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?
What becomes possible when we are brave enough to hear and support all voices in a classroom?
Last November, Collab Lab participants noted trust and open communication as key factors that allow both teachers and students to deal with uncertainty. Those same factors were also noted in Collab Lab 54 as key drivers of safety, affirmation for both teachers and students. We’ll kick of our 9th season of Collab Labs with a discussion focused on building trust and open communication– between students as well as between students and teachers.
Come share your experience, questions, and ideas. As always, you’ll be joined by peers and collaborators from K-12 higher education, industry, and the nonprofit community. If you work with or know of a student (7th grade and above) who would like to join the discussion, please extend the invitation.
Please note that in October we’ll be at UWM’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center. For the rest of the season we’ll be back at MSOE’s STEM Center.
Agenda
5:30 to 6:00 pm
Grab something to eat, meet some interesting, passionate people
6:00 to 6:15 pm
Welcome and introductions
6:15 to 8:00 pm
Let’s talk through some ideas
8:00 to 8:30 pm
Wrap up and next steps
Food and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided. There is no charge for participation but space is limited!
Featured Participants
Among others, you’ll have a chance to talk with:
Hannah Fox — Health Education Coordinator, Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers Hannah’s work within the Department of Environmental Health and Community Wellness focuses on helping children form a connection with nature and showing them how they can have a positive impact on their environment and in their community. Hannah’s professional interests include sustainability, cross-cultural collaboration, nature therapy, systems thinking, and planetary citizenship. Before starting at Sixteenth Street, she worked as a translator and taught English to international students and community members in the Netherlands, Brazil, and Germany.
Serina Jamison — Program Director, Future Urban Leaders Serina is the program director for Future Urban Leaders, a non-profit providing leadership and enrichment opportunities for Black students in Milwaukee to help close the opportunity gap. She is also an experienced educator and leader with over a decade of advancing education equity and student success. She holds Master’s degrees in Education Policy & Leadership and English from Marquette University. As a former Dean of Culture at Pathways High School in Milwaukee, she fostered a community focused on authentic relationships, equity, and social justice.
Serina has taught rhetoric and civil rights courses at Marquette University and developed curriculum as an adjunct instructor at Alverno College. Her work as a teacher coach and English instructor emphasized literacy, equity, and discernment. She is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, facilitating core identity sessions and promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.
Yesi Pérez — Neighborhood Revitalization Project Manager, Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers
Yesi is a graduate of Marquette University, where she received a B.A.in Political Science, with a focus in Law and Policies, as well as a minor in Studio Art from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. As a graduate of the Burke Scholar Program, Yesi spent her four years as an undergrad advocating for social justice among the many sectors in the Milwaukee community.
As the Neighborhood Revitalization Project Manager in the Department of Environmental Health and Community Wellness, Yesi is able to apply the knowledge she gained from her service in the Milwaukee community, continuing to build trusting relationships between community members and organizations, so that the neighborhood may be heard, healed, and empowered in creative ways. Yesi works to collaborate with various project partners to implement initiatives that seek to improve the built and natural environment at the neighborhood scale, to enhance the lives of those who live, learn, work and play throughout our built and natural environments.
Chris Willey — Director of Technology, Islands of Brilliance At Islands of Brilliance, Chris engages neurodivergent individuals with creative technologies. His work revolves around developing Digital Academy programs for the 14+ community, leading a team of Creative Technologists, and supporting community upskilling efforts.
Chris has a mission is to make the education revolution irresistible. He is a trailblazer in teaching and learning, focusing on emerging creative technologies. Drawing inspiration from the metaphor of gardening, he cultivates a teaching philosophy that centers around fostering growth, nurturing creative curiosity by building resource-rich learning environments, and emphasizing the process.
Chris is an Adobe Creative Innovator. He gets to collaborate with a distinguished community of creative educators on a global scale with the sole purpose of generating lifelong learners. With over a decade of teaching at the college level, his expertise spans digital art, digital painting, animation, audio/video production, 3D modeling, and game engines.
Collab Lab Sprints
If you want a jump start on putting ideas from the Collab Lab into practice, join us for a Collab Lab Sprint. We’ll kick off the first of these mini projects on Monday October 7th with a four week sprint focused on brave conversations. Over the course of the sprint we will give you the framework for short exercises you can run with your students. A check-in call each week with us and peers participating in the sprint will give you the chance to share what’s working, and where you have questions.
You took on new challenges this year. What possibilities can you now see?
Season 8/Collab Lab 62
We’re moving to UWM for our final Collab Lab of the season to host the discussion as part of UWM’s Experiential Learning Day. Our discussion will celebrate the work of students, teachers, and partners and look forward to what we now see as possible. Bring something to show off, stories to share, and, if you are up for it, the next adventure you have planned.
We’ll be meeting on campus at UWM’s Center for Student Experience and Talent (SET). We’ve worked with SET over the past two years to place close to 300 architecture students in service learning positions with area schools. The Collab Lab will follow SET’s Presentation of Learning earlier in the afternoon where we will join a panel discussion on the project.
As always, you’ll be joined by peers and collaborators from K-12 higher education, industry, and the nonprofit community. If you work with or know of a student who would like to join the discussion, please extend the invitation.
Agenda
5:30 to 6:00 pm
Grab something to eat, meet some interesting, passionate people
6:00 to 6:15 pm
Welcome and introductions
6:15 to 8:00 pm
Let’s talk through some ideas
8:00 to 8:30 pm
Wrap up and next steps
Food and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided. There is no charge for participation but space is limited!
Where do the voices of students call you to take them?
What do you hear that points to a path where their concerns and passions can drive a richer exploration of what you had hoped to cover anyway?
Season 8/Collab Lab 56
Join us as we kick off our 8th season of Collab Labs with a discussion focused on the value of elevating student voice, and what might unfold when we do so. As always, you’ll be joined by peers and collaborators from K-12 higher education, industry, and the nonprofit community.
The contributions of middle and high school students at our last two Collab Labs of Season 7 added a new dimension to the conversations. In light of that we invite the participation of students in grade 7 and above (when accompanied by an adult) at each of our sessions this year. If you work with or know of a student who would like to join the discussion please extend the invitation
Agenda
5:30 to 6:00 pm
Grab something to eat, meet some interesting, passionate people
6:00 to 6:15 pm
Welcome and introductions
6:15 to 8:00 pm
Let’s talk through some ideas
8:00 to 8:30 pm
Wrap up and next steps
Food and non-alcoholic beverages will be provided. There is no charge for participation but space is limited!
Featured Participants
Stay tuned, we’re lining up a great group of Featured Participants you’ll want to have a chance to meet.
Collab Lab 51 attendees explored the hopes and fears attendees commonly express having when it comes to letting students drive the issues that are the focus of their learning.
What do we hope for when we offer students the opportunity to pursue issues they are passionate about?
What fears might hold us back from doing so?
Hopes
Across the discussion groups we heard a number of common themes among the hopes that were expressed — that students feel heard, they are motivated and engaged in work that is meaningful to them, they have the opportunity to discover what it is that they do care about, that the work allows them to build the skills, confidence, and empathy to take on more complex challenges.
We also heard hopes for what that process could look like — that students have a chance to iterate and learn from missteps along the way, that we are able to design and support project based learning experience effectively, with scaffolding in place that allows students to take on the work, that teachers are equipped and supported as they do this work with students. The overarching paradigm for participants is that student driven issues would drive the process of project based learning: allowing students to discover their passions and to let those passions drive their education.
Fears
Moving forward to create opportunities for student driven work won’t happen if we don’t recognize and address the fears that hold us back as teachers.
Chief among those is that a lack of structure on an open ended project could lead to chaos, with some students left behind. Our participants also worry school or district leadership won’t recognize what’s going on in the classroom as productive learning, that it deviates from curriculum, that we won’t hit standards, and don’t have the right tools to evaluate student learning progress. Other fears center on the challenges we might offer students — what if the topic fails to engage them, we don’t have the time or support to pull it off, or are blocked by competing curriculum demands.
Participants also noted fears students themselves might have — how they will know if they are making progress, that they won’t get “the right answer”, that it feels weird to take on work that is by nature open-ended.
Next Steps
Our final question of the evening focused on what one might do in the next 30 days to push things forward. For our participants, the key to moving forward is building the support to take some risks and align resources that can both support and inspire students in their work. That’s the hard work that teachers find difficult to navigate individually.
The inspirEd Community recently established a Collab Lab group to explore these and other topics in a community setting. Consider joining the Community if this sounds like something that could help you in your teaching.
Acknowledgements
We are especially grateful to our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:
What becomes possible when we are brave enough to hear and support all voices in a classroom?
