The Many Titles of Educators

It’s been a great week at SXSW 2023! I had a great session presenting, met Hank Green, had knowing what an “ekphrasis” is come in handy in conversation, saw a magic show and discovered parallels between magic and education, reconnected with someone who taught me over half a decade ago, solve puzzles with deaf participants in Japan over Zoom, and just generally speaking had an amazing time connecting and learning from and with other passionate educators.

Now this is going to sound a bit like my last post, but what’s really been sticking with me is how I’ve gotten to learn from so many educators that don’t just come from a teaching background. I’ve learned from coaches, magicians, game makers, neuroscientists, YouTubers, parents turned school founder, social entrepreneurs, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I have also loved learning from and with teachers while at this conference — a science teacher from Atlanta, an ESL teacher from Chicago, a social studies teacher from Arizona, etc. — but that was to be expected.

I would love to see a learning community where these two groups weren’t so siloed (the “teachers” vs everyone else). Both have different values to bring to the table, but I hypothesize the value would increase if they worked in tandem.

What if you had a learning community where everyone was always partnered when facilitating sessions? Just as a quick example:

• A math teacher and a magician
• A science teacher and a coach
• A language teacher and a restaurant owner
• A social studies teacher and a philanthropist
• An english teacher and an architect
• A music teacher and a neuroscientist

The possibilities are limitless.

Associative thinking is such a key part of how our brain learns. I can only imagine what would happen if we thought about our lead learning facilitators with an associative mindset; pairing different expertise to create unique experiences with easy applications to real world challenges. What I imagine though seems pretty great.

A Star in the Sky

For the past few weeks, I have been working on the brainstorming and planning behind what it would look like to host a virtual design jam (a design thinking workshop/challenge). We hope to start officially marketing the event next week, and I was originally going to wait until then to post about how much I’ve been enjoying working on this project, but I decided I couldn’t wait. It’s been so much fun to plan because I have to rethink everything I would normally do and figure out how to adapt it for an online environment and that’s been a weirdly amusing thought puzzle for me.

Today we had a group meeting with all of our table coaches for the workshop and even then I found myself still catching more little details that could be adjusted to make for a more interactive and engaging experience. It seems that every time I revisit the plans I realize there is something else I could do to make the process more efficient, and I think it’s finally starting to take on a really cool shape.

What excites me the most about this idea is that if we can pull it off, then a virtual design jam will be another tool in our pocket that we can continue to build on in the future. Being able to host a workshop virtually would give us the option to connect with such a wider range of people in the future and that’s a really exciting thought. To not be bound by the limits of physical location is truly game-changing, and I’m not sure we would have had the push to try out this concept had it not been for this pandemic; it’s forcing us to think differently and try new things that have the potential for great capacity building.

This pandemic has been awful, but it’s nice to remember that even on the darkest night, a few stars can still be found.