TEDxAtlanta Adventure: Design Thinking with Tier1 Performance

 

We are pleased to feature a piece from MACIE student, Dartez Jacobs. As part of his capstone inquiry project, Jacobs shares key insights from a recent a TEDx conference.

Coming away from a TEDx conference can be very challenging. There is so much information to soak in, activating ideas we take from them is no easy task. Tier1 Performance teamed up with TEDx to facilitate a workshop that helped to guide our ideas even further. This was my first introduction to the process and brain science behind Design Thinking. The room was set up in a way that sectioned each component of the five-stage Design Thinking Model in a different location of the space. The five stages are: Define, Test, Empathize, Ideate, and Prototype. We were instructed to go stand by whichever stage that we felt was a strong suite. My group was the sole group who couldn’t chose one specific area, so we created our own between the Empathizers and Ideators. As a conceptualist, I feel empathy is very important to business success and to create sound solutions.

A unifying theme throughout the MACIE program is participatory creativity. This Tier 1 workshop gave participants an opportunity to work through the Design Thinking process together in overcoming the limiting beliefs behind rest.

The most unifying theme of TEDxAtlanta was Saundra Dalton’s talk about the rest cycle and different rest deficiencies. Our adventure focused on how we could individually improve our rest patterns. We split up into groups and acknowledged our current state and goals related to our desired rest cycle.

Rest can be split into seven areas: mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and physical. We reflected on our energy levels during the week and within a group exercise came up with ways we could rest specific to the identified areas with deficiencies.

As a group we uncovered core issues related to the rest we lacked by completing a rest log. We each came up with individual solutions that were a result of overcoming the limiting beliefs behind rest. In many ways this is exactly what we do as educators in making room for change in our education system. Seeing children as creative thinkers and innovative makers is how we move to action, from thinking to doing