This is what PD should look all the time!
We had some very active, noisy, collaborative workshops at ULearnNZ this week…and then there was the best conference workshop I have ever contributed to, and possibly attended. Students from Hobsonville Point Secondary School gave up a day of vacation per the request of my co-presenters, Steve Mouldey and Claire Amos. We had 90 mins. With NO directions ahead of time, we sent them out to the hotel lobby area to observe and come back ready to prototype and pitch the new “Hotel of Wow”. Then all of the adults observed the students as they did just that (and responded to the student-led empathetic interviews as “hotel users”). Videos of the proposal pitches will come later, but here are the students at work. After the pitches, we, the facilitators, sat back as attendees asked the students questions about their school and deep learning, and were BLOWN AWAY by the level of sophistication, articulation, and ownership these students have in the learning process. After the session, a teacher came up to me and said “I was in the room next door and we had ‘room envy’ hearing all of the excitement over here”!
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