During the peak of our 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, the staff at Griffin were hooked by a new journey – one that awakened our wonder in ourselves, in each other, and in the way learning could be further transformed for our learners.
It all began with an unexpected professional development invitation from David Turner, Director of Professional Learning at QASSP. He invited us to learn about the agile practices of the technology world and to consider how we might harness them in an educational setting. Little did we know how transformative this opportunity would become on our inquiry journey at Griffin.
Within a week, our eight-person Leadership Team tentatively ‘zoomed’ to Oregon and connected with the technology expert we now call a friend and mentor, Thompson Morrison. Thompson spoke to us about a unique learning framework and experiments using it in a rural school in Dayton. He explained the Designed inGenuity (DiG) learning framework to us briefly before articulating that it was best experienced in order to be deeply understood. And so we began our first 'DiG'.
The Griffin leadership team became the first 'learning pod' at Griffin. Across our week-long journey, Thompson invited us to take on the role of learner, embracing daily, hour-long connections with Thompson and David via Zoom. We quickly realised that we were engaging in a truly different kind of professional development.
Our understanding of the DiG framework unfolded as we experienced it. We learnt about the components and the process through undertaking the process ourselves. We discovered that Designed InGenuity is a powerful framework for the creative mind. It’s intended to inspire learning journeys that harness practices from the technology world – rapid research, fast-paced learning, and creative innovation. That’s exactly what we experienced across our week.
As learners in a DiG, we undertook a learning journey unlike any other. Many profound surprises, delights, and wonders emerged as we journeyed our deeply personal paths. We delighted in having our curiosities and thinking heard, noted the sense of trust and belonging in sharing our authentic voice, and were empowered to allow our truth to be seen and discovered.
Our experience led us to question how we might continue to reimagine our teaching practices in order to truly unleash our learners’ creative potential, something that would better prepare them as creative learners for their future world. Experiencing learning that not only was deep but surprisingly joyful, we began to ponder how we might harness this powerful learning framework in our classrooms.
Through our collective experience of a DiG, we were further affirmed in our belief that the traditional model of teaching fails to align with the learning pace and processes needed for flourishing in our future world. Considering the key question driving the technology world is ‘How fast are you learning?’, we began wondering how our existing inquiry-based learning pedagogies might be 'powered up' by this unique framework.
Thompson tells us that an Agile Mindset can’t be understood until it is experienced, that the experience of joy felt is the defining experience of agile learning. During our DiG journey, we became truly empowered learners. Guided by our curiosity, we learnt at lightning speed. We courageously leaned into uncomfortableness and our vulnerabilities. Then, we created innovative artefacts to share our learning and thinking, our story, with others.
The DiG learning journey had unleashed a creative potential we didn’t know we each had inside of us. We had experienced something unforgettable, something that we couldn’t simply unfeel. Witnessing each other learn and create through a DiG was awe-inspiring, a genuine goosebumps experience that left us profoundly changed. We knew we must bring this powerful learning framework to our teachers and learners.
Next: The Shared Truth
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