What Happens When Students are Invited to Redesign Learning?

 With our first Student EdCon behind us, we are inspired by the experience and ready to start thinking about the implementation of ideas for next school year.  Student EdCon was created with the idea of increasing student voice and providing students the opportunity to redesign learning. Students spent two days focused on the challenge of redesigning an aspect of learning at school using design thinking.  Throughout these two days, students worked in small collaborative teams and were exposed to incredible speakers who helped bring the design thinking process to life. The video below will provide you with a brief overview of Student EdCon 2013.

Student EdCon 2013

Then on Saturday morning, each group presented  their idea on improving learning to the students, teachers, administrators and parents.  All eight groups were impressive and surprisingly contained similar themes.  Themes that emerged from the groups included: increased student choice in what they learn, changes in the physical environment, and democratic classrooms. Our team of LASD teachers and administrators selected three of the group ideas to implement in some way next year.  The three ideas selected were Elective Shopping, Democratic Schools & Project Me.  The presentations from these groups are linked  below.

Elective Shopping
Democratic Schools
Project Me

Everyone involved with Student EdCon learned a ton.  It is probably debatable who learned more, the students or our teacher facilitators.  At the end of each day, we debriefed with facilitators to share insights, learnings and thoughts on refinements.  At the end of the first day, one of our teacher facilitators shared how amazed she was by the level of depth being contributed by students.  The overwhelming questions by all was, “Why haven’t we involved students in rethinking learning before?”  As a team, we looked forward to thinking through the implementation of student ideas and are already excited to begin planning Student EdCon 2014.

Collaboratively Contributed by Alyssa Gallagher, Kami Thordarson & Karen Wilson