The Art and Craft of Designing & Facilitating Learning Spaces- Masterclass with the Kaospilot.

You know you are missing school when all ‘purpose’ is directed to cleaning one's living space, labeling the linen cupboard, and uploading documents and photographs on to a Cloud in the fear of an apocalypse! So, when I heard of the Kaospilot Masterclass all I was seeking was some interaction and conversation around education and a break from incessant cleaning. 

The Kaospilot based in Sweden defines themselves as a hybrid business and design school, focusing on a multi-sided education in leadership and entrepreneurship. Their website said that The Art and Craft of Designing & Facilitating Learning Spaces Masterclass will introduce, explore and train participants in experiential learning and teaching and the art of facilitation & curating the pursuit of knowledge through learning processes, strategies, increased engagement & safe learning spaces. This sounded worthy of my time so why not I thought and enrolled. 3 days spent at the Masterclass took me by pleasant surprise. The quality of the interactions, course content, and reaffirmation of my own personal growth as a learner and educator over the past year was spectacular. The Kaospilot Masterclass was also a reaffirmation of what I was learning at Srishti and the overall vision of the PPDE program. 

For a while now I have been thinking about what after the PPDE and secretly hoping it never ends, as closure would mean plotting new pathways for the self. Where would I put my skills to use, What will I do with the Craft Caravan, Why doe all that I am learning seem so right at a personal level and yet so far fetched as an educator?  I grappled with these worries and silenced myself with — ‘all education is only as good as what the learner chooses to do with it’ and tugged on. 

And then over 3 days at Kaospilot I suddenly saw the light and a new understanding dawned! What struck me the most about the Kaospilot Masterclass (over and above the superb content and delivery) was the relevance of everything I am studying at the PPDE. Both Paddy and Manjari will tell you how averse I have been to using Thinking Tools. By the second term, I was grudgingly seeing use in them, but they were tedious intrusions anyway. 

At Kaospilot a lot of thinking tools were used, most tools seemed liked distant cousins of the ones that were introduced to me the PPDE, some different thinking tools were used as well, but at the core, all of them used divergent thinking to arrive at convergence. Strangely I took to all this activity like a fish to water! Firstly because I was not overwhelmed by so much non linear thinking, that Post-it's magically moving into ‘random buckets’ didn’t trouble me. I seem to have developed a great ability to allow for thought to emerge out of chaos. I had to head a team for one of the projects at the Masterclass and strangely my own idea of Leadership had blossomed into an energy I had not witnessed before (I kept recalling my Leadership Manifesto all along). Later, at the feedback session, my team of 7 reaffirmed my style leadership and also shared with me what they would like to see more off.   

So where am I now after this journey of reaffirmation? 

When I asked all those questions as to where I am with my PPDE, and what after, there was a crucial bit I was missing which the Kaospilot Masterclass plugged. I am now poised to look at Education from the frame of Design, and not merely from the frame of an educator! So what I am essentially doing, term on term with my PPDE is building skills that allow me to look at learning frameworks from the perspective of the end user/learner, asking the many ‘whys’, allowing for the many ‘hows’, and asking ‘what’ over and over again. Upon shifting the frame to Design, the role, responsibility, expectation and consequence of education changes. When education is embedded in the design, it moves into a powerful space of Change!  I have now begun to revisit the Craft Caravan from this framework and am actively moving away from merely defining the pedagogy of my programmes and focusing on the ‘Why Framework’ more consciously. This revisioning of my own practice from the space of effective design has been a great leap forward from where I was a few months ago. 

Here are a  few snapshots of the Kaospilot Masterclass, I have over a few 100 pictures, but this should sort of do for now. 

   Portrait wall. Being aware of the 5 C's. Setting the frame of expectations.

 IDOART set the framework for the 3 days. This was a mantra we diligently followed. We even added our own rules to  make it democratic. 

   How does learning need to be. Why are Hand, Head and Heart used this the process was explored through the Klob  Learning Cycle. 

Set of questions after 2 activities where we used Lego ( Swedes are very proud of Lego) and Yo Yo's to experience learning by doing both as individuals and groups. These activities were defined to understand leadership and how people respond to it. 

Prepping to use the big fat Kaospilot tool called Vision Backcasting which is very similar to Understanding by Design but more non linear and mammoth. The entire 3 days were guided by the Golden Circle and constantly defining each movement  within the frame, this felt like I was revisiting UbD again.  

Thinking of pedagogy and design from the frame of competence building. Learning Arches a tool used to depict the layers of embedded learning within each workshop activity, very similar to Cubic Design Curriculum, but this tool tracks phases of setting, growing and landing. 

The mammoth Visual Backcasting Tool where we worked with project owners to redefine strategy and design of 3 selected live projects. I worked and led a project to define a Democratic Ethics curriculum being built for primary school children in Jharkand. The tool resembles UbD, but is extremely non linear and converges magically in Phase2. The feedback tool is similar to the Ladder of Feedback. Post this each team made a presentation of their project. 

These fantastic people from varied walks of life were my co travellers on this journey of 3 days. The Master Class ended with sparkling wine, a certification ceremony and reading out our oath of commitment to practice. We had to talk of one thing we will take forward and one thing we will leave behind and never revisit. The certificates were designed as boarding passes, symbolically meaning - Ready To Fly :)

  

After these three fantastic days, there was 2 days at the Quest to Learn Summit where I heard many educators, change makers and thinkers in the space of Learning speak and share their ideas. Punya Mishra - Michigan State University & Kiran Bir Sethi - Riverside were my favourite speakers. Punya gave me reaffirmation on the beauty of making and experiencing to learn, Kiran brought an avalanche of tears, for like her, I am an 'accidental educator' who is slowly learning to see it as a badge and not a disadvantage. 

I will write more on the Quest to Learn Summit in my next post as the incessant cleaning bug calls me again, now to vacuum the house :)