Knowledge Acquisition & Brainstorming

Based on Wiggins + McTighe, what ideas are you developing for helping your learners acquire the knowledge that you believe is pertinent for them to gain? What role might form play in your ideas?

Utilizing the six facets of understanding delineated by Wiggins + McTight, we started out by reflecting on our own learning experiences in the past that helped us to either explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, empathize, or develop self-knowledge (and some that spam across all six categories). However, as we began filling out the six facets with our own core challenge of embracing and reframing failure, we found that we hit a wall in applying this framework to many of our early ideas. We found it especially difficult to answer what we would want our learners to be able to explain and interpret, since much of lifelong learning involves a slow accumulation of skills and greater mindset shifts rather than specific or quantifiable knowledge.

As seen below, we did identify some interesting (though still broad) goals and potential activities in the bottom three quadrants that served as great starting points for our brainstorming session that followed. This also indicated to us that building perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge will likely be central to our learning experience moving forward, though we anticipate the top quadrants will evolve more as our ideas become more solid.

Seeing as we were talking in circles a bit during this mapping exercise, we decided to spend some time brainstorming more concrete ideas in a few of the directions we are interested in pursuing. To start off, we used the questions that emerged from the knowledge acquisition activity, as well as the three categories we had pulled out from our 4MAT diagram: reframing how we think about failure, reflecting on failure, and creating safe spaces for learning.

Some of the initial ideas we used as jumping off points included ways of repurposing past failures, documenting progress and celebrating small moments of success, and building communities around both success and failure to normalize varying paths. We also discussed visual metaphors that we could leverage to represent slow and continuous growth, as one of our end goals is to shift learners towards a slower pace of learning.

From there, we started storyboarding a few of our ideas in order to visualize how they might take form. We came up with three(ish) varying experiences:

1. The first was a take on CMU’s Giving Wall, in which students could exchange “failures” or failed projects of any sort in order to build something new and make something beautiful as a collective. However, as we thought of ways to make that more adaptable for non-creative projects, it became more of a reflective space, in which students could collaboratively but anonymously work through failure together. We also storyboarded another iteration of this idea, in which the end goal is to make journaling a more interactive and collaborative activity in order to create more safe spaces and open up conversations. With this version, we thought there could be a mailbox-esque system in which community members would write a response to a prompt (i.e what did you learn from the last time you “failed”?), drop it off in the mailbox, and then another person would pick it up and respond to it/ build off of it, in order to create a sort of discrete support system and gain new perspectives on your own challenges. Though we have yet to flesh this out, we figured this experience could happen physically, digitally, or in a hybrid manner.
2. The second idea we briefly explored was that of iterative problem solving, in which we were imagining some sort of game that actually encourages learners to fail and then iterate upon that in order to come up with the solution. We didn’t get very far into the details of the game, but we would essentially be exploring ways to push against the “three strikes you’re out” mindset of most games, and instead encourage the players to build off of failed attempts. We’ve been looking at various mind games and escape rooms for inspiration here.
3. Lastly, we would also like to explore different interactive ways for learners to zoom out and put their failures/ successes into perspective. This idea could potentially become collaborative (similarly to our first idea), in order for people to see that they are not alone in their experiences and that failure is a natural part of every success story we hear. A few ways to show this that we discussed included utilizing data visualization in order to “see the bigger picture”, as well as peeling back layers on the most classic examples of achievements/ accomplishments in order to see the failures that led up to success (i.e the failed iterations of the computer/ iPhone/ etc). We also circled back to the use of a visual metaphors here, such as window frames that only give you a peak into someone’s life.

From this brainstorming session, we realized that many of our ideas began to interconnect, blurring the lines between the categories we started off with (reframing how we think about failure, reflecting on failure, and creating safe spaces for learning). We determined instead that reframing failure is really an overarching theme, while reflecting and creating safe spaces are the avenues we are using across all of our ideas in order to accomplish that end goal of reframing.