Friday Thoughts #5: Wayfinding, Doorknobs and People Based Learning
Readers, what are you thinking of Friday Thoughts? Wondering if they are compelling enough to keep as a regular feature. 3 quick questions. I would love to hear your thoughts. ♥️
AHHHHH. Happy Friday!
A new Friday Thoughts to share some inspiration as we enter the weekend.
Friday Thoughts aims to:
AMPLIFY: Take aways from posts and podcasts… what inspires?
BUILD connections: Tools, resources and community…what can you use?
CONNECT & COMMIT: People, places, ideas…what resonates?
In this issue:
AMPIFY: Posts and books and resources on wayfinding- designing for LIFE.
How can schools best prepare youth for the future? Instead of setting long-term plans, developing Wayfinding Abilities is experiences more than planning.
BUILD: A model for healthy conversations by an improv artist/researcher.
Improvisation is well-known as comedy and entertainment, but during the past decade it has grown as a method of teaching and learning and LIFE as well.
CONNECT: with the
of Profile, a blog and podcast about inspirational people.
In each week’s newsletter, Pompliano deep dives into the life and work of a newsmaker, thought leader, visionary, or all-around interesting human.
AMPLIFY
🔄Direction over Destination
The concept I am all about right now: Wayfinding.
Most of us make decisions by paying attention to external signals and standards. We follow academic, social or cultural standards of “excellence” and might ignore internal longing of “resonance”.
Wayfinding is all paying attention to our internal signals and standards. I wonder if humans have forgotten how to “read” their internal signals because of all the modern noise. How can we quiet the noise to find the signals?
Inspiration comes from this amazing book, You Need a Manifesto, and this accompanying teaching resource by Charlotte Burgess-Auburn, published by Stanford d.school. And in this post:
And most recently, Ivan Cestero’s post on LinkedIn, an excerpt below,
Most schools still don’t help kids systematically connect interests and passions to real world opportunities and career pathways. Crazy– I could hardly think of anything more important.
It’s not about finding THE PATH– it’s about learning to link what lights you up to what’s out there for you. And then doing that for like 10 different versions of you. Because life is hard and you don’t get what you want and you’re likely to change your mind anyway. And because we all– but teens especially– don’t know what they don’t know.
We get caught up in key knowledge, skills, projects, experiences, professional learning. But ultimately school must help translate internal (self) and external (academic, experiential) knowledge into OPPORTUNITY. Or it just remains as “potential”.
Here’s my internal message right now: we should seek direction, but not necessarily always be fixated on destination. A fixed destination loses the beauty and the serendipity of what happens along the way. Instead, focus on pointing your internal compass in the right direction.
Ivan Cestero’s prompt I am sharing, “🎙️I dig this work, but we do need to rename it. It’s design + ikigai + entrepreneurship + hero’s journey + maybe a bit of early therapy… What should we call it? What are you calling your version of it?”
BUILD
🚪Doorknobs, not Stop signs
With our focus on listening to ourselves and each other recently, I’ve been digging in to research on conversation. I found a useful framework.
This great article offers a conversation model. The author, Adam Mastroianni, a Columbia Business School researcher who studies conversations and how people perceive each other. He is also studies improv.1 In this article, he coins the concept of "stop signs vs. doorknobs". His research has identified that most questions we ask are like a stop sign. They invite an answer that naturally ends the conversation.
An alternative is to ask questions or make statements that are more like doorknobs, that invite the other person to open them and walk through; to start telling a story.
Stop sign: Where did you go on vacation?
Doorknob: How did you decide where to go on vacation?
The first question will more likely than not lead to a conversation stop when the person responds with a location. Follow up like, “How was it?” requires heavy lifting to answer. A doorknob will more likely than not lead to a story. Every story offers new opportunities for us, as listeners, to attach to a point and further the connection and discourse.
CONNECT
🧠Inspirational People from the Profile by Polina
Instead of a featured person, this post offers a resource where people are featured.
The creator of a fabulous blog and podcast, both called the Profile, Polina Pompliano, tells stories of inspiring, interesting, and story filled people.
Some favorites— one with James Clear and one with Brandon Stanton are models of what People Based Learning is all about > personal stories that inspire durable learning.
If you have not already found
and Profile, is a blog and podcast you can get lost in easily. LOVE.If you like what you read, click the ♥️ above. I would love to hear from you.
There are so many applications for improv, and I love this article about its use in schools.