Designed to Learn: Authentic and inclusive assessments by design

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing educational inequalities. How can we better serve our most vulnerable students, including neurodiverse learners?

Dr. Portnoy, cognitive scientist and author of Designed to Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion to the Classroom, will introduce design thinking as a lens for creating more equitable outcomes for our learners by invigorating teaching, learning, and assessment. This webinar will include time for questions from attendees.

Game On, Brain On: Learning to Play or Playing to Learn?

Cognitive science and the neurological underpinnings that make the science of learning concrete provide evidence for the way we perceive and engage with the world around us. Join us as we unpack the science and art of playful learning and discover powerful strategies for more empowered learning you can implement tomorrow.

Bugatti + The Brain: The striking similarity between play and gray (matter)

The science of learning and the art of play come together in this fast-paced keynote. Together we explore the learning and assessment embedded in well-made games and our unique cognitive frameworks that unleash powerful learning through play. We discuss attributes of the environment that make gameplay ripe for learning and share strategies for utilizing more authentic and iterative models of assessment to more equitably serve all learners. Join us!

School Administrators of Iowa: Design Thinking for Innovative Change

This session unleashes the power of cognitive science to help you cultivate curiosity and create more purposeful, passionate, and human-centered approaches to leading and learning each day. Together we unpack key tenets of cognitive science and map them onto the empowered learning set free through design thinking and gameful learning experiences. We’ll discuss how and when to apply the 5 elements of design thinking and utilize the author’s “Paper to Plan” protocol to find opportunities to innovate in any space alongside authentic assessments to demonstrate deeper learning.

Participants will:

• Explore key tenets of cognitive science foundational to more purposeful and applied learning.

• Discover five elements of an educationally focused design thinking framework and how to apply each in any learning space.

• Create concrete steps for authentically assessing design thinking experiences that document learning and provide palpable formative feedback for growth towards a more human-centered approach to learning.

Designed to Learn @ ASCD 2021

Empowering learners to be future change makers is the key to building a more just and sustainable future. This session will use the lens of design thinking to harness student, educator, and community voices in solving the most pressing issues of today while preparing learners to tackle the unknown problems of tomorrow.

Together, we will unpack and apply the five elements of design thinking for reframing curriculum that foster purpose and passion for more engaged learning. Participants will emerge with firsthand experience applying this approach in order to elevate student voices into action alongside a clear vision for implementing and iterating this framework tomorrow.

Join us to….

• Experience a powerful framework for scaffolding inquiry and problem solving to become a more critical thinker, compassionate leader, and build more inclusive learning spaces.

• Apply the design thinking process across content and grade levels for empowering and engaging learners to become agents of change.

• Co-create and communicate more dynamic and authentic assessments to drive learning and inform future instruction.

Bugatti + The Brain: The striking similarity between play and gray (matter)

What travels faster than a Bugatti and carries over 1,000 trillion passengers from a single drivers seat? 

The three pound mass between your ears is home to billions of neurons whose signals travel over 270 miles per hour to send messages, otherwise known as human thought. 

Making up only 2% of the human body the brain is the source of what makes us, us. Who we are, what we do, how we move, why we think and react to the world around us.

Join us as we explore the science of perception, attention, and learning to see how our motivation to learn can be best explained by our innate drive to play. You’ll see that games are anything but child’s play, and instead hold the key to unlock limitless learning!

NExT + CAPS: Designed To Learn

Thank you for joining the NExT+CAPS Summer Bash 2020! I’m delighted to be sharing some tips and tricks from my book Designed To Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion To The Classroom.

• In this session you’ll experience the paper to plan protocol I use to illustrate and activate the design thinking process.

• My hope is that you leave this session feeling confident in your ability to fuel more empowered learners and more purposeful learning with some simple tools to begin co-creating a more sustainable future of learning alongside your students this year!

Design Thinking Hackathon with the "Paper To Plan" Protocol

In this fast-paced 1-hour professional development we use the author’s proprietary “Paper to Plan” protocol as we “Prepare to Pivot” in any learning space.

• Educators explore the foundational concepts of design thinking that seamlessly translate to digital spaces and foster essential skills of communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking in your students.

• An extension to essential teacher guided instruction, students learn to co-create meaningful solutions to today’s most pressing issues by collaborating with their peers, honing their communication skills, flexing their latent creativity, and unleashing their critical thinking.

• Through this unique and proprietary protocol useful for both educators and their students, learners become more self-regulated, metacognitively aware, and see themselves as meaning makers in the process of learning as their epistemic beliefs evolve.

Design Thinking: Problem Of Practice To Opportunity To Innovate

Grounded in my book Designed To Learn: Using Design Thinking to Bring Purpose and Passion To The Classroom, you’ll learn to implement the process of design thinking across the curriculum and throughout the district,

• Fuel more empowered learners and more purposeful learning,

• Identify, research, and ideate solutions to solve real-world problems with purpose and passion, and

• Collaborate to design solutions for a sustainable future (aligned to: Designed for Good: Design Thinking Solutions for a Sustainable Future and the 17 UN SDGs)

Raising Community Voice To Design The Change We Want To BE In The World

This unique workshop invites all stakeholders of a learning community to come together and develop a shared understanding of their unique ecosystem and together work to:

• Collaboratively brainstorm a host of opportunities for innovation to enhance learning practice,

• Identify community partners working in this space seeking partners in connecting, engaging, and growing together,

• Explore and co-creating opportunities to effect positive change locally and globally, and

• Design a sustainable and generative plan for each stakeholder to continuously engage with one another in the learning space to continuously design the change they want to BE in the world.

Designed For Good: Designing Sustainable Solutions To Solve Tomorrow's Problems Today

Apply the Designed to Learn framework to unpack issues and design solutions unique to each learning environment,

• Identify the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) achieved by creating solutions for local problems

• Mapping local design to global impact

• As a class, cohort, or community communicate to ideate a design through iteration, prototyping, testing, and continued reflection

Demystifying Assessment: What Matters, Why, and How to See the Bigger Picture

In this daylong workshop we work together to unpack myths from reality when it comes to assessment and delineate assessment practices unique to every space that:

• Enhances and deepens learning and the transfer of knowledge,

• Unlocks the power of authentic assessments unique to each space that extend and accelerate growth and engagement,

• Empower learners through a focus on choice, voice, and community in the way their knowledge is shared,

• Develops qualitatively rich systems of measuring learning as dynamic as each individual, and

• Surfaces powerful tools for measuring what matters while learning to give, take, use, and calibrate feedback to fuel ongoing growth.

Formative Assessment: Measuring What Matters

Most of us believe that if you don’t know, you ask! Unfortunately the science of learning has shown time and again that we don’t know what we don’t know until, well…until we know it! Behold! The power of Formative Assessment! In this workshop we:

• Discuss the iteration and reflection inherent in the process of assessing for learning and the profound impact this approach makes on your learners academic and social-emotional development,

• Discover novel techniques for creating, and applying formative assessment,

• Learn how to use the results of formative assessment to drive impactful instruction, and

• Elevate student voice as an integral role in the process of ongoing learning.

The Joy Of Teaching AND Learning

In this daylong retreat, colleagues are given the time and space to reflect on the joy of teaching and learning while considering:

• Opportunities for more Professional Collaboration & Student-Led Assessment

• Innovative practices for deepening learning and increasing engagement amongst colleagues as content experts within a community of practice,

• Potential interdisciplinary collaborations across the building and throughout the community to deepen practice and increase the impact of our shared work, and

• Approaches for more student-led inquiry and assessment for more authentic and empowered learning across the curriculum.

Authentic Tools For Learning: Creating and Calibrating Assessments To Fuel Feedback And Engagement

How can we evaluate authentic and dynamic student work in the least subjective way possible?

• Learn how to create authentic tools for providing feedback on student work,

• Together we will calibrate and validate current assessments and design a concrete roadmap for future with clear goals and outcomes,

• Delineate pathways for ongoing forward progress with students as co-collaborators of the creation and evaluation of their work, and

• Ensure all learners have the tools and feedback they need to meet their greatest potential

Integrating Tech With Purpose

Tomorrow's Leaders, Today's Tech: Emerging Technologies for Tomorrow's Leaders

• Explore the most innovative emerging technologies,

• Extend learning beyond the walls of the classroom,

• Learn how to implement these tools seamlessly throughout the curriculum.

Game On? Brain On: The Surprising Relationship between Play and Gray (Matter)

Based off my latest book, Game On? Brain On?, discover the science of learning across multimodal domains through social emotional, cognitive, and physical development unique to the learners in your environment,

• Develop strategies to harness powerful learning strategies today,

• Invite learners to collaborate in designing their own multimodal learning experiences tomorrow, and

• Emerge with tips, tools, and powerful practices for using games for learning today where the assessment IS the game, and return the joy and fun to learning

The Science Of Learning: The Art of Applying Cognitive Science

Unpack the cognitive science underlying more engaged, passionate, and purposeful learners in any space:

• Discover the latest in cognitive research aligned to your unique learning community and unpack those buzzwords until they are powerful tools for creating engaged learning,

• Learn about the nature of knowledge and knowing specific to individuals in your space as they vary by age, development, interest, and content area,

• Learn how to bridge the theory to practice gap with research based practices you can use right now, and

• Apply concrete methods to immediately enhance learning in your learning community.

Paper To Plan: Co-Creating Impactful And Human-Centered Experiential Learning Through Games

Active inquiry into the games we loved as kids and the games our kids love today,

• See games as an opportunity for growth, learning, and enhanced discovery,

• Learn how the mechanics of game play align to the mechanics of learning,

• Create, test, and emerge with a working prototype of a completely unique game that will inspire, engage, and delight your learners!