Turkish Private Schools Association 14. Annual Education Symposium was held between 29th and 31st January in Belek, Antalya. GEDS was present in the symposium, delivering one lecture and two workshops.
In accordance with the overall theme of “the Teacher of the Future,” Gülay Özkan’s lecture was about improving the experience of education. With a reference to Klaus Krippendorff, a design theorist and a professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Özkan defined “design” as a tool for “understanding and making sense of the things around us.” Such an understanding of design has the potential to be a framework for solving complex problems that are evident in education too. With examples from around the world, Özkan demonstrated how this notion of design can be best applied to educational domain. She mentioned that design can be specifically utilized for solving organizational problems in schools and coming up with more student-focused strategies.
Also, GEDS facilitated two workshops. One workshop was titled “Training the Entrepreneurs of the Future” while the other one was “Design Thinking for the Teachers of the Future.”
In the “Training the Entrepreneurs of the Future” workshop, the main objective was to discover how students who passively receive information and accept or don’t notice problems can be transformed into active seekers of knowledge and problem-solvers. Using design tools, ways of encouraging students to embrace such characteristics were explored.
“Design Thinking for the Teachers of the Future” was aimed at evaluating how might we enhance the experience of a student getting bored in the class, what characteristics a teacher should display, what actions he/she should take in such cases. Realizing that seemingly grand problems can actually be solved through small changes by adopting a human-centric perspective was the most interesting detail in the workshop for the participants.
Being comprised of lectures and practical exercises, both workshops were well-received by the participants, producing interesting insights about the future of education and teachers’ role in this transformation. In these workshops, the participants had the chance to experiment with a way of thinking that they had never done before. They evaluated education-related problems from the eyes of their students and defined new roles for teachers using design tools. More detailed outputs can be found here: “Training the Entrepreneurs of the Future”
A few of the audience members praised the lecture for “making a relatively abstract topic easily digestible” for non-design-related people. The workshops, additionally, were characterized as “fun and informative.” It was a great pleasure for us to be a part of this event. We are looking forward to collaborate in future occasions.
