week 8

Having spent the last number of weeks gaining an understanding of innovation and design thinking through completing readings as well as gaining first hand experience through participating in the process myself it was finally time to put everything I had learnt into practice! This time, instead of the tutors facilitating and guiding us through the process it would be my turn to teach the children from Stengardskolen (the school we had been previously working with) how to be innovative.

Admittedly, I was daunted at the thought of this prospect as I had only just come through the process myself however because we are working in groups I feel like I can acquire the extra confidence needed and feel supported by the rest of my group as I take the lead. Indeed, this is one of the many positive aspects and benefits of this module as you can work collectively to source and build upon each others ideas and you never feel that you are on your own. This is a skill I feel I am developing greatly during this process and this skill will be needed throughout my teaching career back in Northern Ireland as I will have to work collaboratively with other teachers to plan work and teaching materials, similar to what I have witnessed whilst being out in schools in Denmark as well as working with their classroom assistants (pedagogues) and parents.

Throughout this innovation process my group and I have worked hard on trying to solve the problem innovatively which we identified in the school. Having always been aware that we would have to complete this next stage of turning round and teaching the children to be innovative themselves we worked with this in mind during the first stage of this program, trying to innovatively solve the problem identified but could also accommodate an environment for children to be innovative themselves. This proved to be very worthwhile and beneficial for my group as we realised that due to time restrictions in this program we would only have one class to plan for our innovative teaching episode!

Design for Change a 4 step process

Before any group work was done however our tutor introduced us to the design for change model which encourages children to identify issues which bother them and guides children through a  four-step process which allows them to take an active role in imagining and creating change for the better. 

Until now, I had never heard of this movement before however I was inspired by how powerfully it could be used. I defintely feel like this is something I could potentially use back in Northern Ireland as we teach through topics and as a teacher I could use the design for change model within my topic such as Africa to feel empathy towards people in 3rd world countries and thus do something about it and they could come up with innovative ideas themselves and share it with others. Indeed, I feel that because the 4 simple steps it is divided into it can therefore be used and adapted for a variety of age groups through the primary school system in Northern Ireland.

As a group we decided to make a flexible teaching plan due to the fact that we did not know what time we would have or the number or age of the children we would be working with. flexible teaching plans are good as they encourage teachers to adapt and go with the flow of how the children are learning and interacting. We decided to avail of many of the concepts and ideas that we had used ourselves when going through the innovation process. Although we did not use every single one, we decided to only use the ones we felt were the most beneficial and useful for the children and the ones that we also enjoyed participating in ourselves. As a group we decided on a time schedule for each of our activities during the day as we realised from experience ourselves that deadlines are needed to ensure that children remain focused and keep moving forward with their work and some of the best ideas are imagined and developed under pressure within deadlines.You can view our flexible teaching plan below which gives a rough idea of how we imagine our teaching episode to pan out!

Our flexible teaching plan

As you can also see from our plan we divided up the different roles within our group depending on our skills and abilities. We also made a list of resources we would need to complete our teaching episode which we emailed in advance to our tutor to ensure that we would be prepared for the day. As well as this we identified 'what ifs' which were a list of things we would do if something did not go to plan. This ensured that we would be prepared for the worst case scenario, a good back up plan for when you are a teacher! As you can see we also have chose to divide our children into unusual groupings, having a male, female and mixed group of children. We specifically chose to do this as we wanted to do an experiment to satisfy our curiosity and see for ourselves if there would be any variation in the ideas and concepts the groups came up and how well they worked together. As teachers we are interested in how children work together and can hopefully use this knowledge back home in our own countries.

A list of our Characters, resources and success criteria

Overall, I excited about the prospect of teaching the children to be innovative. Although at times before this I had questioned why we ourselves were participating in the innovation process I now see that we needed to do to gain a better understanding and use this first hand experience and knowledge to teach the children. I am hopeful for what the children can achieve during this time frame as I know from experience what can be achieved yet I am nervous at the same time as we have such a limited time with them and because of the fact that we cannot speak danish to them I hope that nothing gets lost in translation and they will be able to understand us fully and actively participate in the class and won't get tired listening and speaking English for that period of time.