The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

English courses often rely upon analytical writing assignments to engage students in deep thinking about literature, but how can we devise projects that develop imaginative problem-solving skills beyond the analysis of language? In this session, we will focus on a project in our ninth-grade English class, where students engage tenets of the Design Thinking process to respond to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. With the eventual goal of creating their own monsters, students interview designers and artists within the world of monstrosity while they explore their interpretations of the text and consider the larger implications of Shelley’s work. Through exploring this project and several student exemplars, participants will consider how the Design Thinking process can shift some of the work of literature-based projects and the English classroom toward a wider scope of skill development.

At Nueva, we believe that Design Thinking is not simply a subject for students to learn or a process to follow. Rather, it is a mindset for students to cultivate, a way to approach challenges in one's life and beyond, as well as a lens through which to view our world. In this overview, Innovation Lab (I-Lab) director Angi Chau and members of the I-Lab team will talk about the journey that Nueva embarked on 13 years ago as it began to develop a holistic Design Thinking program for our school. We will show how Design Thinking permeates our school culture, from the student experience to more behind-the-scenes work such as designing our school's schedule. We will also highlight more specifically the work we do in the I-Lab, where we built upon the foundation of Design Thinking by adding on the lenses of engineering and computer science. This presentation would be a wonderful way to begin your own journey through Design Thinking, both at this conference and beyond, and we think you will find something relevant to bring back to your own practice, whether you are new to Design Thinking or not!

Dialog with graphic recorder Bruce Van Patter as he discusses the keys to capturing spoken content in memorable images. In addition to highlighting the techniques and benefits of graphic capture, Bruce will teach a simple, hands-on lesson in visual modeling. Explore how such techniques might aid your classes.

Does your school have a makerspace (or innovation lab, or idea lab, or ...)? Why? As more and more schools are adding makerspaces (or innovation lab, or idea lab, or ...) to their programs, we want to ask educators to reflect on the goals of these spaces in their respective communities. In this interactive session, we will present some frameworks to help educators think about possible purpose(s) and intention(s) underlying these learning spaces and guide participants through some self-reflection exercises in order to help them begin to answer this big "why" question. We will also leverage some of the tools of design thinking to help us strive towards understanding. While we cannot guarantee that you will come out of this session with an answer in hand, you will leave this session with ideas and questions to take back to your schools, so you are prepared to tackle this "why" question with your colleagues. 

The development and practice of certain mindsets in learning environments can serve to enhance, engage, and connect with today's students in a more meaningful way. In this hands-on, high-energy session, we will explore ways to build and nurture innovative design thinking mindsets daily in our classrooms and communities.

Practicing human-centered mindsets is crucial to building a community of learners who embrace risk-taking, creative problem-solving, and collaboration and have a bias towards action. How might we provide opportunities for students to grow in their learning by empowering mindful, intentional daily practice of these mindsets? Participants will engage in activities that can be brought back and experienced directly and immediately in their own communities.

When a recently rescued California brown-bear cub walked into the classroom, it captivated the students in a way that most teachers could only dream about. The students hung on every word of the handlers and it became apparent that if I could get a bear into my classroom I, too, could grab the attention of students like never before...

It is my responsibility as a design-thinking and makerspace teacher to engage potential builders, but getting them comfortable and absorbed in a foreign curriculum can be daunting. To overcome this obstacle I turned to a unique set of users and built a class around designing habitats for wild animals in captivity. Everything from the marketing to the curriculum for the class was designed to bring students who did not self-identify as makers into the Innovation Lab. Rather than structure the class as a traditional engineering elective, I built the semester around the goal of giving students an opportunity to work with real-world users and complete a full-cycle project in a single semester. Now, three years into the class, I will be discussing many of the lessons I have learned through iteration as well as the culture shift that occurred around students in the class and their comfort in the lab as time went on.

Participants will have the opportunity to see what each step of the Design Thinking process looks like in the Nueva Lower School. By homing in on examples in grades one and four, we will see how skills change and deepen over time. We will showcase projects we have done at each grade level so participants can walk away with some ideas of how to create their own projects at their schools.

THIS PRESENTATION WILL NOT BE SHARED.

A few years ago the Stanford d.school shifted their canonical design process from a series of five steps that began with “Empathize” to a collection of eight abilities to be cultivated, including “Learn from Others.” Carissa Carter defines this in her groundbreaking Medium article as “the skills of empathizing with different people, testing new ideas with them, and observing and noticing in different places and contexts.” Empathy skills are still critical to the design thinker and have been recast in a more active light as shifting from “having empathy” to “learning using empathy.” How do we cultivate this ability when our students, through a quirk of biology, may lack empathy?

This is the challenge we face every day with teenage students. During these critical years, their prefrontal cortex is still myelinating, still pruning and strengthening connections between neurons. This process starts in the hind brain, where our reptilian aspects reign supreme (and result in behaviors made famous by Lord of the Flies) and migrates to the prefrontal cortex. Cognitive empathy, adopting the point of view of others, lives in the prefrontal cortex. This region is the last part of the brain to mature, sometimes as late as the early 20s. Affective empathy, recognizing the emotion states of others, actually drops in young teenage boys.

So how do we develop design thinking skills in students who have been biologically blinded to the needs of others? That’s where this talk unpacks our own efforts to “Experiment Rapidly” and create ways for students to enhance their skills in “Learning from Others.” At times this involves tricking students into empathetic behaviors when cognitive and affective empathy are underdeveloped. Other efforts attempt to expect empathy explicitly from students, with mixed success. Join us as we share our lessons learned in accelerating the development of these abilities without invoking the Big E.

We know what it looks like to teach phonics and algebra 1, but what does it look like to teach innovation? Each summer, Galileo Learning teaches tens of thousands of children to develop as innovators using its three-part framework, the Galileo Innovation Approach. In this workshop, you'll explore Galileo's approach to innovation-based lessons and see how supporting mindset and process goals throughout the lesson can lead to more creative, more innovative student work. Then you'll use a blank innovation-lesson template to transform one of your own lessons into an innovation-based lesson. You'll come away with a new way to think about teaching innovation and a custom plan to put it in action.

Dialog with graphic recorder Bruce Van Patter as he discusses the keys to capturing spoken content in memorable images. In addition to highlighting the techniques and benefits of graphic capture, Bruce will teach a simple, hands-on lesson in visual modeling. Explore how such techniques might aid your classes.

In this presentation, we will give a comprehensive look at the first formal Design Thinking and Engineering class of our strand, where fourth graders design and make an LED lamp to meet the need of a family member. We will talk about the Design Thinking process, how we teach it, and some of the engineering aspects and tools the students are introduced to and use to make their lamps.

In this fast-paced interactive session, Dan Roam shares the latest evolution of the visual-thinking revolution — with a focus on the VISUAL DECODER. See how this simple paper-&-pen framework can help YOU (whether you're a student, teacher, administrator, and parent) unleash your visual superpower in 10 minutes flat. Come prepared with a favorite story and be ready to draw! (Even if you haven't drawn since kindergarten. :-) )

Classrooms today are no strangers to coding, or even robotics, but few teach artificial intelligence ― a technology increasingly applied across almost every industry. STEM education nonprofit Iridescent teamed up with leading AI corporations and researchers to produce a curriculum demystifying AI for youth, teaching them how AI can be used for good in the world. Using simple materials, lessons can be adapted for various grade levels or even done by families at home.

Research is showing that people vary significantly in how they learn best. Everybody has what is called a jagged profile. But which "jags" matter? Educators should seek to understand learner variability in order to support all students. Vic will share a whole-child framework and supporting open-source tools developed with the world’s top learning scientists along with instructional and design strategies. When you bring a mindset of learner variability to teaching and learning, you don't see student problems — you see design challenges.

What is the most important skill students can develop during their time in school?  Learning how to learn.  If students graduate seeing themselves as learners and understanding how to learn new things, they are prepared for a world that will undoubtedly present them with challenges that we haven’t yet solved—and some that we haven’t even anticipated.  In this interactive workshop, we’ll experience design methods that can help students (and the rest of us!) exercise learning muscles that often atrophy in formal education environments.  More workout than workshop, this session will get your mind and body moving.  All levels welcome!

As education around the world slowly shifts from a standards-based model to a competency-based model, what will the future of education look like and how will students engage with teachers, their peers, and the world around them? For the last 10 years, NuVu has built a school on the architecture studio model that focuses on creative learning through a hands-on interdisciplinary approach. Studio topics connect with real-world issues, and large, complex questions are presented to the students to discuss and research. What will the next 10 years look like for NuVu and what are new directions schools can take to be prepared for an unknown future and the future of learning? This talk will dive into NuVu’s vision of the future and what obstacles lie in that pathway.

Participants will come away from this presentation with an understanding of the science regarding cognition related to the most commonly requested accommodations for students with learning differences. With this knowledge, the framework of Universal Design for Learning can provide opportunities for all students to become expert learners, not only those who have learning differences.

What is blockchain? How is it relevant to our education systems? Can anyone build with blockchain (yes!)? Like a camera for a photo, a hammer for a nail, or a tweezer for an eyebrow, blockchain is a tool for a system. Peel back the hype about cryptocurrency and you find computer code that has the potential to reshape many of the systems in our lives. In this 90-minute experiential workshop, you’ll build a blockchain and consider the implications for education.

If we want tech, and the products, services, and systems it’s intertwined with, to represent all of us, to work for all of us, it must be designed by all of us. We want to provide radical access to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain. We want people of all ages, races, professions, and genders to be able to use tech as a medium in their work.

If we want the education systems of the future to work for all of us, we need to understand blockchain. All are welcome! No experience with blockchain, code, or design is necessary. 

Being able to identify and act upon opportunities is vital to success. However, these skills are rarely taught in school. Professor Tina Seelig explains how to see and seize bold opportunities in all parts of our life by challenging assumptions, breaking the “rules,” and making our own luck. Based on her newly revised book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, Tina shows us how, regardless of our age, we can defy expectations, have a healthy disregard for the impossible, and turn problems into remarkable opportunities.

To prepare children to thrive as adults in the 21st century, we know our schools need to evolve. But how? To innovate, schools may add coding classes or open maker spaces, or install 3-D printers in libraries, but rarely do these add-ons deliver the desired outcomes. Join Galileo Learning’s founder and CEO, Glen Tripp, to explore what it takes to create an innovation ecosystem where systems, culture, and curriculum come together to support children in developing the skills and creative confidence they’ll need to succeed in our changing world. We’ll start by outlining the competencies of 21st century learning, look at several case studies (including Galileo camps) where these practices have really taken hold, and share plans and strategies you can use to bring these changes to your school and community.

How do we imagine bold new possibilities with optimism and hope and bring them to life with compelling stories and vision? By embracing roles as futurists, innovators, technologists, and humanitarians, leaders have the ability to not just live the future, but to shape it. Building on years of teaching of scenario planning, foresight, and strategic design, Lisa Kay Solomon, designer in residence at the Stanford d.school, will share leadership practices that are teachable and learnable at all ages.