If I Could Do It Again....

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“To learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner... Learning involves interaction between the learner and his environment, and its effectiveness relates to the frequency, variety and intensity of the interaction. Education, at best is ecstatic.”      George Leonard, Education and Ecstasy, 1976

I read Leonard's book in 1976 and knew it would become a classic.  He made strong points about what education could and should be. I was considered a forerunner in education having opened one of the most creative and innovative Teacher Center's in the country. I was given awards and invited to speak at large teacher associations and conferences. The Learning Exchange  that I helped to create engaged with exemplary teachers throughout the greater Kansas City Area  to create curriculum that the cummunity felt was lacking in the area schools. I thought a lot about the 21st century and wondered what young people would need to learn in the 20th century that would help them be fit in the 21st century.  I regaled against the "sit-and-get" way of learning and  the LX became well known for project-based learning and for making collaboration, design, and exploration seem natural ways of learning, even for adults. 

In 1978, my husband, Matt, and I started teaching a course together for students and adults called TOOLS (Time of Our Life Seminars). We created an outline curriculum for the 21st Century.  Our course was intense explorations into the future, engaging the personal, organizational, and world views of each participant.  And yet, and yet, as I now live in the 21st century ... as I see the changes that have occurred in just one generation  -- 30 years or so -- there is so much I wish I had offered that I did not even think about then.  I took so many things for granted.

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A Playshop for Evolutionary Leadership, Collaboration & Systems Thinking

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A few weeks back, I had the honor of designing and facilitating a 3-hour event - or "playscape," as Professor Laszlo called it - with a class of MBA students at the Presidio School of Management studying "Evolutionary Leadership, Collaboration, and Systems Thinking."

With such a juicy course title, I wasn't a hard recruit. I knew from the get-go that I did not want to try to present to the class, opting instead to first give the students a participatory experience of the kind of collaborative design processes I like to create, and then open the room for conversation and questions generated by the interaction.

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In less than three hours, the class created six new enterprises, defined the guiding principles and organizational practices of each, incorporated key insights from three dozen world-class writers and authors and, finally, presented these business models to each other in way that could be readily understood in about three minutes.

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It was a rich and immersive afternoon of collaborative design and social learning, embued with emergence and playfulness.

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Doing What Comes Naturally

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“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation”. Plato

Years ago when I was a teacher, I found that even my second graders sometimes got too serious. Once when they were all intense and upset about some test, I created the Esnesnon Club (nonsense spelled backward) and they were all members.  The rule was to create nonsense ideas that engaged all members.  Sometimes, what happened was brilliant, other times, just pure corn.  The Esnesnon Club continued throughout the year. Always though it brought fresh air into the room and lightened things up. 

Later when I founded the Learning Exchange, (1972) play was a healthy part of the process.  We had a large recycle department that stocked left overs and scraps from businesses throughout the city.  We would have contests to see who could think of the most uses for these items.  These items became reusable wealth and became a healthy part of the LX budget each year.  One of the things the LX spawned was an Invention's workshop for teachers and principals. Teams were asked to select ten to 15 items out of a barrel of goodies and then they were asked to invent something with them.  Non just anything, but a "timer that would run for exactly three minutes then send a signal to send a rubber ducky down stream"; or "a vehicle that would run on its own power for 90 seconds then emit an odor that would trigger something else to happen". Teams had to design, build, market, and sell their ideas.  We often had adults ... serious adults rolling on the floor with laughter.  There was a freedom in the room,  unencumbered moments where people became themselves ... curious, collaborative, playful, and active.  These were the years before anyone thought about the value of collaboration. But here they were seeing how different minds could see and solve different parts of the problems.  In the debrief there was always astonishment about how they all participated and because of that, created success.  In a three-hour module these adults who worked side by side each day - who counted on each other - got to know each other better than all the hours they had spent working, worrying about students and parents, playing politics, and acting adult. 

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