Throughout my 39 years of working in public education, one thing always brought me joy: designing experiences.
When I was a teacher, I loved designing lessons, units, activities for my students. The more I got to know them, the easier this task became. As a teacher, when you see what engages your students and when you give them opportunities to share their voice with you, you are more likely to see students learn at high levels and retain what they have learned. Plus…it just brings more joy to the classroom when everyone is diving into their learning – including the teacher!
As a district administrator, there have been so many opportunities to design experiences for staff, students, and families. I’ve loved these times because they lend themselves to being creative and thinking of new and fresh possibilities.
Good design involves high levels of collaboration with your peers – something else that fills my bucket!
One of my favorite tasks each year has been designing our yearly Leadership Launch, with my superintendent and our Assistant Superintendent for TLI. We used a very simple protocol that can be used when designing any new experience or professional learning time: Who? How? What? I developed this simple protocol after years of using the Schlechty Center’s Coaching For Design model. The protocol provided us with scaffolding that kept us from jumping to planning too quickly, and to really consider those for whom we were creating the experience. By the time we began specific planning, we had created something far more engaging, creative, and thoughtful than if we had just jumped right into building an agenda from the start. Experiences that were directly connected to our participants.
| WHO? | HOW? | WHAT? |
| What do you know about who will be participating in this experience and how they best learn? If designing for teams of people, what do you know about their strengths & challenges as a team? | After describing your “who” consider the types of activities, schedule, etc…that would best match to their styles/needs, What types of activities, lessons, events have engaged them in the past? | What is it that we want the participants to know and do as a result of this experience? Are their important topics that can’t be missed? What are our intended outcomes? |
I will miss this times of using my brain in these creative ways. I wonder what kind of designing I can do when retired??
Click below to read the previous Top Ten memory posts:
Ten
Nine
Eight
Seven
So, I've been thinking... 
5 thoughts on “…my sixth favorite memory from my time as an educator.”