MIT2023- Omaha Hui

Omaha Hui

The Omaha Hui was a first chance for the 2023 MIT cohort to meet in person. For half of us, that meant flying up from Christchurch! It was really nice to meet Michelle and Essie at Christchurch airport first.

We met up with two others in the cohort at Auckland airport. As well as one of our facilitators. We then drove North to Omaha, to meet the rest of our group. 

The purpose of this hui was to really think about the challenges we had identified, clarify the wording around our proposals, and how we could address them. We had a range of sessions across the hui to help us with these things. 

Discovery:

This was our first session, which was designed to get us thinking about how to phrase of our projects in the best possible way. 

This was done through a role play, where our facilitators acted as BOT/Principals of a school, and we were the parents of students at the school. The Principals would make claims about the challenges they were facing and we had to question what the school was doing to the address these challenges and how they came about in the first place. 

It was a very effective activity for demonstrating the implications of the words we use.

Empathy: 

Our next session was centred around role playing our challenges to consider both the point of view of the kaiako and rangitahi involved. It was interesting to think about how to portray the challenge to others and consider the perspectives of those involved.                            Essie and I worked together on this, and while it was a lot of fun to step into the role of a learner in her class and causing her frustration, I can also see how similar her challenge is to those we also see in the Secondary setting. We then used the empathy gathered from the role play to complete perspective maps from both perspectives.

Interpretation:

We then used all we had learned from the role plays to re-phrase our challenges. We used two techniques to do this. The second being "How might we..". This prompt really helped with us phrasing our challenges in a positive way, and it was really interesting to see how different the outcome was when we changed from "What is the challenge?" to "How might we..". 

My HMW is: How might we support secondary teachers to incorporate literacy strategies into subject specific contexts. 

We then used our HMW to think about the opportunities that could come with it. Each of us had post-it notes and we had to suggest opportunities connected to each others projects. There was some really great suggestions on mine, some of which I had already started to look into, and some I had not considered. 

Who:

The next session was for us to reflect on who could offer us support with our project, we started off with the obvious- support through school, colleagues, the MIT team, and personal support. We were then asked to add Big Ideas- people we don't know that could offer support or collaboration. This I really struggled to think about, as I am quite a pragmatic thinker. It was really cool to hear some of the big thoughts from others though. There are definitely lots of platforms that could have awesome partnerships.

Ideation:

This last session was where we started brainstorming what we might develop to address our challenge. We started with something called "Crazy 8s". Where we had to come up with eight different ideas of what we could develop. I really struggled to come up with 8 different ones within the time frame, but listening to some of the others ideas helped me to complete all eight. 

We then presented all eight ideas to the group and we went round each project and added stamps to the ideas we thought resonated with the HMW to best. Finally, we added a big sticker to our favourite of the crazy 8 for each person. 

For mine, there was two that were the most popular. Both ideas are very similar, but each works through the information in a different sequence. One of the website portals starts with subject first, then would go into resources, while the other would section off based on literacy resource type first, then into subject examples. Subject first was the most popular within our group, but I think it will be something to test when prototyping.

Where to next...

From here we are to start thinking about our prototype. We meet at the end of the month for our first KPMG hui, which will centre around prototyping. 

I am looking forward to seeing everyone again, after a wonderful first hui.