Tag: Communities of Practice

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!

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.

Spy Hop: Building a Resilient Learning Community

Posted on by Mindy Faber

Profile

Spy Hop is youth media organization based in Salt Lake City, Utah providing over 18,000 youth, ages 9 to 20 with scaffolded programming in film, audio, music and design. Programs take place at its center in downtown Salt Lake City and across the state, in collaboration with schools, other community-based organizations, and Utah’s juvenile justice services. Working collaboratively with their peers and guided by professional media artists, students explore their creativity, identity and career and higher education interests.

Musicology Students from Spy Hop

Challenge

Spy Hop needed an external evaluator that truly understood the unique and complex role of youth media organizations in amplifying youth voices and advancing youth agency and civic engagement. This meant creating an evaluation plan that would not only look at youth gains in media arts skills, social, emotional development and academic knowledge, but would examine the impact of youth media on audiences, communities and societal perceptions of youth. One of the unique challenges was to better understand how Spy Hop might use innovative audience engagement tools to elicit deeper and more meaningful insights around adult perceptions of youth experience. 

Outcomes Mapping Workshop led by Convergence

Approach

We designed a new logic model and theory of action, created a rubric and assessment system based on real world competencies and authentic performance tasks, and aligned learning outcomes to national standards in SEL, media literacy, STEAM and media arts. We also trained Spy Hop teaching artists to build a community of practice in order to reflect on and improve their pedagogy. We worked collaboratively to develop a series of innovative audience engagement strategies. We are now building an alumni study to measure longitudinal impact. Check out our case study on Spy Hop’s virtual programming response to COVID-19 and our 2018-19 Evaluation Report.

Design Thinking Workshop led by Convergence

We are Spy Hop: Showing Up During COVID-19

Posted on by Mindy Faber
Spy Hop’s robot delivers video equipment to students at a safe-distance

Overview

During the COVID-19 outbreak, Spy Hop, a Utah-based youth media organization, effectively engaged several hundred young people in media arts education locally and nationally by swiftly pivoting to a bold experimental virtual approach. A study conducted by Convergence Design Lab reports that while many youth-service organizations furloughed staff and paused operations during COVID-19, Spy Hop adapted quickly and delivered virtual programs to a geographically and age diverse population of youth using principles grounded in connected learning.

“While many organizations seem to have floundered with the displacement of familiar programs, Spy Hop has managed to turn its lemons into lemonade,”

Challenges

We are Spy Hop: Showing up During COVID-19 is a 16 page ethnographic chronicle that vividly describes the challenges and decision-making process that occurred at Spy Hop between late March and early June 2020.

The report finds that Spy Hop succeeded as a direct result of its facility with three particular organizational behaviors and that these behaviors shed light on what collective resilience looks like in action.

Testimonial

Mindy Faber and the incredible Convergence Design Lab are invaluable partners, collaborators, cheerleaders, advisors, and friends. Their work has pushed Spy Hop and our teaching staff to deeply examine our pedagogy and push us to be better, to do better, to be critical thinkers of our own work. Through our partnership, Convergence Design Lab has given us the insight, guidance, and tools to empower us to better articulate our positive impact on the youth we serve and our place in the world as change-makers.

—Matt Mateus, Deputy Director, Spy Hop