Impact from the Middle

  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...