Last Fall, I had the pleasure of collaborating with three amazing educators and changemakers on the planning and facilitation of the Revolution in Education Congress, a 3-day congress focused on the topic of how to build a maker culture in K-12 schools. The congress was hosted at Gimnasio Los Caobos, a progressive K-12 school in Chia, Colombia, with the support and thought leadership of Gabriel Diago (Director or Innovation of Gimnasio Los Caobos) and his team.
Over a 4 month period, I collaborated with Nick Salmon (founder and president of the Collaborative Learning Network), Kavita Tanna (Global Vitality Coach and Co-Founder of Catalyst Learning Labs and USTAWI Global), and Lina Nathan (middle school instructional coach for the Westerville City School District and part-time faculty member for Otterbein University) on envisioning and then re-envisioning the entire congress from the ground up. Although we had a working template from past years of the congress, we embraced the challenge of creating a truly responsive and hands-on learning experience, leaving a lot to be created in person during the event (a very unnerving thing for most conference planners!).
But for me, this embodied the role of any great educator who has a student-centered learning approach at their core and leaves things open for the student to take leadership in and helps guide the student based on their interests, learnings and goals. It was exciting to transform the conference from a typical model of speakers and seminars to a hands-on and experiential learning-based congress in which the participants were gathering new insights at every step by being involved in the learning process, just like their students. And we, as facilitators, left no stone unturned. We tried to envision every aspect of the congress in a hands-on format - from the Day 1 experience of participants entering the main space and the entry activities, to using feedback from the participants to redesign the workshops in real-time, to constantly reorganizing the space to fit the needs of the activities, to the finale celebration of learning - all of which lead to the creation of a highly dynamic, high energy experience for the participant educators (and for me as facilitator).
The participants came from a wide variety of schools (urban, rural, bilingual, local, international) from all around Colombia, and it was equally energizing for me to feel their passion and energy for creating this culture change at their schools. During the congress, they built a list of 70 different strategies that they had learned during the 3 days which could be utilized in their classrooms and schools immediately. They also created a “Maker Manifesto” to highlight our combined vision of transformation with our education system. After the congress, the participants reported feeling inspired, motivated, and equipped to implement changes in their teaching practice.
I’m looking forward to reconnecting with the facilitators and participants in a few months to meet and understand the long-term impact of our congress and how these learnings have made it into the cultural fabric of their unique environments.
