- Defer Judgement
- Encourage Wild Ideas
- Build on the Ideas of Others
- Stay Focused on the Topic
- One Conversation at a Time
- Be Visual
- Go for Quantity
The Ideation phase was a great experience because it opened up the lane of creativity. Since our guiding question is about EL students and parents, when I began thinking about strategies they tended to be the normal everyday strategies. Through collaborating with my teammates and reading their ideas, I began generating better and more creative ideas myself. This phase also brought to the surface the importance of teamwork and collaboration, to listen to the different perspectives and experience from the group. From conservative to wild ideas, we were able to come to a consensus and reminded each other about keeping the end users in mind.
Part 3 of the phase consisted of collaborating live through google hangouts and creating a Coggle to organize our promising ideas: inspiring ideas, rational ideas, darling ideas, long shot ideas, and most likely to delight the end users ideas. After adding our promising ideas, we identified the possible oppositions, the funding that will cover the cost, the real value of the end user, time constraints, the cost, and the experts needed.
This week's biggest challenge was finding the time to collaborate as a complete team in such a short week. We had class on Wednesday night and the entire phase was due by Sunday. This only gave us 4 days to complete the assignment. This was difficult due to our busy schedules with end of the year teaching responsibilities. We were not able to collaborate until Friday night, then we planned to collaborate again on Saturday night but I was not able to make it due to a family commitment. We then collaborated on Sunday evening but one of our teammates was not able to be there due to other commitments as well. This was also in the midst of completing our own reflection for this phase as well. It was a tough balance but we persevered through it and found a way to get it done through great teamwork and keeping me updated with the process even on the day I was not able to attend our collaboration meeting. The web 2.0 tools and the flexibility of everyone made this a much easier process.
The ideation phase can also be applied to the classroom or with staff because the phase implements the collaboration process. The phase moves us from the traditional position of isolation to one of collaboration, reflective dialogue amongst teachers and leaders and a collaborative focus on student (end users) learning. We can use the ideation phase to collaborate to solve PLC issues, student behavior management or during decisions such as common assessments during our grade level meetings. Students can use in the classroom to develop their creative and critical thinking skills to solve a real problem through collaboration, experimentation and play. According to Tim Brown in his Ted Talk titled Tales of Creativity and Play, he stated that as children, we engage in exploratory play. Free from the reins of experience and social norms, we look to discover how things work. This idea is the core of Design Thinking, therefore adults that wish to be creative need to have a space to do so as there are numerous companies like Pixar and google, education should provide the same.
Resource:
Brown,T. [Ted]. (2008) Tales of creativity and play. [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjwUn-aA0VY on June12, 2016.