Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Links for 2012-06-01 [del.icio.us]

2012-06-02T00:00:00-07:00

Feeling of Knowing in Memory and Problem Solving
How to recognise when a task is worth stopping in order to let an insight into your mind
Analogical Problem Solving
Our basic experimental procedure was to provide subjects with a story analogy, describing a problem and its solution, and then to observe how subjects used the analogy in solving a subsequent target problem. The target problem was Duncker's (1945) "radiation problem," which in our experiments was stated as follows.
Uninhibited imaginations: Creativity in ADHD
ADHD individuals outperformed non-ADHD individuals on the Unusual Uses Task, but performed worse than non-ADHD on the Remote Associates Test and the semantic IOR task.
Reforming Chinese Education: What China Is Trying to Learn from America | Solutions
Some educators have come to the conclusion that China’s outstanding academic success, as indicated by test scores, may be what is holding it back. Now, China is searching for better education models elsewhere.
When Should Schools Start in the morning? | A Blog Around The Clock, Scientific American Blog Network
More and more school districts around the country, especially in more enlightened and progressive areas, are heeding the science and making a rational decision to follow the science and adjust the school-start times accordingly. Instead of forcing teenagers to wake up at their biological midnight (circa 6am) to go to school, where invariably they sleep through the first two morning classes, more and more schools are adopting the reverse busing schedule: elementary schools first (around 7:50am), middle schools next (around 8:20am) and high schools last (around 8:50am). I hope all schools around the country eventually adopt this schedule and quit torturing the teens and then blaming the teens for sleeping in class and making bad grades.
From Zzzz's To A's - Adolescents And Sleep | Inside The Teenage Brain | FRONTLINE | PBS
The researchers found that the biological clock opposed the sleep-wakefulness cycle at certain points of the day and at certain ages. It kept people awake when they were very tired. Just before puberty, that internal clock helped teens stay alert at night when they should have been falling asleep. The researchers called this a "phase-delay."
Finland's schools flourish in freedom and flexibility | World news | The Guardian
In Finland, the state decides what should be taught, but not how. If they like, teachers can take their children outside for "wood mathematics" – where they go into the nearest patch of forest and learn to add and subtract by counting twigs or stones in the open air. A typical lesson compresses several disciplines into one; in one class, children who don't speak Finnish as their first language are taught to identify and name the parts of a mouse ("ears", "whiskers", "tail") and then mark on a chalk outline of the country where the animal lives. It's a literacy lesson, but biology and geography as well.
Coolest Sleeping pods for some serious napping job : Designbuzz
The business of sleep: Short but intense! - Bene Office Furniture
MetroNaps - ABC News. - YouTube

Links for 2012-05-31 [del.icio.us]

2012-06-01T00:00:00-07:00

Pluralistic ignorance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance, a term coined by Daniel Katz and Floyd H. Allport in 1931,[1] describes "a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but assume (incorrectly) that most others accept it...It is, in Krech and Crutchfield’s (1948, pp. 388–89) words, the situation where 'no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.'".[2] This, in turn, provides support for a norm that may be, in fact, disliked by most people.
The Best Social Networks for Kids Under 13 | Techland | TIME.com

Links for 2012-05-30 [del.icio.us]

2012-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

swissmiss | Self-Respect
Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. - Joan Didion
Readlists
What’s a Readlist? A group of web pages—articles, recipes, course materials, anything—bundled into an e-book you can send to your Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.
swissmiss | in.gredients
In.gredients is a new package-free grocery store that is opening in Austin, Texas in the Summer of 2012. Its mission as the US’s first zero-waste, package-free grocery store will support local businesses and farmers, will sell based on seasonal rhythms of farming, will avoid processed foods, will reduce transportation costs and pollution, and will encourage customers to bring their own reusable containers.
swissmiss | Complaining
“Complaining is stupid. Either act or forget.” - Stefan Sagmeister
Twitter / SOTScleveland: A 'Done Wall' in progress.
A 'Done Wall' in progress. @ewanmcintosh kids finding so useful in organizing thoughts. pic.twitter.com/ZNtH5Tv4
Architecture for Humanity
International Education Statistics: Primary school attendance in Nigeria
International Education Statistics: Secondary school attendance in Nigeria
International Education Statistics: Age and level of education in Nigeria

Links for 2012-05-29 [del.icio.us]

2012-05-30T00:00:00-07:00

Tears, Tantrums & Tech 6: Keep It Simple, Stupid [Video] - The Next Web
The art of coping with loads of advice: immerse first, synthesise then have your ideas.
Canton Arms - Stockwell SW8 - Restaurant Review - Time Out London
Student Designed Learning Spaces | kingscc.it
Our Year 12 Graphics students recently had a project to produce plans for a proposed refurbishment of our middle school classrooms. These students have developed the plans on their student laptops using Archicad and Artlantis then produced virtual tours of the proposed spaces for our recent open night. Visitors where able to then see the spaces proposed refurbishment for 2013.

Links for 2012-05-17 [del.icio.us]

2012-05-18T00:00:00-07:00

Born Creative | Demos | Publications
In a series of essays Born Creative brings together the experiences of creative practices in early years education, to show the importance of cultures, environments and networks in the enrichment of the early years learning and interrogates the role of leaders, policy and parents in creating them.
Phil Libin of Evernote, on Its Unusual Corporate Culture - NYTimes.com
Workplaces of the future?
Clay Shirky on the relationship between physical space and creativity - Boing Boing
Audio slide show: Pullman porter and family patriarch - latimes.com
At 100, Lee Wesley Gibson is nearly the oldest surviving former Pullman porter. He is one of thousands of African Americans whose lives were transformed by working for Union Pacific Railroad. Gibson was married to his wife, Beatrice, for 76 years until she died in 2004.

Links for 2012-05-15 [del.icio.us]

2012-05-16T00:00:00-07:00

iOS Fonts

Links for 2012-05-14 [del.icio.us]

2012-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

How GM Is Saving Cash Using Legos As A Data Viz Tool | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
But beyond their transparency, there may be a bigger advantage to Legos: they’re also fun. By mapping real world problems to an icon of our youth, each challenge must be approached with an inherent playfulness. And because Legos are, by their very nature, expected to be rebuilt, patterns don’t appear stuck in stone--or just as bad--printed in ink. Now, if only we could get the Lego pirate ship or a lunar rover in the mix, we’d really have something.
Bauhaus: Art as Life – review | Art and design | guardian.co.uk
There is a lesson here about much contemporary art education: the lack of common purpose, the overweening bureaucracy, the disillusionment and grasping for fees, the box-ticking lostness of so much of it. The Bauhaus had a sense of common purpose and shared ideas, of arguments that meant something, of making things up as you go along. And so much that it gave us was practical, and a delight to the eye.
NeverSeconds
School dinner blog by a pupil
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best... HTML and JavaScript.
WIRED Business Conference 2012
Excellent brief visual notes on the future, technology and innovation

Teaching is demanding: Fatigued and Dissatisfied or Fatigued But Satisfied?

2012-03-23T13:04:22+00:00

While sitting in on a seminar on Mental Toughness as a teachable, as well as genetic, attribute, I came across the work of Dutch researcher Nico Van Yperen. Being mentally tough means that we take control of our futures, we enjoy challenges as opportunities rather than threats, and we have deep involvement in meeting our own, personal goals. But if you're a leader, your actions can also be responsible for helping or hindering others' capacity to have mental toughness:

Van Yperen believes it is possible to influence achievement orientation. Generally, one's environment will shape these choices. For example, work settings with a compensation system that identifies and rewards individual performance will encourage a performance orientation.

One that rewards groups of people equitably encourages a mastery orientation.

Managers' comments drawing attention to the task encourage mastery. Comments comparing individuals encourage a performance orientation.

Managers who display their own pleasure when performing the same tasks as their people, encourage mastery. Those who don't, encourage a performance orientation.

Hard working, effective employees are a valuable asset we'd like to preserve. Helping them be satisfied in their work by encouraging a mastery achievement orientation is one way to do it.

Pic from DVids

Design Thinking: not just for Design and Technology class

2012-03-12T16:35:03+00:00

Design Thinking father Tim Brown blogged a while ago this great pleading from some of Britain's best designers and design educators for Government and schools to heighten the importance of design, technology, design thinking and prototyping skills through the vehicle of engineering subjects such as design and technology. It's a great clip, with many great reasonings as to why making learning concrete makes so much sense.

However, as impatient as I ever am, it's not enough.

Design thinking - learning how to scope out and solve problems within seemingly vast areas of knowledge and experience - is something I believe belongs as a framework across the curriculum. It's as core a skill as literacy and numeracy, but a lot less well understood by teachers outside the design technology world. It needs the time, attention and thinking power of educators to be understood as a framework that contains so many of what we already know are powerful learning and teaching strategies for student improvement.

With NoTosh, I've been fortunate to foster and see the beginnings of this whole-school approach to design thinking in schools around the world, with our partners in the UK, US, Australia and the Far East. The Design Thinking School is taking hold in many areas, and challenging the status quo in some painful ways in others.

But challenging the status quo, that content cannot be covered unless a teacher or day-by-day curriculum is 'delivering' it, is what we're all about. And, school by school, that sea change - design thinking throughout the school, not just in the design technology class - is happening.

Clair 2012: Le design thinking, du studio à la classe

2012-02-25T19:17:38+00:00

In early February I presented, in French, a 90 minute story about how design thinking and the educational worlds of formative assessment, school building, curriculum and assessment strategy are all bound together.

I wanted to show to the audience at Clair 2012 in New Brunswick, Canada, what can happen when these apparently unrelated worlds of technology startups, product design and formal education are bound together by leaders with foresight and an understanding of the detail and complexity of learning, amazing learning opportunities can happen.

It was a joy to speak about the complexity of learning and teaching, with the time and audience who got it - it was, after all, New Brunswick teachers that taught me how to really teach through their French immersion, project-led pedagogy.

It's the first time I've ever had a standing ovation for a talk, especially one that was 90 minutes and between opportunities for the audience to drink wine and eat cheese. I was taken aback by that. And even more humbled by the words from Stephen Downes, who also braved his fears of keynoting en français at the event:

I've had my criticisms of Ewan McIntosh in the past and I will no doubt have my criticisms of him in the future. But they will be a bit tempered from now on, I think. Ewan McIntosh weaved what can only be called magic at the conference I attended at Clair 2012, in northern New Brunswick. It wasn't simply because his French is easier to follow than his English ;) - he wove a tapestry of ideas together talking about what it is that will draw out students, interest them, engage them, and get them to be more than just followers of orders. It was one of the best presentations I've even seen - visually beautiful, low-keyed, personal and engaging. He has clearly learned a lot from his work with TED, but also, with 90 minutes to work with, the talk was never rush, never forced, and, in the end, exactly the right length. He received a standing ovation at the end, very much (to my observation) a rarity at education conferences. Well deserved.

I think part of it was to do with speaking French, but not because I was making an effort to speak it or anything, more that as a result of speaking my second language in an unfamiliar context I took extra care, and extra time from the normal 45 minute keynote sprint, to weave the complexities of our learning world in a simple way.

It was great fun, and I'm grateful to Roberto Gauvin, the Principal teacher at Clair's learning centre, for the opportunity to come through the metre-thick snow and -30˚C freeze to work alongside such a dedicated group of franco-canadian educators.

You can download a copy of the talk from the Clair 2012 website (right click/control click and select "Save As..."). Better still, you can see the actions stemming from it and other talks when you dip into the manifesto for change, the DeCLAIRation, a pragmatic document for change based on what we all heard from the four speakers and our many corridor conversations.

How To Start An Education Revolution

Part of the manifesto is an ongoing Revolutionary Google Doc, developed in a furiously productive 50 minute BarCamp session that I led on Starting A Revolution. I've been reading Gene Sharpe's work on real, political revolutions, and wanted to produce a live, step-by-step guide to education revolution, much along the same lines:

This growing document is designed by 100 educators who gave up a Saturday morning in a gym in Clair, to provide links to research that disprove the key naysayer arguments for curricular, assessment and pedagogical change in the classroom. Well, it's a dream document for a keynoter, even one with 90 minutes, because the Saturday morning exercise allowed us to revisit and question all those things we had heard from the keynoters through two days of conference, and back up our views with research and leading practice, rather than anecdotes.

It's open until March 11th for changes, and then we're going to use it to create change in the Francophone and, with some translation, the Anglophone worlds of education, by create a copy that can be sent to every politician and Principal we know.

A competence-based curriculum: RSA Opening Minds workshops

2012-02-14T14:20:57+00:00

RSA Opening Minds promotes innovative and integrated ways of thinking about teaching and learning. It helps students to develop the skills they need to be creative, resilient learners, citizens and employees of the 21st century by making its starting point not school subjects, but competences students require to find their place in society.

To help teachers and principals find out more about the curriculum, and how to get involved, the RSA are holding an event this March 3rd, covering off the key questions and offered a chance to see how a competence-based curriculum works in practice.

As well as some motivating keynotes, the day is largely made up of schools leading practical workshops and discussions about how to move to a competence-based curriculum. It's a cheap day's worth of inspiration and expertise (and as a member of the Board of Trustees I encourage you to go or follow the @rsaopeningminds Twitter account; you can also download the Opening Minds Conference 2012 brochure):

Kingsbridge Community College, Devon, will explain the competence framework and ethos of Opening Minds, how to develop and implement a curriculum and the outcomes and impacts it has had for one designated Training School.
Cardinal Heenan High School, Liverpool will explain why one school decided to apply to become an RSA Opening Minds accredited school, their experiences of developing a curriculum and how they have been supported by a Training School.
Whitley Academy, Coventry will deliver a practical session about how to develop and implement an Opening Minds curriculum. The session will cover top tips based on lessons learned and about the outcomes and impacts for the school, teachers and pupils.
Wood End Park School, Hillingdon, will share the experience of a primary school who are developing and delivering an Opening Minds curriculum and their plans for the future.
St John’s School, and Easton Royal Community Primary School, Marlborough will focus on the ways Opening Minds is being used to support pupils through the transition from primary to secondary school.
Oasis Academy, Enfield, reveal the challenges for developing Opening Minds and how can these be overcome to ensure schools deliver high quality teaching and learning.
You can find out about the benefits of action research and how the Opening Minds schools are harnessing these to share learning and best practice.
The RSA Academy and Capital City Academy will ask: how do you assess competence development and what are the challenges? Also hear how schools are working together to identify the most effective means of assessment.
The RSA Academy will also explain the Opening Minds curriculum and practice that the RSA Academy use at KS4 and you can find out about the Diploma they are developing.

Do you teach from the bandstand?

2012-02-08T23:35:00+00:00

Do you have a plan that you stick with, no matter what? Do you have a plan at all? Do you have a plan that you're prepared to give up totally when a student proposes something, anything, interesting? Are you patient, listening to what's going on, allowing yourself to be pulled, and slick enough (skilled enough?) to react and create something magical out of your box to make a lesson sing?

When we're working with our Design Thinking Schools the main challenge that comes up, at the beginning at least, is the desire of educators to forward plan to the extent that improvisations - or mistakes - can't be seized upon to create something much better than the plan the teacher had written, and probably stayed up until 11pm on Sunday night writing.

Stefon Harris explains in his TED Talk how this over reliance on the plan is, in jazz, a form of musical bullying. As someone who, in his early twenties, almost gave it all up to be a big band drummer, I know exactly what he means, and I know how it feels when 17 other musicians move their plan to accommodate for another's idea.

But I can also picture it in the classroom, where a "gift" is offered up by a students' question (or a student's lack of understanding) but isn't built upon by the teacher. Who or what are you going to allow to improvise and shift your plan today?

Stop ping pong questioning. Try basketball instead

2012-02-08T19:28:46+00:00

A little run of posts inspired by my favourite educationalist of the past decade, Dylan Wiliam. He's the chap that explained formative assessment to me in twelve pages flat, and changed my practice forever.

In this two-minute clip he pleads with us to move away from IRE questioning (Initiate a question to the class, Response comes from one child, Evaluation comes from the teacher ["that's right", "interesting answer" etc etc). He describes this form of questioning as table tennis question and answer, where all questioning, thought, wisdom and learning revolve around the teacher, and occupy just one child at a time. Back and forth, back and forth...

He asks us not to do table tennis Q&A - play basketball instead. Pose a question, pause, ask another kid to evaluate the answer child one gave, and ask a third for an explanation of how and why that's right or wrong.

Finally, don't allow hands to go up to give an answer - your students results will be worse than if they do otherwise. Instead, the teacher can encourage certain students to take part in this three-way questioning activity, and work over time to get them playing question basketball for themselves.

Making a creativity-friendly school timetable

2012-02-02T08:08:30+00:00

School timetables work for so few people, yet it's only a few daring souls that seem to be prepared to change them. A new piece of research adds to the evidence that more flexibility is required to make the most of the latent creativity in our learners and teachers.

At NoTosh we're working with several schools on reshaping their school timetables to create space for teachers and students to conference, one-on-one, on how the day and/or week will look for each student, personalising content and the way learning will be undertaken. We've also been taken with trying to map the energy levels of students and staff to better shape the overall day, discovering, for example, in one school that no-one was fit for learning well first thing on a Monday (quelle surprise), and suggesting we should start and end the day later.

Last night, via Mike Press, I found a new piece of research showing a counterintuitive effect of energy on creativity: the less fresh you are the better it is for your ability to think and act creatively:

"...Tasks involving creativity might benefit from a nonoptimal time of day.” What this means in everyday language is that morning people should try to solve problems requiring creative thought in the late afternoon, and evening people should undertake them in the morning.

So, where an entire school is fatigued first thing on a Monday is where people should be engaged in creative problem-finding projects, perhaps, rather than in learning the core content elements that might act as a foundation for some project work.

This is counterintuitive to many who believe that when we're fresh and full of energy we should invest our efforts in our "best" work - if you want to approach it creatively, it might be best to approach it when you're feeling less than your best.

Invest Time To Make Time

2012-01-31T15:29:15+00:00

One of our proudest long-term Design Thinking School programmes is taking place in Sydney, Australia, with MLC School. Back in November we kicked off a programme of pedagogical change, to inform a new school bulding, with an intensive design thinking workshop. More on that soon over on the NoTosh site.

It has already led to a different type of language being used in the school: refreshingly, instead of "yes, but", we are now hearing "what if..." and "so what, who cares..." as the key questions asked around policy ideas and pedagogy.

But the biggest challenge that came through our Building Blocks challenge, sourcing the main blocks to change, was Time (or the lack of it). You can see time forming as the key concern in the middle of this timelapse of the process:

Tom and I traded a few ideas based on the way we work, harnessing GTD, the Done Wall and a vision founded on fuzzy goals that allows us to achieve a lot without getting bogged down too much in adminstering that creativity.

A throwaway phrase in one exercise, though, was the notion that, at the end of the day, we have to invest time to make time. James, one of our star music teachers, explains on his blog:

"INVEST TIME TO MAKE TIME". This motto, which I have since repeated to myself daily, has been my ticket to FREEDOM. It has given me the courage to change the way I do things as it has taken the guilt and anxiety away from "wasting" time in class (and on my own at my desk) to plan topics and projects WITH my students.

Yes, I may spend two entire lessons with my students planning a learning project, but the earnings on this relatively small investment are so high (and not only time wise). I get through more topics in a shorter amount of time (tick, tick, tick goes my virtual pen on my syllabus document), the students are more engaged and consequently put MORE time and effort themselves into the project.

From the workshop I have also held quite tightly onto... [the] image of the curriculum being like a 3D matrix...: instead of working through our syllabus in a linear manner, we could visualise all the student outcomes in a three-dimensional matrix and tick them off at different points in time as the students meet them through their various projects. This is also a great way to help us see that interdisciplinary teaching through project based learning is DOABLE.

So, INVEST TIME TO MAKE TIME... in any area of your life, really.

Photo from Noukka Signe

Why does innovation in education take so long? Field, Habitus, Identity - that's why

2012-01-23T17:21:51+00:00

I spend my life convincing educators to do things differently. Of late, we've taken the policy at NoTosh of not working with a district or school unless the Principal, the Head Honcho, the Boss is in the room participating. Why? Because the Field, Habitus and Identity developed by all the teachers in the room will provide the eventual block to any change happening.

Pierre Bourdieu's view of the world, set up nicely to help you see why you always need to have a whole-school approach to innovation, is nicely summed up in this research paper pdf, in a succinct three pages.

The Field is where what we're informed by research as being good learning and teaching is thrown out in the hubbub and busy-ness of the school day: "Forget what they tell you about teaching at Uni - this is where you'll find out how to really teach." To get over this, the whole field needs to experience the changes being proposed to remove the pressure of the field to descend to lowest common denominator.

The lowest common denominator in the field? Every time? Yes - because the Habitus of the people in the field is formed from the strong experiences of learning at school, the thirteen years compulsory schooling that shapes our inner understanding of what a successfully run classroom or school looks like. When we enter the classroom again, in our twenties, thirties or forties, it is this strong visual (and odoursome) memory that kicks back in, and we revert to the way we were taught. This is why it's important to always know what your happiest and least happy memories were at school, and work out ways to emulate the former and change the latter.

Finally, the Identity of a teacher is formed from this collective mix of historical habitus and current day field - individual responsibility for development within the collective responsibility for change as a whole school is the only way to adapt for the long-haul.

Thanks to Derek Robertson for the push over to Bourdieu this morning, while I toiled with change at the EU workshop on harnessing digital games for inclusion and empowerment of the disengaged, pictured above.

Design Thinking 2: Immersion - don't give students a problem to solve...

2012-01-16T18:11:05+00:00

The Future Belongs To The Curious - so says this compelling clip passed on by Christian Long. But so say the scores of teachers with whom we work, when we suggest to them that the average 13 years of compulsory schooling content can be covered, easily, in less than 13 years time if, in fact, students choose what they cover, and when.

This is the core tenet of the first phase of The Design Thinking School: Immersion.

When we began working with our schools in Brisbane, we explained Immersion like this:

The first phase of design thinking does not take one fifth of the time: immersion might take up to 70% of the process, as great observations can lead quickly to great ideas for solving real problems. It's a process of opening up opportunities to explore, not shutting them down. This is where, from a teacher's perspective, all control sometimes feels lost as students explore unexpected tangents. The trick is keeping out of the way, and letting students justify to themselves and to others why some tangents are worth exploring and others less so.

Immersion: observation and empathy with others

The act of just observing what goes on in the world is one that most adults struggle with: we want to jump to inferences and even come up with ideas to problems that we've perceived. But there's only one way to spot a great problem: find it through speaking with people, observing their "thoughtless actions", as Jane Fulton Suri puts it, noticing the small things that don't work, and the band-aid solutions people have to make the world around them work better. It's in these observations, and the empathetic process of putting yourselves in their shoes, that interesting problems no-one has solved, and questions to which no-one (yet) knows the answers, will emerge.

Observations might be made around a general theme or a more specific challenge (often framed in the "How might we…?" or "What would happen if…?" vein). The teacher's job with his or her students, much like the client working with creative design agency, is to negotiate the initial trigger of research, the brief, which needs to be

1. open-ended enough not to suggest a pre-existing bias or answer to be second-guessed

2. epic enough to be worth solving or working out (it needs to pass the "so what?" test of your average 14 year old, regardless of the age group of children working on the challenge)

3. negotiated enough to allow the students to find interesting tangents to explore, but the teacher to retrospectively see how curricular goals can be matched with their learning.

Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, puts it this way:

"The key of a design thinking structure is enough flexibility with enough specificity to ground its ideas in the lives of their intended beneficiaries."

How about these for starters?

What would happen if we cut down the last tree?

What would happen if humans became extinct?

How might we create a carbon zero school?

How does an iPad know where it is?

What would happen if there were no religions?

How might we solve a problem that will improve the lives of 100 people in our local community?

You'll notice that these are not framed as problems, but rather generative challenges out of which many problems could be found. It is these subsequent problems that students will set out to solve. This means that in a class of 30 students, working in groups of three, four or five, you could end up with 10 different problems being solved within the same initial challenge. Or, you might find students being drawn to one problem in particular.

What they did with this process opened up their eyes to a much more enrichening curriculum approach than anything that had been 'carefully' planned by the teacher. Students didn't just cover what needed covered - they went up and over that limit to surpass the core curriculum, putting it in context, and bringing in other, new and existing content that made their project ideas work.

The key to success, and the differentiator compared to other problem-based learning approaches? Students, not teachers, work out the challenge they want to solve.

This key idea is what I explored in my TEDxLondon talk on the problem finders:

Now you can see for yourself how this plays out in the classroom in the video produced by the Brisbane Catholic Education Office.

Tom: At Mount Vernon School in the United States, as part of the ITU Telecom World conference that we helped to reinvent with the participation of 10,000 young people through design thinking, one picture sticks in my mind. As part of the empathy phase young students, no more than six or seven years old, carried water, large canisters of water, from home to school. They had pain on their faces, sweat pouring down their cheeks. All this to better understand what it's like. Because they did that, they thought up better products, through a broader range of solutions.

Ewan: It's hard to teach that empathy/observation part. Teachers want to cover what they feel they want to cover. But empathy and observation is going to go beyond what you need to cover in any six week period, because this isn't a six week project. It's a way of working, a way of learning that frees up so much time later in the year or in the child's school career, with enough cooperation between schools. I wonder whether this is why 3-18 schools, independent mostly, are able to better understand the potential time saving and the ability to reduce the repetition most school students have to put up with.

Cassie: The immersion stage is a very difficult stage. It's not about generating a solution, drawing in a sketchbook, or Googling ideas or finding information. It's about finding emotions, people's feelings, finding empathy for the problem.

Miriam: When we were in that immersion stage and we were really trying to create that empathy, we were trying to get out of the students their feelings, what they thought about it and then what action can we take to be better? It was sort of empowering to them to see that they can do something about it. It's not just your teachers, your parents your school, you can actually go out there and do something about it.