Now Our Teachers Care About Us with Eric Chagala Transformative Principal 251

Eric Chagala is the principal of of Vista Innovation & Design Academy Twitter

• Changing with the same kids same teachers same place.
• Using the design thinking process to actually get there.
• There is no difference in design thinking between business and schools.
• Trying to create and add value for and in the community.
• Identifying who our users are and what their
• How do you get deep insights?
• Steve Jobs idea, they never would have come up with that idea. Listen deeply, and read between the lines of what people are asking for.
• What is it that they have not imagines.
• About 1000 educational visitors come through our school each year. Want to do better by and for kids. Looking for exposure. Trying to gain understand about what might exist in different capacities.
• What they understand from the perspective that they have. Important for the designers to have a really vast set of exposures.
• It’s not just visiting schools.
• Stopped reading about education stuff. Starting reading and focusing on things from industry.
• Subscribing to more things outside the context of education.
• discussion, reading, and some travel to other places.
• Quallcomm, Mindsets of founding leadership team.
• Translate what we were hearing from students and teachers.
• Looking at creative firms that touch the education sector.
• Diversity of the ecosystem.
• The more diverse an ecosystem the better
• Feb 2013 - spring smiling at each other, year long journey of trying to figure out what a new school would be.
• August 2014, after just 1 year. Taught all day at the old school afternoon and evening were spent learning and gaining empathy.
• Be centered around design thinking. Doesn’t translate very well into pedagogy.
• Pedagogical framework, buck institute on Project-based learning. That gave us a framework to insert design thinking into.
• PBL is more challenging in Math than humanities, so moved to Problem-based learning. Challenge-based learning.
• Design-based learning. Deeper learning & project based & challenge-based
• DBLe - including entrepreneurship to get them ready for the gig economy.
• The narrative we share about the experience that kids get when they come here.
• VIDA - Life - Narrative of life vs. school.
• It’s not design thinking or PBL, what sets us apart is our narrative. This is not school.
• You can’t just show up for 7.5 hours and think you’ll change your life.
• First year - students who were matriculating through. Found some of the kids who had struggled the most in the old school and were stars in the new school. Tell their story on video.
• Turnaround kids.
• Schools have the power to perpetuate or change the culture of the neighborhood.
• “Now our teachers care about us”
• Pursue challenging tasks with
• Love the hell out of every single person, every day.

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