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Day 2 at #InnEdCO17 was an incredible day of connections and storytelling. I started the morning with Sean Wybrant (Colorado Teacher of the Year) and his session on crafting heroes. As the Colorado teacher of the year, he decided to use the role to serve as a voice for the teachers of Colorado. In his session, he told the story of his student's journey to creating an interactive, periodic table using a variety of augmented reality hardware. For me, the most impactful part of his presentation was the emphasis on sharing your story, especially before it feels like a polished product. Like the many iterations of the Iron Man suit, it is important to understand that there will be constant iterations of your story. The most important thing is to start sharing your story in the first place. Too often, negative headlines take over the educational narrative. In order to overcome this, educators across the country need to share the positive stories they have as often as they occur. We need to not led perfection become the enemy of good enough and reclaim the education headlines through our intentional storytelling.
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Next, I attended the inspirational Keynote of Rusul Alrubail. While I have been fortunate enough to be exposed to many equity-focused keynotes over the past year (see previous blog posts), I feel lucky to have made such a personal connection to Rusul. She shared an inspiring message focused on elevating student voice, kindness, empathy and the importance of representation and authenticity as an educator. Below is a collection of my favorite tweets from Rusul's keynote.
Ben's image for the vision of personalized learning.
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I was also able to attend a session on personalized learning by Ben Wilkoff. His session provided insight into the vision for meaningful, relevant, personalized learning for all learners in Aurora Public Schools. This includes a connected learning, with a device that they feel confident using, in a learning space that meets their needs, making things that matter to them. This same learner is connected to a community of other learners and has ownership over their work and data that they can then share with others. These skills can then be recognized via microcredentials, allowing the learner to move their own boxes and engage meet their personal learning goals. I found myself reflecting on how these characteristics are also conducive to a creative and innovative work environment. You can find Ben's presentation here to click into examples of these concepts.
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Last, but not least, I engaged in a conversation with Mustefa, an innovative strategist, around design thinking and the importance of understanding context to solve a problem. Very often companies come up with complicated procedures for engaging in design work, when a straightforward and simple thinking process can help us solve our problems. Once we can identify our context, we can then consider the challenges that come up and the corresponding opportunities and risks for each challenge. From there, we can take action in the ways that best support reaching our intended goal. Mustefa emphasized how it is not necessary to engage in a complex set of structures to really tackle our problems, including those involving systems of inequity. Once we have a solid understanding of the context, anything is possible.
How has your week been at InnEd CO? What great equity-focused Keynotes have you heard?
Please share in the comments below!
Please share in the comments below!
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