I had the amazing opportunity to take a 6 week thought journey with Bruce Dixon and Will Richardson the co-founders of Modern Learners while working at TST BOCES. My first exposure to Will occurred in 2015 when I watched the video below. I have shared this video with a lot of colleagues, administrators and friends. The reactions have been excitement, contemplation and most recently anger from a past administrator but I think that is a blog post for another time.
Our time spent working with Will began with the importance of creating a vision for what learning would look like in our space. We were asked to share our ideas of what a vision entailed and eventually Will share what he though were key components or important things to consider as we moved forward. He recommended that a education/school vision be:
Developed thoughtfully with as many stakeholders possible
Easy to remember (Why?)
Everyone in your organization can understand, repeat and share why it is your vision important to your community
All decisions you make should be filtered through your vision
Examples visions that may note be as effective as possible.
Thanks Will! The course ended and my colleague Justin and I packed that knowledge away and went on with our jobs at TST BOCES. Until that fateful day I was asked to write the Learning Technology Grant and we were asked to create a vision.
The Learning Tech Grant became the "Teknologia Project" and it required a team of forward thinking learners to design and implement an experience that supported our local teachers. I worked with Sunny Miller, Mary Kay Welgoss and Justin DiMatteo and we created an opportunity that will never be forgotten. Our first step was creating a vision!
Our plan was to go to lunch, eat sushi and write a vision. What it became was multiple long working lunches over multiple weeks with passionate productive arguments, tired folks claiming visions were not important (based on past educational practice) and finally three simple words that have moved our work forward for the last 8 years: Creation - Learning - Joy
Simply put, through the creative process, there is immense learning that occurs. If the creative task causes enough struggle/learning then when we are successful we experience joy.
Our team then applied our vision to the Teknologia Project and embedded it into everything we did and decision we made.
Jump forward to today! Our team has split up, with Mary Kay retiring. Sunny has become a principal, tech director, and curriculum director extraordinaire, and Justin and I moved on to a school that asked us to develop a K-12 STEAM program. We initially changed our vision with very little thought and discussion, but very quickly came back to: Creation - Learning - Joy.
How have we integrated our vision? We have posters, stickers, t-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with different artistic versions of the vision. We followed Will's advice and made it simple, easily remembered while we do our best to run every decision through it. Most importantly learners in our spaces use it in discussions, can explain what it means and have experienced it as they work through their creative processes.
Has it all been easy? Absolutely not, administrators have joked that we are marketing a product (we/they need to engage more in STEAM together), colleagues have argued that joy is too fluffy (we need to provide experiences that help them understand) and sometimes we as a STEAM program allow decisions to be made that do not support our vision. On those days we remember another mantra we use daily, "Process over Product." That is for another post.
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