Wait a second...
Let's stop right there - at least, let's pause for a moment.
Before we can talk about October 10th, we really need to rewind a few weeks.
A passionate and dedicated group of faculty, the same group who attended our mini-conference back in August, began meeting in the early part of September to talk about how we would best move forward in our work with design thinking and our full faculty. Feedback from our initial presentation revealed that there was a sincere desire on the part of the majority of our faculty to learn more about design thinking, and that many of them wanted the chance to experience design thinking for themselves. They also requested some guidance to create and implement design thinking lessons in their classrooms. The planning group definitely had their work cut out for them!
And so, over the course of a month, this dedicated group of people came together and talked about our next steps, specifically, how we would bring design thinking to our first Professional Learning Day of the year. In tandem with our consultant, Parker Thomas (me@parkerthomas.com), we debated and discussed merits and demerits of various activities, learnings, and projects that we could undertake during the day. Ultimately, we landed on a two-part session that would take approximately four hours.
The first part of the day would be set up to give all faculty a hands-on experience with the design thinking process. After reviewing our Parker Design Thinking Process V 1.0 with everyone, we would dive into a design challenge that was relevant for faculty and which would involve all of the steps. Following that exercise, we would then reorganize faculty into collaborative teams so that they could settle in and work on specific lessons that would be able to work in their classrooms following the professional learning day.
The planning group set up the agenda in general terms, and provided some great "think abouts" to ponder as we got set for October 10th. Parker and I then spent several hours via Skype to hammer out the agenda in a high degree of detail as well as ensure we had a bead on the needs for our planning group, who would be serving as our facilitators for the day. This was going to be something very new for all of us - hosting 150+ people in a design thinking experience all at one time.
I then set to work organizing the myriad supplies and ensuring we had a slide deck set up for the morning so that we had all of the materials on hand, ready to go on the morning of October 10th. The days leading up to October 10th were chock-full with last minute details, supply organization, and consulting with Parker to ensure we had everything we needed for the day to be a success.
Supplies at-the-ready!
Have Post-Its, Will Learn!If you are thinking about setting up something similar for your faculty group, please don't hesitate to contact us with questions or wonders about how to get it done. We're happy to help!