Category: Tools

Leader Hats: A Deck of Styles

Posted on by Mindy Faber

The Leader Hat cards are a playful way to think about how your leadership approach can impact others. The Leader Hat cards represent different perspectives that you can adopt when approaching various aspects of your work. We all wear different hats. Which hat do you wear best? Which hat would you like to try on?

Leader Hats: A Deck of Styles

Leader Hats cards can be used as a powerful tool for leaders and teams in areas such as:

Communication

Team-building

Peer-development and training

Action research

Appreciative inquiry 

Group and individual reflection

Building a Community of Practice: A Deck of Lenses

Posted on by Mindy Faber

This nine-card deck offers a playful way to engage members of a community of practice in collaborative dialogue, reflection and strategic planning. This original deck of cards draws inspiration from The Art of Game Design. We designed our cards to help people define what makes a community of practice strong and what could make it even stronger.

Today, the learning needs of educators, both formal and informal, are shifting at alarming rates. Our Deck of Lenses is one of the many ways Convergence helps support communities of practice by offering powerful strategies for generating critical new knowledge that can help people transform their practice and accommodate ongoing changes in technologies and learner needs. 

There are a myriad of ways to use our CoP Decks of Lenses cards, both in person and virtually.  Each of the nine cards offers a simple, focused prompt to discuss, allowing folks to dive deep into important considerations without being overwhelmed by the task of improving every aspect of the work. Download the cards and test them out. And let us know how we can help build your CoP!

Passion to Purpose

Posted on by Lorelei M

Overview

Passion to Purpose (P2P) is a free open-source and delightful online tool that lets learners flex their civic imagination muscles. The purpose of P2P is to help educators lead their learners through the challenging process of generating authentic questions and project ideas based on their personal interests and civic values.

Users are guided through a series of fun prompts (eg: What are you a fan of? What do you want to learn more about?). With the aid of a built in randomizer, they land on an unexpected design challenge in the form of a “How might we question”. P2P works across informal and formal contexts and disciplines. It comes with a free educator guide with lots of helpful tips and strategies for sparking ideation with youth.I recommend Passion to Purpose to all my digital media literacy educators as a great way to ignite student inquiry around topics that matter to them.

Digital Atelier: Designing Connected Learning Spaces

Posted on by Mindy Faber

How might we design a replicable model for a safe, creative and learner-centered environment that shifts the traditional concepts of “schooling”?

That was the challenge posed to Convergence by a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Education grant. Convergence joined forces with Tilden High School in the Back of the Yards, Chicago to create the Digital Atelier (DA), a new kind of learning environment where students could explore interests on their own without the structure of a top down “adult-driven” curriculum.

We partnered with Archeworks, a non-profit design lab, to undertake an eight-month participatory design process to visualize the space. A comprehensive toolkit was developed so that other schools can replicate the process.

The students’ vision for a youth-centered culture and digital learning space sparked such excitement that nearly a dozen other organizations came on board. Convergence then brought in digital media mentors, media artists with expertise in youth development, who could guide students during informal learning time, eg: lunch hours and after-school.  We then adapted Digital Youth Network’s connected mentorship model, a pedagogical framework based on interest-powered and peer-supported learning. 


	


	





	

		
Mentor Hats
			

				Posted on  by Mindy Faber			

			


	
			

			
	

		

The Mentor Hats card deck offer a playful way to think about how your facilitation, teaching, or mentoring style can impact learning. They are ideal for sparking conversations among educators as part of a facilitated workshop. 





Mentor Hats Cards





As educators, we all wear different hats. Which do you wear the best? Which would you like to try on? The cards can be used to play a more structured game, or they can simply be used as a discussion and reflection tool to shake up how you approach teaching.