The Innovation in Teaching workshop will explore a range of innovative resources, spaces, and teaching practices. Teachers will learn new tools and techniques to incorporate these emerging innovations into the classroom and new skills, perspectives, and confidence around innovative teaching.

We'll start with these questions:

1. How does your space contribute to and inspire learning?
2. Does it allow for flexibility and collaborative moments on-the-fly?
   

Over the next four days we will utilize the DEEP (Discover, Empathize, Experiment, Produce) design thinking process & MAKER methodologies to reimagine learning spaces within the context of the classroom. We will examine your approach to instruction and learning and we will explore the fixed mindsets that may be keeping us on the sidelines, as well as ways to shift towards a growth mindset.

The DEEP Design Thinking methodology is focused on people-centered problem-solving through collaboration, creativity, and most importantly, empathy.

The MAKER movement brings to education an emphasis on learning-through-doing in a social environment. These two methodologies compliment, overlap, and support each other and will create a learning opportunity for you to take back to your classroom and re-engage students.

Day 1 - Mary Cantwell introduces design thinking and designing intentional spaces.

Dive DEEP + MAKE: We will take moments in this first day to establish a culture of Norms for your team. This will involve Understanding, Doing, and Visualizing how our classrooms, instruction, learning, and mindsets can shift & grow. We will demonstrate and model how the culture of the space trumps the content of information delivery.

Day 2 - Jim Tiffin Jr shows how to integrate design thinking in your classroom through making and technology.

How Might We…imagine Making, Tinkering, and Engineering as part of the daily fabric of our classrooms? This day will be about asking questions with a "How Might We..." attitude and a "What If..." call to action.

Days 3 - DEEP Design Thinking Challenge: Classroom Environment

Today starts a two day full immersion into a DEEP design thinking challenge. Through Discover. Empathize. Experiment. Produce. you will work collaboratively in teams to redesign the classroom environment.

Day 4 - As our time together closes, this day will be spent prototyping solutions, testing and exchanging feedback based on your solutions, and creating a plan of action for you and your students' learning spaces.

As an attendee, you will learn new skills and approaches to education that you can apply to your own teaching practice in order to dynamically shift what learning looks like in your classroom. You will have an opportunity to design a new learning environment for your students, engage in design thinking, learn to facilitate maker/STEAM activities, and connect your students to a global audience.

Upon leaving the Innovation in Teaching Workshop, you will have a plan to redesign your classroom to be more flexible and supportive of a new way of learning. You will have ideas for how to begin teaching design thinking and having your students apply the design thinking process to solve real-world, global problems that involve making prototypes, recovering from failure, learning from constructive feedback, and empathizing with others.