Sheddery isn't about physical spaces; it's about fostering mental and collaborative environments where ideas flourish and fast failure is a stepping stone to success. From napkin sketches to world-changing ideas, 'sheddery' promotes a shed load of continuous improvement, innovation and collaboration. Let's unpack what it means in this blog.
Hold please, caller. What real learning looks like.
Noisy classroom. Kids out of seats. Animated conversations. Kids drawing on whiteboards. Kids exploding out into the hall. So loud! Enough!
But wait.
Take a closer look: students are discussing measurement, others are tinkering with motors to prototype a powered hat design, someone is researching portable solar panels, someone else is designing in Tinkercad and there are drawings and diagrams and things being tweaked and thought about everywhere you look.
I always look forward to this bit. This is the bit when you see that learners have 'earned their stripes as learners’ and that they know how to learn. They are finding things out, they are tinkering, they are thinking, they are wondering out loud and they are problem-solving.
The launching pad for this was a ‘think tank’ unit exploring the history of Aotearoa’s taonga, early trade and enterprise, the history of New Zealand inventors and entrepreneurs, critical analysis of Shark Tank pitches and exploration of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Now it is the students’ turn to come up with something useful, something that services a need, something that targets a sustainable development goal, and something that they can pitch to (albeit pretend) ‘sharks’. They have two weeks to work through the empathising, defining, ideating, designing, prototyping and testing phases.
Design Thinking is a process that opens up so much potential for students. When explored thoroughly, the empathy stage opens up problems to solve that were there all along. The ‘goldilocks’ card sheds real light on problems (see my emptahy deck). We can walk in someone else’s shoes and really think and feel what they are thinking and feeling - and as a consequence, we can design new and improved solutions to actually make the world better.
Maybe it is this part that is the most rewarding - the idea that we can make the world better. The actual asking of ‘how can we make the world better?’ and the actual belief that ‘we can make the world better.’ But actually, this part IS so rewarding. I can stand back and watch, observe the noise and the ‘real and beautiful chaos of learning’ and see that they are all immersed in their learning. The noise is the good kind.
“It is such a loud class today,” said one student. “I know,” I replied. “Because look, everyone is into it.”
So, when at first glance it looks like ‘all noise and boisterousness’ and something that needs to be controlled, stopped or silenced - look closer. Hold please, caller. Don’t step in and stop it. Embrace it. It is what learning looks like.
