The Learning Adventures approach is distinctive because it celebrates surprise, serendipity, endless possibilities for connection making, and neat phenomena. The best Learning Adventures are interdisciplinary, open-ended, and appropriate for a wide variety of ages and expertise levels.

Learning Adventure Professional Development

The “secret sauce” of the Learning Adventure approach to professional development is that the workshop experience itself is a Learning Adventure. Teachers awaken their senses to identify provocations replete with neat phenomena that can inspire sophisticated learning-by-doing in any classroom.

Joining, Creating, Thinking, and Sharing Learning

Learning Adventures are interdisciplinary projects that expand the breadth, depth, and complexity of classroom projects while amplifying the potential of each learner and exceeding the expectations of the curriculum. Learning adventures support the notion that the project should be a teacher’s smallest unit of concern, while engaging students, and helping teachers create more productive contexts for learning. A piece of literature, news item, scientific phenomena, painting, or local issue may be just the provocation needed to spark deep and sustained learning.

The richest learning adventures are suitable at multiple grade levels and across subject domains.

After an introduction to the learning adventure approach and discussion of its benefits, participants will team up to explore a particular learning adventure from an assortment of possible themes, such as:

What Happens in a Learning Adventures Workshop?

Educators are invited to experience a Learning Adventure before beginning the process of designing Learning Adventures for students. Next, teams of educators will embark on designing a Learning Adventure.

Workshop participants don’t need to teach any specific subject or have a great passion for a particular learning adventure to jump in the pool, make great discoveries, learn-by-doing, and become a better child-centered educator. The learning adventure “destinations” are ambiguous by design.

Workshop Agenda

As a community we are on a mission to become better teachers by embracing opportunities to be better learners.

• This full-day workshop begins with a mini learning adventure for the participants to experience, followed by a discussion of effective prompt setting, and the six-part Learning Adventures approach.
• Next, collaborative groups of educators form to design Learning Adventures based on the model.
• Participants review their new Learning Adventures design and align it to curricular objectives.
• Sharing of Learning Adventures with the entire workshop community.

Learning Adventures require educators to:

• Experience learning in a particular domain
• Collect resources
• Curate objects to think with for students
• Create a plan to prepare the learning environment
• Design prompts for students that result in a dive deep into personally meaningful projects
• Transcend the expectations of the curriculum

Classroom Results

In a Learning Adventures workshop, educators learn to prepare their unique learning environment for growth in the form of tools, resources, expertise, and increasingly complex provocations. Once back in the classroom they are able to plant the smallest seed possible to lead children to bloom in the most glorious garden.

Constructing Modern Knowledge’s Learning Adventures workshop is:

• An assembly of critical friends
• A hands-on workshop
• A model of adding creative computation, making, and modern technology to PBL
• A collaborative research and development effort
• A supportive learning culture
• A curriculum design workshop