Last call to donate from David Loitz of Imagining Learning and Adventures in Learning! (by Imagining Learning)
I need your help! We only have less then 5 hours til the end of Imagining Learning’s Crowdfunding campaign. My personal goal is to reach 200 donors. Charles Kouns goal is crossing the 10,000 dollar! I think we can reach both of them. You have all heard our story now for the last 30+ days and you all know my passion for providing learning experiences for young people that can change their life and change their capacity for changing education and the way we live together! Please stand with the young people of the world and donate at least 10 dollars to our campaign! Please be one of the 41 people to donate today! Much Love! http://www.incited.org/projects/imagining-learning-creating-a-national-collective-voice-through-listening
Imagining Learning Listening Session at Unboundary.m4v (by Bo Adams)
Five days to provide this experience for more students for more young people. Every 500 dollars raised allows us to travel to one community and give 8-20 young people a chance to have their voice and ideas heard. If you seen the video of the students after the session, you can see their transformation and their own belief in their capacity to positively change education.
We are now up to about 45 listening sessions requested by communities and young people around the country, but without additional funds we will only be able to do about 10-15 of them.
Through Imagining Learning, Listening Sessions are arranged across America to ask students how they want to learn and change their education. By providing a forum where students can trust educators with their honest opinions, Imagining Learning has the potential to change education as we know it. Read more from founders and GOOD members David Loitz and Charles Kouns.
Check it out, Imagining Learning was choose to be part of their Saturday push for good series! This is for our young people and the future of our planet. From my heart I ask you to donate today. Every dollar donated will be repaid ten-fold in positive energy. Just remember what it was like to be a young person and how powerful it was or is to be listen to and be asked to engage in a project trying to make the world better! You can bring that experience to young people all over the country! Please donate today!
What would you give to be heard? How much is it worth to listen to young people? $10? $50? What if we each gave just a little and asked our friends to do the same? Could we make a difference? Visit Imagining Learning’s campaign to find out: http://www.incited.org/projects/13
Each time teens meet in a Listening Session with Imagining Learning they are transformed into facilitators of change, collaborators with hope. Over three hours they create a vision of what education can be…what they need it to be, and the result is literally a work of art. Learn more here.
Imagining Learning has held 20 Listening Sessions already and have been invited to do another 38 across the country. (See the map above.) But they can’t get there without a little help from believers like you, people who know that young people have important wisdom to share.
Let’s break down what’s possible when a few committed people get together to enact change:
Each Listening Session costs about $500. Just 20 people giving $25 each can make that happen.
For the price of a $10 lunch, 50 people can bring the Imagining Learning revolution to a city that’s begging for it.
If you and two of your friends agreed to donate $20 each and then each found three more people to do the same, that would only need to happen 4 more times to raise over $21,000 for Imagining Learning!
“A successful student is.. someone who thinks outside the box, share’s their knowledge with others, and takes advantage of the opportunities thrown at you.”
Help Imagining Learning fund their tour to do listening sessions around the country! Listening Sessions are designed to ask young people how they would transform education if they had no limits! Help us know by donating even a dollar! Every dollar donated goes to help us amplify and activate young people’s vision and voice on education!
http://bit.ly/15IE8P6
Please help be boost this message by reblogiging! and join me in donating! I donated 10 dollars can you match that! Hoping to help them raise 500 dollars by tonight!
If you enjoy my blog and all the great education stories, please support this cause! Even a dollar is enough!
How systems change is a topic that has been on my mind for quite some time. Not in these concrete words, more as a feeling that I have gotten when trying to explain some new ideas or new approaches to people I am working with.
I like change and to look at my work from new perspectives. Especially in the field of education I see a big need to find a new system that is more directed towards people’s passions, needs and dreams.
So, here is a video about how systems change. I tried to write up a short summary, however, just watch the video, it is 6min and explains it really well.
The woman talking in the video is Deborah Frieze. And more background information on the system changes and Berkana you can find here.
They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.
They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud.
They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents.
They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know—to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds.
“I have a holistic view of the educative process. The universe is one … Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they are already together and you try to keep them from destroying life by segmenting it, over-organizing and dehumanizing it… The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas.”
When local authorities wanted to “transform education for the children of Croxteth”, a suburb of Liverpool in England, they turned to Morgan Sindall and amazing architect Martin Shutt to create a “state of the art learning facility” in consultation with teachers, students and community members. When the designs were done they included a semi-circular room that looked tailor made for the work of 4-D Creative. They designed the space “with giant projection and an interactive floor. Next up dame a swirling ceiling feature complete with twinkling fibre optic lights. We also fitted some light globes for an extra wow factor”. Wow is right.
Not Too Cool For School: Modern school design by Australian Architecture Firm smith+tracey who see the well being of the learner important in the design of a school. A tenet that leans out of the box from your average learning center.
The country’s strongest innovators embrace creativity, play, and collaboration — values that also inform their physical spaces.
Spaces designed for learners that facilitate many modes of learning from individual quiet study to group performance and everything in between.
Spaces that allow for, and promote, creativity, play and collaboration for students and teachers
Spaces that create and express community
Spaces that are learner-friendly, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing and flexible.
These are the ideas that are shaping our thinking about space at PDS.
And of course - we can always learn from kindergarten about project based learning, interdisciplinary thinking and creative and imaginative play. Sometimes we forget what we have always known about what works best!
There’s a nice bit about bloxes in the article.
A community about to build or rehab a school often creates checklists of best practices, looks for furniture that matches its mascot, and orders shiny new lockers to line its corridors. These are all fine steps, but the process of planning and designing a new school requires both looking outward (to the future, to the community, to innovative corporate powerhouses) as well as inward (to the playfulness and creativity that are at the core of learning).
In many ways, what makes the Googles of the world exceptional begins in the childhood classroom — an embrace of creativity, play, and collaboration. It was just one year ago that 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number-one leadership competency in our complex global marketplace. We can no longer afford to teach our kids or design their schoolhouses the way we used to if we’re to maintain a competitive edge. In looking at various exemplary workplaces such as IDEO, Google, and Pixar, we can glean valuable lessons about effective educational approaches and the spaces that support them.
