ASM Engage Week
How It Started
The school admin proposed students be released from classes for one week to solve real-world problems. It would stop business-as-usual for 160 students and dozens of teachers to allow for, instead, something else. The school needed a dedicated team to pull it off.
My title was “lead engager,” and I was responsible for managing activities, volunteers, and logistics. I threw branding into the mix.
The Challenges
We had two months to put together together venues, caterers, programs, support, and objectives for a 160-person event. It was unprecedented.
Meeting the needs of our users was tricky. Some teenagers, we knew, would rather stay home. Private, international prep-school parents expected globally-competitive performance. Teachers were skeptical of the amorphous learning opportunity and the abandonment of tried-and-tested classrooms.
Our final major problem was defining success. Unlike test scores, engagement is hard to turn into numbers.
With these challenges in mind, we got to work.
Space, Food
The need for space and food was imminent, so we solved it right away. One big thing to check off our list. We submitted facility request forms to the administration and sent a food budget with ideas and dietary restrictions to the school cafeteria.
Forming Teams, Organizing Facilitators
We needed to define a role for students that would afford them the magical mix of freedom and responsibility to do the work of Engage.
I suggested students form their own teams. Teachers needed to demonstrate the faith and intention that students could self-organize and make beautiful things happen on their own.
To help students form teams, we developed a survey that tabulated a hierarchy of “project personality types.” (Mine was 1. technologist, 2. presenter, 3. designer, 4. documentarian.) Students could then use this data to make informed choices about teams, balance strong and weak.
To make it fun, we assigned each personality type a color code using legos. With the legos as a guide, students found partners that complemented their abilities in real time. The discoveries students made walking around the room, the confirmations and surprises, was one of my favorite parts of event.
To assist teacher-facilitators in their work, we defined clear roles, held training sessions, and assigned “critical friends.” So, they could act knowledgeably, with confidence and support. We also held team meetings throughout the event.
Designing Programs
With space, food, and teams covered, We set our focus on building programmatic events that would engage and delight students.
I suggested students choose smaller, personal sessions, like in a conference. They could choose, for example, a talk on designing mobile apps, delivering a pitch, or crafting user experiences, with new sessions every hour.
In this conference-style approach, students had the benefit of breaking out of their teams to jigsaw takeaways. They could teach each other. It was a distributed system with greater variety, deeper work, and more complex networks of information.
For this, we needed to recruit speakers to craft and deliver sessions. We asked and got a yes from the headmaster, the high school director, and several teachers. They designed their own topics. They led their own workshops, 101s, and case studies. The personalized, choice-style nature of the sessions ended up being one of the greatest successes of the event.
Branding
Branding was one of the lower priorities for the planning team, which makes sense because teachers focus on curriculum. I came in with a background in visual rhetoric and media, so I was interested in picking up work in this area.
I looked at similar projects like neuscout, hackfsu, and future design school. What colors, typefaces, and trends did they employ to promote a culture of learning, productivity, and playfulness?
I decided to run with the lego brick as a symbol of imagination, construction, experimentation, and cooperative play. (The toy’s name is Dutch for “play well.”) I sent sketches to our planning team, and they liked the direction. So, I took it to Adobe Illustrator and crafted detailed variations.
I gave the director a selection of 12 to choose from and she ordered shirts on the spot. I then made posters, videos, and slides.
In the End
Students pitched their ideas, with HMWs and Storyboards -- to save thousands of dollars in energy with desk lamps and a natural light schedule in the library, to improving relations between teachers and students, to reducing wait time in the cafeteria.
Lessons Learned
- Go for the easy win. Secure venue, food, logistics as early as possible, so you can focus on the good stuff.
- Use the peer-to-peer model. Engage participants, foster inclusion, and promote involvement on all levels with peer-to-peer work. Next time, we want to amp up student involvement and P2P work with a board of student advisors.
- Decentralize sessions. Workshops were one of students’ favorite aspects of the event, according to our feedback survey.
- It’s all iterative. We had highs and lows in this first-ever, days-long project. We recognize the mountain we were trying to move and where we can be better. So next time, we are starting planning earlier and with more help. Already, we are looking forward to planning Engage 2.0.