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Collab Labs

Collab Lab 67: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

Last week’s Collab Lab served as a follow on from our November’s session on Place Based Engagement. At that session and in follow up conversations, Joe Kaltenberg, MKE Parks Manager with the The City of Milwaukee noted that input from students, residents, property owners, and other stakeholders can offer the department not only a clearer picture of the roles the playgrounds and parks oversee play in those neighborhoods, but also a richer vision of the roles they could play. 

That prompted us to use Collab Lab 67 to explore how and where K-12 students might engage at different points in the City’s playground redevelopment process as a means to foster community input and engagement in those efforts. During the discussion participants identified three areas where engaging K-12 students could offer a rich experience for students and support key areas of the City’s process — stakeholder mapping, storytelling, and design.

Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping allows the City to understand who uses, cares for, or is concerned with a particular playground or park, and who ought to have input or otherwise be involved as part of the redevelopment process. The work to identify stakeholders, their relation to a playground or park, the issues they see and the goals they have, is an opportunity for K-12 students to gain a much broader perspective on civic engagement. It’s a chance to understand who in a community cares about what happens on a specific site, the reasons behind that and where they may conflict and align with goals others may have.

Storytelling

For a park or playground to be of the neighborhood in which it sits, the City needs to hear the stories of those who use, care, or are impacted by a park or playground, and what takes place there. Storytelling offers methods to understand where stakeholders are coming from and communicate those hopes, fears, and dreams to a broader audience.

Collab Lab participants noted that a storytelling event focused at or on a particular site would allow K-12 students to collect stories from a variety of stakeholders. It would also serve as a way to draw attention to that site as a candidate for redevelopment.

Ideation

Involving students in the design of a playground or park, where they can see their ideas take shape and have an impact on the community is a wonderful idea. Yet, as Collab Lab participants noted, unless the process were constrained to proposals for the arrangement of pre-selected components, it is unlikely that they would ever see their designs implemented as envisioned, and even in this scenario, be able to recognize their contributions to what was put in place.

More importantly, this approach fails to leverage the fact that these are students. We shouldn’t be asking them to act as engineers, we should be asking them to dream, to think outside the box, and challenge the assumptions of engineers. Here the request of students ought to focus on how they or others experience a playground or the features or equipment under consideration. We ought to be asking them what adults involved in the process fail to see or understand about how a park or playground is experienced by those who use it. We need to probe behind suggestions for features that would never be implemented to understand the problem a student sees that an impossible feature solves.

Constraints

A common set of constraints cuts across all three of these areas for engagement. Central among them is the ability of teachers to effectively engage their students in this work:

  • Finding the time to do so
  • Establishing connections to curriculum standards
  • Synchronizing school calendars with the City’s, particularly when the seasons and weather can further constrain the time students can spend on-site
  • The availability of community partners to support student efforts
  • The ability of teachers to collaborate across classroom or school boundaries for shared success
  • The proximity of parks in the City’s pipeline to teachers and students ready to take on this work

The Collab Lab did not provide an opportunity to dive into all of these issues, but we were able to identify a strategy in one area. Most schools, particularly at the middle and high school level draw students from well beyond the neighborhood in which the school sits. Thus, while a park or playground may be near a school, many students will have limited exposure to it or be able to access it outside of school hours. For any of the opportunities noted above, this limits the ability to rely on students themselves as stakeholders, storytellers, or users of their own designs.

What we can do is ask students to work at a higher level, to be the mappers of stakeholders, the collectors of stories. We can ask them to be the designers who can communicate what the users of a park or playground that is near their school want from it or hope that it could become.

Where do we go from here

The work to organize teachers, students, and community stakeholders to participate in the planning process would be a lot for MKE Parks to take on. While useful to have that input, it’s not really something for them to take on. We’re exploring with Joe a different approach– developing a framework that, recognizing the timelines and constraints faced by each of these participants, allows them to work outside of a City managed process while offering their input and results of their work at the most useful points in the process.  We plan to spend time between now and the end of the school year to understand what this framework would need to look like to make this work for educators. If you are interested in participating in that process, let us know.

Collab Lab 66: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

Our discussion at February’s Collab Lab focused on engaging families. As we explored goals we have for family engagement we considered:

  • Who we include as “family” in “family engagement”
  • Who family engages with
  • Where/When it happens
  • Who benefits/how

While parents, siblings, and caregivers of students are obvious starting points for who to include as family, the discussion quickly broadened to include a much broader group. The extended families of students, individuals and families in the community which surrounds a school, those who may work or own businesses in the community around the school. In no small part, this expansive view family reflects a deeper goal — that the school is not simply a place where students and teachers spend the day, but that it is deeply embedded in the life of the community.

This broader approach to engagement changes the way one thinks about who the school and it’s families engage with. It’s not just about caregivers connecting with their student’s teachers. It’s about giving those families a chance to connect with each other, individuals and organizations who support their school, and in particular. It looks to move past one way communication, simple reporting out of what a school thinks families ought to know. It looks to build the relationships and trust that allow disengaged families to engage and for the community to come together not just to support the work of students and their families, but to  support each other. It changes as well, where engagement might take place.  It moves beyond family coming to school. It’s the school coming out into the community. 

This expansive view of engagement only works if all participants see benefits, and they see that their contributions to the school community, as students, teachers, family members or neighbors are valued. 

What do members of the school community need to engage?

As we moved the discussion to what’s needed to engage, the word “dignity” came up early. Again, not just dignity for caregivers, but dignity for students, teachers, and members of the broader community who schools do or seek to engage with.  For caregivers, this means recognizing both the time, financial, and other constraints and obligations they work face, but that they have something to of value to offer, that they are partners in the education of their child.  Often it comes down to the simple things– if we are asking for something more of any of the participants, what burdens can we remove?

  • A time that works for those we want to engage with
  • Providing food at events that may overlap with meal times
  • Helping with transportation
  • Activities for children that may need to come when a caregiver is there for an adult conversation

Most importantly, don’t waste someone’s time.  This means not asking teachers, caregivers, or members of the broader community to participate in engagement activities they don’t value or benefit from. 

The process starts with how we invite the engagement. Are we asking for engagement because we see a caregiver or a student as a problem or the one that needs to solve it, or are we asking for engagement to work together for a better outcome.

In the end, it comes down to recognizing that members of the broadly defined school community each come with a different set of goals. Effective engagement doesn’t mean that everyone needs to share the same set of goals. It requires that we acknowledge the goals they do have, understand where they align, and find something useful to work on together that allows everyone to come out ahead. It’s how trust is built.

A special thanks to our featured guests,

Amber DuChateau — Art Teacher at the Milwaukee Academy of Science

Aubrey (Ellickson) Fulsaas — Environmental Educator, Schlitz Audubon Nature Center

Bernie Traversari — Director of Operations and Programs, Society for Conservation Biology North America & STEM Education Consultant

Additional thanks to Bernie for his help facilitating the session. Bernie joined us to record a debrief of the session that you can find on inspirEd.

As always, we’re appreciative of MSOE for letting us make use of the NM Lab in the WE Energies STEM Center every month.

Up Next

Collab Lab 67: Connecting to Community Thursday March 13th, 5:30 to 8:30 pm at MSOE’s STEM Center

Actively using some form of PBL with your students and looking for ideas or encouragement from others? Consider joining your peers in the inspirED Community.

Collab Lab 65: Recap & Notes

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Capacity Building as an Outreach Strategy

The Freshwater Collaborative  of Wisconsin’s mission to advance freshwater education and research relies on attracting and developing talented individuals who are passionate about water science. The conventional approach to community outreach is traditionally focused on the delivery of programming — offering experiences or content to K-12 teachers and students through curriculum, site visits, summer camps, or other activities.

We worked with the Freshwater Collaborative to use our December Collab to explore a different approach. We view teachers, students, and schools not simply as recipients of programming, but as potential partners that can support and extend the work of Freshwater Collaborative members. This model empowers K-12 schools to become active partners in research and education, creating experiential learning opportunities that benefit both students and researchers.

To provide a concrete basis from which to explore this approach to engagement, we framed the discussion around a budding collaboration between Dr. Ashley Lemke, an underwater archeologist working out of UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, and Peter Graven, a middle school science and high school robotics teacher from St. Francis. Over the past several years, his students have developed underwater ROV’s of increasing sophistication. The immediate opportunity is to deploy an ROV in service of Dr. Lemke’s research. The bigger vision is to develop additional capabilities at St. Francis and other schools to serve the specific needs of FCW researchers and its partners.

Discussion

The set-up for our discussion centered on a single faculty member working with an individual teacher on a specific project. What came out of that was a number of insights about how and where those efforts could catalyze opportunities for other K-12 teachers and schools, as well as faculty pursuing other research interests.

We split the attendees into four discussion groups, each focused on a different capacity needed to allow a K-12 school, to support research efforts of Dr. Lemke. These included:

  • An ability to engineer, prototype, and test components
  • An ability to collect images, data, water, and sediment samples
  • An ability to provide ongoing monitoring of conditions
  • An ability to document findings, tell, and share a story

A fifth set of needed abilities we had not planned to introduce as part of the discussion, was nonetheless covered as part of a broader conversation between discussion groups:

  • An ability to deploy, operate, and maintain an ROV

The discussion which followed covered opportunities to directly engage students, the importance of cultivating a sense of wonder, and the importance of soft skills — the ability of students to work effectively as a team to take on any of these challenges.

Across the participants we saw interest and excitement around:

  • The types of collaboration that might ensue
  • What K-12 students might gain from the experience
  • What individual participants or organizations might be able to do to support the efforts of Dr. Lemke and Mr. Graven directly, or to support FCW/K-12 collaboration in another area.

Given the discussion at the Collab Lab and follow-up conversations we see six areas to build upon to validate and scale the approach we’ve suggested, starting in the spring 2025 semester.

  • Facilitate the work of Dr. Lemke and Mr. Graven
  • Share that story as it evolves
  • Identify opportunities for other schools to support this effort
  • Identify additional opportunities for collaboration
  • Recruit participation from additional K-12 schools
  • Understand and document what has enabled this initial collaboration and a path forward to extend the depth and reach of these efforts

Notes From Initial Brainstorming

Ability to engineer prototype and test components

  • Teachers need to have a framework/plan to structure students’ learning experiences to develop their design & making skills
  • Teachers need to be able to and actually model failure & Learning so that students know what it looks like and what it produces
  • Students need self awareness & self management skills to monitor and adjust their emotions to persist and create
  • Students need to have practices or skills to stretch their thinking and ideate broadly so their ideas break new ground
  • Students need to be able to sketch/model their ideas so they can discuss and make
  • Students need to have clarity about the connection between the design and real world application so they can test effectively
  • Students need to have multiple experiences of the make-test-revise cycle and feel a sense of accomplishment and to believe there is value in failure
  • Students need to be able to see their efforts and failure as a part of a lifelong learning journey so they persist and learn
  • Students need to be able to let go of their ideas and take an adversarial approach to find flaws so they can go farther faster
  • Students need to develop an appreciation for the discomfort that comes from presenting their ideas, getting, feedback, being wrong, and being uncertain so they remain open to growth
  • All parties deal with failure — playing it safe leads to not enough prototyping


Ability to collect images, data, water, and sediment samples

  • Modular construction for multiple purposes — right tool for the tasks
  • Generalized tool vs specific tasks
  • Photography
  • Lighting
  • High quality camera
  • Shutter speed
  • Video vs photos
  • Coring
  • Water Samples
  • Sterility, DNA,
  • Grabber hand for artifacts
  • Mapping
  • Endless types of data (interdisciplinarity) to collect. Explore & let the science happen– don’t lock yourself in too soon
  • Underwater mechanics important to take into account
  • Streamlined
  • Multi-perspective
  • balanced/shifting balance
  • Transform something that works on land to something that works underwater
  • Research & Art
  • Videography – stabilization of film (See film all too clear film)
  • Need to know where you are
  • explore/make questions
  • Underwater special challenges
  • Design thinking
  • Project management
  • Give up control
  • Deal with failure
  • Visual thinking
  • Resilience


Ability to provide ongoing monitoring

  • A Reason Why
  • Creativity – draw from other disciplines
  • Story purpose
  • Community
  • Contributing (leads to story)
  • Reasons to do it in a certain way — e.g. being scientific
  • Model scenarios for winter tests
  • simulations
  • Drill through pond ice (winter strategy to get out on smaller lakes)
  • Big challenge is precise location
  • Get practice in an accessible way –virtual simulations, small scale trials
  • Data logging
  • System for submitting and maintaining data
  • Decentralized
  • out of silo
  • People doing a part of a bigger, longer term effort
  • Possibly revolving group with new comers
  • Internal story telling to bring in new participants
  • Data logging – consistent methods
  • What story are we trying to tell?
  • Knowing who the community is
  • Virtual training/accessibility


Ability to document findings, tell and share a story

  • Wonderment
  • Speak/voice
  • Listen
  • Kids speak
  • Share a story — kids, teachers, families
  • Kids — visual communication/posters/art
  • Cyclical feedback/revision
  • 37 sec reels [how things work]
  • Local pride/trust
  • clubs


Ability to operate an ROV

  • Put in
  • Take out
  • Know where I am
  • Know what I’m seeing
  • Maneuver reliably
  • Maintain it
  • Clean
  • Repair
  • Train other operators
  • Make use of a test environment to improve skills

A special thanks to our featured guests,

Peter Graven — Science & Robotics, St Francis School District

Marissa Jablonski – Executive Director, Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin

Ashley Lemke — Associate Professor – Anthropology, UW Milwaukee

As always, we’re appreciative of MSOE for letting us make use of the NM Lab in the WE Energies STEM Center every month.

Up Next

Collab Lab 66: Engaging Families Thursday February 13th, 5:30 to 8:30 pm at MSOE’s STEM Center

Actively using some form of PBL with your students and looking for ideas or encouragement from others? Consider joining your peers in the inspirED Community.

Collab Lab 64: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs ,

Our November Collab Lab explored placed-based engagement–what it can offer students, and the ways we might engage students around particular places in their neighborhood, their lives, or the broader community.

Discussion

We started the conversation by asking participants to describe for their tablemates a public space that holds meaning for them. We then asked each group to identify the what helped create that sense of meaning. Across our discussion groups, several key themes emerged:

  • The opportunity to experience a place over an extended period of time– within a single visit or across multiple visits
  • The sense of agency/ownership/belonging/feeling of welcome individuals had within those places
  • A feeling of connection to a place’s history, their own experience within it, or with the people of that place

The ability of participants to experience a place through multiple senses, bring their own knowledge or experience to their understanding of a place, physically engage with or within a place, or recognize a feeling of peace (or danger), all add to the ways we find meaning or a sense of magic and wonder in a place.

From there we asked participants to identify what they came to understand about places which hold meaning for them, that a casual observer, or one who had not spent much time in the place would miss.  Here, the temporal experience of places came to the fore– how it changes during the day, with the seasons or over the years; how it evolves or adapts physically, in how it is used, and the meaning it holds for those who inhabit or care for the place.  Participants also recognized that much of the meaning a place has for them is a product of what they bring to the place, that there are multiple ways of experiencing the same place, and often unwritten rules which guide one’s conduct within it.

As a final point of discussion, we asked how students might gain that sense of meaning, or a deeper understanding of places within Milwaukee.  Here, we found clear agreement across the discussion groups– “Get out of the way”. Students need time and the freedom to experience and explore places on their own terms.  The meaning of a place can’t be proscribed for students, it needs to grow organically from their experience, knowledge, and understanding of that place.

We can however help set up the conditions that can allow that to happen:

  • Don’t fill or control every minute of a field trip or field experience, leave time for students to explore and experience the place you’ve brought them to on their own terms.
  • Build a classroom culture that welcomes reflection, understanding of the experience of others, self exploration, and a willingness to share ideas
  • Leverage the fact that each student comes with their own experience of the city and connections to different parts of it
  • Start with places students do know and care about, and let them explore outward from there
  • Allow students to engage with new places in the context of issues they care about

Participants recognize that curriculum, access, proximity, and time all pose constraints as we seek to engage students in building a deeper understanding and connection of places within Milwaukee. But there was also a hopeful thread of thought that looked to kindle a re-enchantment with the world for students and a recognition that one can find wonder and meaning within the most mundane places.  That starts with simply creating the opportunity and getting out of the way.

Thanks

A big thanks to all who were able to join us for the discussion, and especially our Featured Participants:

Lauren Instenes— Project Coordinator for the MKE Roots Project, Marquette University

Joseph Kaltenberg — MKE Parks Manager, City of Milwaukee – Department of Public Works

Arijit Sen — Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies, UW Milwaukee

Angela Vickio — Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Thanks also to MSOE’s STEM Center for hosting us.

Resources

We didn’t get much time to talk through Arijit Sen’s Field School project, but he did share several links to that work with us:

J.B Jackson’s work looking at ordinary landscapes was also mention. Here’s a link for further reading https://daily.jstor.org/j-b-jackson-and-the-ordinary-american-landscape/

 

 

Collab Lab 63: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs , ,

The ability of teachers and students to engage effectively in difficult conversations, across that gap or amongst peers is central to creating the kinds of opportunities we want for students. At a bare minimum, those skills are needed to offer and receive effective feedback on student’s work. They are even more important if we want to engage students (and teachers) on challenging topics or to drive change within their school or in the broader community. The centrality of those skills seemed like a good place to kick off our  9th season of Collab Labs.

On October 10th we gathered at UWM’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center for Collab Lab 63 and a discussion focused on Empowering All Voices. Our work for the evening engaged participants to map factors that allow all voices to participate in brave conversations.

The maps shown here were captured and included here unedited. The primary two goals of creating this experience for the attendees were to:

  • Discuss and reflect on what group members with different backgrounds but shared purpose consider relevant factors and how they relate and impact each other.
  • Reflect on how you would apply the insights generated to your own ‘self-management’ in a group setting with familiar and unfamiliar participants.

We did not explicitly ask attendees to consider a K12 setting with teacher-student(s) and teacher-teacher interactions. We are in the process of integrating these maps into our larger model, and will share that work in a subsequent post.

  • What do you see in the maps when you look a bit more closely? Are there commonalities that stand out to you?
  • What would be a question you might ask (one of the teams) to help connect some dots or further complete the map?

Thanks again to our Featured Participants:

Thanks also to Ben Trager from UWM’s Center for Student Experience & Talent for hosting us at UWM, and to his Ed Policy students who were a great addition to the conversation.

Join us on November 14th for Collab Lab 64: Place Based Engagement

Collab Lab 59: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs ,

After a break in January, our Collab Lab Series resumed last night with a session focused on dealing with setbacks and recognizing wins.

Challenges

Began the discussion with an inventory of the challenges and setbacks students face when they work together on open ended projects.  These challenges primarily revolve around:

Expectations

  • Focus on grades
  • Belief that their voice won’t matter
  • Opposing wants — freedom vs control
  • Expectations are unclear

An ability to deal with uncertainty

  • Lack of confidence
  • Being open to the idea that there is no one right answer 
  • Aversion to risk/failure

Communication & collaboration

  • Inability for team members to agree on a common approach
  • Ability to deal with personality conflicts within a team
  • Ability to give and receive constructive criticism
  • Lack of accountability
  • Lack of feedback

Project structure

  • Project lacks structure that would allow students to make progress
  • Space/time to iterate
  • Access to resources necessary to effectively take on the challenge

Skills 

  • Ability to arrive at a good definition/understanding of the problem at hand
  • Time management
  • Need for higher level thinking skills

Strategies

In our second round, our discussion shifted to look at strategies to help students address each of these challenges.

Expectations

  • Set clear expectations with examples
  • Set up an environment with clear expectations for communication, collaboration, willingness to learn from things that did not go as expected.

Dealing with uncertainty

  • Students have repeated opportunities to immerse themselves in the challenge and circle back with their teacher for input and guidance
  • Acknowledge big feelings to help understand that “failure” is not personal

Communication & collaboration

  • Understand the context of students life beyond school and what they may need to work effectively with peers
  • Small, frequent check-ins
  • Create time/space for purposeful reflection

Project Structure

  • Students are given a clear view of the process they will follow to arrive at a solution even if they can’t yet see where it might lead
  • Decompose challenge into smaller pieces
  • Structure challenges students to stretch at each step of the process, but those steps are within reach, and build on each other
  • Connect students with what they need when
  • Repeated opportunities to practice and develop skills within the context of the project

Skills

  • Both students and teachers are equipped with the skills they need/supported in their development of those skills
  • Skills required build on those already acquired

A Simple Tool

With this inventory in hand, we recounted the story of the Number Talks Quick Refence Card that was developed out of a project we did with K-12 teachers and UWM Math faculty.  That project supported teams of teachers who wanted to establish Number Talks as a regular practice in their elementary school classrooms. Though teachers could clearly see the value of the practice, it was something new, so they wanted something that could rely on to help keep them on the right path.  One of the teachers suggested a small card of reminders that should could hold and glance down at while working with students.  The card we developed includes three sections: Talk Moves (strategies), Probes (questions to ask), and Pats on the Back (signs that things are working). 

As the final exercise of the night, we asked each of our discussion groups to develop their own Quick Reference Cards for open ended projects.  Here’s what they came up with:

Group 1

Moves

  • Give yourself time
  • Accept “I don’t know”
  • Build personal connections
  • You’ve got this
  • Accept congratulations

Probes

  • Tell me more…
  • How might we…?

Pats on the Back

  • I was afraid to try this but I did anyway

  Group 2

Moves

  • Yes, and?
  • Build community
  • Set Goals
  • Normalize failure

Probes

  • What did we learn?
  • What is your why?
  • What makes you uncomfortable?
  • What do you bring to the team?
  • How might we…?

Pats on the Back

  • Unprompted reflection

Group 3

Moves

  • Are students in the right groups?
  • What does this student need?
  • How is my relationship with this student?

Probes

  • How will you define success?

Pats on the Back

  • Students are engaged
  • Students are gaining essential skills
  • Students give and receive feedback
  • Students get the feedback they need
  • Students move from “I” to “we”

Thanks again to our Featured Participants:

  • PJ Dever — Executive Director for Playworks in Wisconsin
  • Lana M. Minshew — Assistant Professor, Director of the Human-Centered Design Lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin
  • Nina Johnston — Program Manager of the Human-Centered Design Lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin

A big thanks also goes out to Anthony, Audrey, Connor, Olivia, & Madeline, Architecture students at UWM. They are joining us this semester for Collab Labs and other sessions we run at the STEM Center as part of service learning field experience for Arch 302. In another example of 1 + 1 = 3, The students gain a field experience as they look at the design of learning spaces (in this case the STEM Center), we get help setting things up and cleaning up after each session, and our Collab Lab participants get the perspective of 5 individuals not far removed from K-12 who find themselves navigating open-ended, collaborative, community-engaged projects.

Thanks also to MSOE’s STEM Center for hosting the Collab Lab Series, as well as the students from Pathways High School and Bradley Tech who joined in person/on Zoom.

Collab Lab 57: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

Following the Hero’s Journey theme of Collab Labs this season, our November session explored stepping out of the known world and dealing with uncertainty. Our discussion began with an exploration of the uncertainty participating teachers and students already deal with in school.  That set some context for the next round of conversations focused on fears/worries about engaging students in open-ended challenges.  We wrapped up the discussion with an inventory of strategies and practices teachers, students, and attendees from outside of K-12 have seen or use to manage uncertainty around projects — whether that is where the project will lead or how the team will get there.

This week we pulled those factors into a system map, connecting elements based on what we heard in the discussions. What’s striking, though not unexpected, is the importance of trust and open communication in all of this. It is what allows both teachers and students to take some risks, try something new, and be willing to accept and learn from efforts that don’t work out as hoped. 

You can view the system map here, and we welcome your thoughts and input on what else we might include, or how we might better repent the dynamics at play. Those of you who have explored the map produced from last seasons sessions focused on feelings of safety and affirmation at school, will recognize a number of familiar elements. Going forward, we’ll be looking at how we can merge or otherwise use these maps and what we hear in upcoming Collab Labs to paint a more complete picture of the forces at play when we look to offer students the hands-on community-engaged learning experiences they deserve.

…

Next up on our Hero’s Journey, we meet the mentors and helpers as we explore what it takes to support authentic work.  Join us on December 14th for Collab Lab 58.

Thanks again to our Featured Participants:

Thanks also to MSOE’s STEM Center for hosting the Collab Lab Series, as well as the students from Pathways High School and Bradley Tech who joined in person/on Zoom.

 

Collab Lab 56: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

For our 8th season of Collab Labs, we’re exploring how the lens of the Hero’s Journey can inform how we approach community-engaged project based learning, and what more we can offer students when we do so. Over the course of the 2023-24 season, each of our Collab Labs will focus on a different phase of the Hero’s Journey. We kicked things off last week with Collab Lab 56, a session focused on the call to adventure.

How do we motivate our students to take the first couple of steps on their own learning journey? How do we channel the enthusiasm of some students who clearly identify with a topic and want to set off in pursuit of the prize, bypassing what we as educators believe are essential knowledge and skills in the order we believe these ought to be learned?

What makes a call compelling for students?

We began our discussion with the question, “What makes a call compelling to students?” As attendees explored the conditions for getting students engaged in a big challenge they noted:

  • Authenticity of subject, intrinsic motivation
  • A teacher’s excitement & confidence
  • Proximal development
  • Involvement in ‘the process’
  • Confidence in the person leading the process >> proper guidance and support, constant work on trust and relationships
  • Align with student’s experience and expertise, attitudes and aptitudes (don’t set the student up for failure)
  • Culturally responsive and relevant
  • The end result will be tangible
  • (Appropriate) level of autonomy & power to choose the path that seems most interesting or rewarding

Additionally, much relies on (role modeling) a certain mindset:

  • Overcoming competing forces that may hold someone back
  • Failure is an opportunity to learn. “A bump in the road is not the road itself”

What has your experience been with creating compelling ‘call to adventure’ for your students?

What do educators and students need to commit to the journey?

With that inventory in place, we moved to a discussion of what needs to be in place for students (and their teachers) to commit to the journey.
On the student side, that includes:

  • Trusting relationships, respect, sense of belonging
  • Build an iterative experience that gets progressively more challenging
  • Create oral/written feedback opportunities that encourage engagement
  • Defined roles based on prior experience
  • Adjust composition of the learning space to reflect the work
  • Normalizing uncertainty
  • Being able to see your peers as resources
  • Learning how to co-create
  • Know and/or find yourself as a learner (EQ)
  • Develop understanding of what ‘commit’ means

Barriers for students fully participating in these challenges include:

  • Housing instability
  • Health issues, Food availability
  • May exist outside the school environment >> teacher less aware
  • Overall stability inside & outside the learning environment

For educators, the list includes:

  • Bring (or gain) personal experience with the journey you’re asking students to take on.
  • Professional development on relevant concepts, such as PBL, collaboration, etc., by experts >> those actually doing this work, from a ‘learner first’ perspective >> practical, hands on
  • Best practices that are share across schools and districts
  • A framework for designing and managing, similar to ‘design thinking’
  • Sustainable partnerships to 1) support student projects and 2) share resources
  • (how do you) develop community support for a different approach to learning
  • (time and energy to) Pursue grants to help support ‘extra’: field experiences, resources, PD, etc.
  • Admin support for taking risks with experiments.

If you are a teacher, how are you navigating the hurdles to offering student driven inquiry projects to your students?

In the discussion of barriers for students, several participants brought up a recent piece in the New York Times that noted that economic stability and integration of families, as well as higher levels of teacher pay in the US Defense Department’s schools were among key factors that allow those schools to outperform public school systems. You can find the article here. One caveat noted in the discussion– the focus of these schools is on a standardized curriculum with traditional models of instruction.

A special thanks for our featured guest, Andi Gomoll from Gomoll Research & Design who brought her extensive experience with understanding what motivates and engages users (customers) to the conversation. And, as always, we’re appreciative of MSOE for letting us make use of the NM Lab in the WE Energies STEM Center every month.

Up Next

Collab Lab 57: Dealing with Uncertainty Thursday November 9th, 5:30 to 8:30 pm at MSOE’s STEM Center

Actively using some form of PBL with your students and looking for ideas or encouragement from others? Consider joining your peers in the inspirED Community.

Collab Labs Return

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

We’ll be back at MSOE’s STEM Center on Thursday October 12th to kick off our 8th season of Collab Labs. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity build connections with individuals who share your passion to do more for students, exchange ideas with folks inside and outside of K-12, and explore opportunities to collaborate, this is the place to do so. If you are a student that would like to see your school value all that you can bring, take on real challenges, and build connections to the broader community, this is your place to.  Building off our experience with students in our April and May Collab Labs, we’re now extending a formal invite to middle and high school students who want to be part of the conversation.

Our discussion topic for October is Heeding the Call of the Student — where do we hear that want to go, how can create opportunities for their concerns and passions to drive a richer exploration of what you had hoped to cover anyway?  Collab Labs run 5:30 to 8:30 pm on the 2nd Thursday of each month October through May, except for January. There is no cost to attend, and beyond great people and great conversations, we provide food and drinks.  We look forward to seeing you there. 

 

 

Collab Lab 55: Recap & Notes

Pete Reynolds Blog, Collab Labs

How does mental health manifest itself in k12education? How is it compromised and what are the levers we may use to positively impact the learning culture for our students (and teachers etc.)

May is Mental Health Month.

It felt appropriate to continue the work our #CollabLab54 attendees had begun with a follow up conversation. So last Thursday, we hosted Collab Lab 55 to create a safe space for conversations about the factors that influences mental health negatively/positively for students, teachers and others, such as trust, empathy in education, difficult conversations etc..

Building on our first conversation in April, we gave our attendees a first draft of a model map of factors we collected together. Attendees at each table reviewed this map for accuracy and completeness using their particular perspective. They could focus on a specific area, review it as a particular stakeholder, etc. This was truly a ‘kitchen table conversation’ where people from different backgrounds, ages and experiences engaged in open dialog about what they experience every day. Together we identified how many of these factors are connected (but differently for teachers and students) and what we might do to break through the negative cycle many are experiencing.

You can find our updated mapping here: 

Where might this lead?
– Over the coming months, we’d like to see additional conversations taking place with people representing all stakeholders at the table
– We’re going to make our STEM Studio time available over the summer for teachers (and students) to participate in a student project design lab.
– we’d like see a project develop to add stories from students, teachers, parents to the map as illustrations of when culture ‘works’ to affirm students and build a positive culture of respect and collaboration in learning.

There are many more opportunities that present themselves from having a comprehensive mapping like this. We’ll be exploring those over the coming months. Curious about the map that’s is under development? Have an idea you’d like to explore to address youth mental health in education?

Since this was our final official Collab Lab of the 2022-23 school year, We want to thank Milwaukee School of Engineering for offering the use of the STEM Center this year (and again in the coming school year!), as well as Northwestern Mutual for sponsoring ‘our lab room’ in the STEM Center.

The Collab Lab formula keeps getting better every season. We’re grateful for all of our attendees who came out for one of the Thursday evening sessions. We look forward to seeing many of you again next season and can’t wait to hear what cool learning you are offering your students as a result of the conversations you’ve had.

Have a great summer!

2024-25 Collab Labs

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