maker-mindset-smartbrief-content-award-winner-teacher-lisa-yokana

 

Education Talk Radio‏@edutalkradio

MAKER MOVEMENT & DESIGN THINKING. @sbeducation presents Award winning Educator @LYOKANA59 . Listen anytime @ http://tobtr.com/s/7272591 

Designing Real/Experiential Courses for Students

It's been an amazing first almost half of the year.... I have met and worked with like-minded people, and talked to students who are crying out for a different type of education. After I gave the induction speech at my high school's honor society, several students stopped me in the hall to express their willingness to do something that mattered, but also to say that they just didn't have time. Our teenagers are so stressed and over-programed that they don't have time to seek meaningful experiences on their own time and they aren't being offered in schools.

To meet this need, we (Social Studies teachers Maggie Favretti, Jen Maxwell, Fallon Plunkett and I) designed a course, City 2.0,  which culminates in a semester long challenge which the students choose and solve using  Design Thinking. The course fits into the NY State requirement for Social Studies Public Policy. We knew that the culminating experience would be the self-selected challenge and we worked backwards from there. We asked ourselves what students would need in order to succeed with this challenge. They needed a lot of skills and habits of mind in order to be successful: resilience; the ability to ask questions and to seek help from appropriate sources, to name just a few. They needed to be able to work effectively with a team-in other words they had to able to lead, listen and collaborate-truly collaborate, not just divvy up the work. They also needed to know about the city. They needed to really study it: to break it apart and understand the complexities of its parts.

The Brooklyn Bridge area tile.

We created a series of scaffolded experiences that would allow students to understand by DOING and use Design Thinking. First there was a scavenger hunt that asked them to go places in the city and accomplish some tasks-all without a smart phone! Then they studied a block in depth. Next, they learned about infrastructure in preparation for building a scale model of lower Manhattan. Each group built a separate tile of the area-complete with subway lines and other infrastructure. These tiles will be put together on January 7th and students will participate in a day long challenge: Storm Godzilla. The students are all divided into disaster teams and will react to the situation as it develops. Real world people will be there to oversee the day: FEMA, the Coast Guard and the Office of Emergency Management. The students should be prepared to handle whatever comes there way-IF they have done their homework.

The ground level of one tile.

Students have said thus far that the course is exciting, different and hard. Not hard in that there is too much work or that it is difficult to comprehend, but hard in that you can't "fake it." Our students are so used to doing school, that they complete traditional assignments without truly understanding or embracing them. They go through the motions, knowing that if they do what a teacher wants, they will get a good grade. But they haven't learned anything and they haven't truly owned it. This course has challenged students in a new way. Most love it. A few don't-because they can't fake it.

Battery Park street level.

We need to challenge our students like this before their senior year. These skills and habits of mind need to be part of their schooling from the beginning, not just as a culminating experience. Let's design authentic experiences for them. Let's empower them. Let's help them learn how to use their education to make the world a better place.

Let us know what you come up with and reach out if you need help! And check out ways to design these types of experiences here http://www.edutopia.org/blog/capture-learning-crafting-maker-mindset-lisa-yokana?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=blog-crafting-maker-mindset

Connecting to Like Minded Maker/Educators

Last week, I went to an amazing conference. Amazing because I met like-minded people, networked like crazy, heard and saw new things and came away filled to the brim with excitement. Bottom line: I no longer felt like one of a few people who believed that making and doing are the way to teach students. The conference: the https://entrepreneurship.asu.edu/makersummit/ at ASU, brought together the 153 colleges and universities that took the maker pledge. These schools agreed to do one or more of the following:

• Allowing students that are applying for admission to submit their Maker portfolio
• Investing in Makerspaces that are accessible to students across the campus, or serving as “anchor tenants” for commercially-operated Makerspaces
• Supporting education, outreach and service-learning that is relevant to Making, such as encouraging students to serve as mentors for young Makers
• Supporting research that advances making technologies and facilitates greater access to making experiences such as the development of new tools for desktop manufacturing
• Expanding access to university shared facilities and scientific instrumentation to Makers
• Encouraging students to use their senior design projects to experiment with Making and Maker-preneurship
• Providing scholarships to students based upon excellence in making
• Participating in regional efforts to create a vibrant Maker ecosystem that involve companies, investors, skilled volunteers, state and local officials, libraries, museums, schools, after-school programs, labor unions, and community-based organizations

Wow! 153 higher ed institutions believe in this. And it's not just STEM schools, Bucknell is one of those schools and they understand how this includes the liberal arts and must be interdisciplinary. So if you are connected to a higher ed institution which is not one of the 153 thought leaders, exert your influence as an alum. If colleges and universities get it, then it makes it easier for high schools to get buy in from parents and students. Parents will see that it's ok for their children to make things, and that they will still get into college. Maker portfolios are here. Let's start creating them!