Impact from the Middle

  Lately, our iDL team, and I'd wager to say our student designers as well, have been having a lot of fun. Having fun, whether professionally or personally, is SOOO important and infectious. One of the keys to having fun is having a good team to work alongside. Our iDL team is fortunate to have become not only a team, but a team of friends. C.S. Lewis explored the friend-bond, known in Greek as philia , in his writings entitled "The Four Loves:" “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." As a team collaborating to build and fly this airplane known as Impact Design Lab this year, we have already had a lot of fun, and I think t...

So there’s this iceberg. It has floated in and out of my teaching life at Mount Vernon - most recently as an operative metaphor for an identities unit in 7th grade humanities... Who am I? What’s the story behind my story? On one level, I think it does serve as a helpful visual by which we might explore ourselves and our stories. The iceberg might help us ponder how much of ourselves we’re ever really able to show and share with the world. (As I write this, I hope I haven’t imparted the message that we, like this iceberg, are destined to float alone, bobbing over waters vast and serene and empty… The aforementioned iceberg. Today, this iceberg represents what my students have helped me begin to see and understand about their experience of school. Especially...around our early prototypes of competency-based education. Our school uses a learning platform called Altitude Learning. The student-facing experience of Altitude centers upon “cards” - that is, the discrete learning tasks each tea...

  Equipped with our newly-minted knowledge of design thinking jargon, we were primed to embark on our first lap of human-centered design. Our mission?  Discover - Define- Design - Deploy Mount Vernon's non-linear phases of design thinking  HMW help our partner hold on to their feelings of summer fun? Using Mount Vernon's Compass to guide us through the phases of design thinking, we jumped in to discovery. Discover: As the need for new skills arises, learn from others and in turn pass it on. Student-designers engaged in an empathy interview. True to our Mount Vernon norms, we started with questions. The first step was to conduct an empathy interview with our partners. Before beginning, however, we shared how we felt in some interviews that we have experienced in the past. What makes for a good interview question so that the interviewee shares openly, rather than with quick yes-no answers? How do we watch for non-verbal cues indicating if our interviewees were engaged and s...

  In a previous post, we spoke about hitting the speed bump in the form of a simple question from one of our student-designers: "Wait...what is innovation?" From that point, we shifted focus a bit from jumping right into the first design challenge into looking at some design thinking jargon that we ideated should be highest frequency. The shift slowed us down in some regard, but we were also staring down a summative assessment deadline: Milepost #1. That to say, we needed summative assessment data to report out to students and families--we were already halfway through the mod! Time was flying, and our backwards-designed calendar was sliding into obsolescent oblivion... A question lingered:  How might we assess in a meaningful and real-world way? Our Arts & Design Focal Points and Power Standards were our starting point, and we began by imagining not only how to best assess, meaning, which Focal Point and Power Standard this assessment "lived" in, but also we ask...

  Come and see this poster:   It displays the norms by which we, at The Mount Vernon School, mean to inquire, explore, question, wonder, what-if, show, revise, avoid, reimagine, and ultimately share the learning life.   These posters grace almost every single classroom in our middle school building, mine included. And I thought that “Sharing the Well” was something I already knew all about.  On some days, “Share the Well” reminds of cross country workouts in high school and college, after the breezy banter of the first interval gives way to a quieter, fiercer urgency of feet against grass, of managing tempo and pace and breath alongside teammates who each take a turn at the lead, leaning like you into each uphill for the same race-day dream.   On other days, “Share the Well” conjures that day when Jesus (as the Gospel of John tells it) scandalized his disciple friends not only by pulling up at a public watering hole in the wrong neighborhood and a...