No one expected it.
When covid hit Oregon in March of 2020, we, like much of the world, were woefully unprepared. In the middle of March with three days’ notice, our schools were closed, just as spring vacation was about to begin.
That following Monday was the date of our monthly gathering of educators who had been inspired by Jami's work in Dayton and were courageously reimagining education in their schools.
We gathered at the same table each month at a rooftop bar in McMinnville. This was a time for kindred spirits to share a pint and to weave laughter together, recognizing that while cultural transformation in schools was difficult, it was fundamentally the right work, work that was filled with moments of meaning, moments of joy.
But that night in March we had to gather on a video call as the restaurant, and most of the city had been closed down. There also wasn't much laughter that night, as these educators were facing immense uncertainty about how to guide their schools through uncharted waters.
We sensed that our time together over the previous two years was, in some cosmic way, preparing us for this moment.
We reminded ourselves that when embracing an Agile Mindset, the greater the uncertainty, the faster the learning cycles must be. Therefore, that night, we agreed to quickly spin up an experiment that might help everyone Walk into the Unknown to Know the Problem better.
In this experiment, we were going to imagine ourselves as Jenni's middle school students for a week in order to experience the agile learning practice she had developed in her classroom at Dayton, something called The Dayton Practice.
A few days later, at our launch meeting for this learning sprint, she defined our shared 'base' topic and we were randomly given a 'scrambler' topic. We were then challenged to embark on a weeklong journey to research, synthesize, and make a creative artifact, commissioned to share a story on demo day about a discovery that was personally meaningful – one that might inspire the wonder of the other members of our group.
Despite the swirling chaos surrounding us, we each dove into this learning journey and found that when we shared our story of discovery the following Friday, something profound was experienced – an experience that held the essence of what we had learned from our experience of introducing the agile culture to Dayton.
At that moment, Jami committed to introducing this framework to the teachers at her new school in Willamina to help them better engage students during remote learning. Jenni and I also committed to defining this practice as a replicable framework and to develop a guidebook that could be used by Jami's staff and others – all in one week as Jami was, once again, moving fast.
In that next week, Designed InGenuity (DIG) came into being, a learning framework for the creative mind.
Next: Awakening Wonder
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