Institutions

Having worked as an educator for more than twenty years,  I find that my skills and experience are useful in helping institutions chart an exciting path forward. Institutional change and innovation can be daunting, but also powerful!

Nothing excites me more than working with students, fellow adults, or institutions to elicit a clearer vision of where they are headed and then support in articulating practical steps to help them move in the desired direction.

These days, I work through the framework I developed with my business partner, Sayan Sinha. We call it PRIMER.

Check out our website or email us at connect@primeredu.com for more informaiton.

Institutions I have worked with to bring about transformation:

The Cothran Center for Vocational Reflection, Furman University: I designed and facilitated a February, 2023 weekend workshop/retreat for university students on how to live more purposefully, centered around the Japanese concept of Ikigai. I then repeated the workshop in July, 2023 for alumni from the ages of 23-73! The retreat was accompanied by the introduction of a bespoke 30-day journal to reinforce the ideas and to help participants develop habits of mindful reflection. Surveys conducted at the end  of each reported that participants walked away with new tools for shaping their path forward. All participants but one requested follow up sessions to continue learning. 

LEAD M-Bangladesh & Nepal: Along with my business partner, Sayan Sinha, I designed a three-day workshop to introduce our PRIMER kit, a set of nine principles (with accompanying practices) for fostering healthy Teams that lead into a model for Projects drawn primarily from the worlds of Systems and Design Thinking. Together, the Teams and Projects elements form PRIMER, a highly flexible framework to support authentic collaboration for change. We rely on images and metaphors from nature, in part to make the whole system accessible across cultural and language barriers. We were thrilled to prototype it and deeply moved by the reception (despite the fact that I could only be present virtually and that we were working in multiple languages). One participant said, "Our work in rural areas is so difficult and we often carry it alone. Now we have a way to share our burdens with each other and help to carry them." We’re looking forward to sharing the kit more widely and to seeing how it might be utilised in a wide variety of contexts! 

The Peddie School: I am supporting a transition to portfolio assessment from the initial introduction through the design of interactive exercises to help the Curriculum Committee create their own vision of how portfolios might work at Peddie, in alignment with the school's mission.

Outschool Refugee Pilot; This pilot came about in response to a suggestion I made regarding online secondary education for refugee teens. With my facilitation, the nonprofit arm of this large online learning platform is now piloting a program to offer academic and mental health courses free of charge to refugee children. I firmly believe this innovation has the power to radically change education access for this critical population.

SIL-Bangladesh; a development project in its starting phase, I am designing a community development kit to work with adolescent health and attitudes toward menstruation and puberty in a minority community. The goal is to combine economic empowerment with a sustainable approach to female hygiene. I bring both design thinking expertise and twenty years of experience working with adolescents.

Woodstock School, Mussoorie, India; a ten-year process of slow institutional transformation where I was able to prototype many different approaches and tools for community dialogue and the community co-creation of a robust educational philosophy. This included a four-year project to found a Centre for Imagination at the school.

Schumacher College, Devon, UK;  A six-week investigation into the core purpose and identity of the college, using co-design methods.

Dartington Hall Estate, Devon, UK; A twelve-week engagement first with place-making on the large and fragmented estate, and then with the community of people who work on the estate. 

NIT, Gurgaon, India; A short-term consultancy to help NIT design an effective bridge from secondary to tertiary education in North India, so that young people might enter university with tighter focus and purpose.

Escuela Americana, San Salvador; A position to support a cultural shift in the school towards authentic empowerment, greater collaboration and co-creation, and to support teachers in fundamentally shifting the approach to learning and teaching to encourage student voice and initiative.