Teachers As Designers
Yesterday, I started my day by spending time at Fort Calgary. Fort Calgary is the exact location where the city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada started. The fort, originally name Fort Briseboise, was built as the post for the North-West Mounted Police in 1875. Then when the railroad came west, Calgary began to grow and the rest is history.
The location was chosen because of of the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. In fact Calgary got its name because of being a location of a great water source. Calgary is named after Calgary Bay on the Isle of Mull, Scotland. It was originally thought to mean “clear running water” but has since been defined as “bay farm,”
After this learning time, I was back over at the 2019 International Research Conference discussing teachers as designers and leaders at Mount Royal University. We were discussing the Double Diamond Design Approach pictured here:
With this model we must first find the right problem or topic. Then we use convergence to bring the topics, partners, and education entities together to decide subject matter and activities and then divergence to get the day-to-day pedagogy developed. As we discussed the model, I got to thinking about Fort Calgary and what a great tool this historic site could be for education. The site certainly has needs for support and volunteerism. Therefore, the schools could:
- Determine needs of Fort Calgary
- Determine what needs could be supported by the education entity
- Use convergence to bring all parties in the partnership to determine the scope of the project and learning
- Finally, use divergence to break the learning and work down into the day-to-day bites
We don’t want people who just do school. We must figure out how we teach and facilitate learning with our students by radically collaborating in our communities. Additionally, we must make sure our very traditional school leaders recognize the great facilitation of learning this radical collaboration creates. We must shift from the compliance factory model of school to education as facilitation of learning. We do this by connecting and collaborating, which enables us to be adaptive, intertwined, interactive, and diverse. How about you? Are you leading learning, or just doing school?
Byron's Babbles 
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