Le Grimoire Spontracté, or when design thinking inspires

by Annie Lévesque, teacher at Collège Sainte-Anne

During a training led by Factry, my team and I took a creative approach to solve a problem related to distance education. A first activity led us to identify the difficulties we experience in the virtual classroom and to name the changes in the teacher-student relationship given the context of the pandemic. Concerns common to all team members emerged. We had to highlight recurring emotions, themes or issues. Subsequently, we learned to construct a promising question:

"How could we allow teenagers struggling to adapt to new ways of learning to participate in class discussions during planned activities given that we do not have as many interactions (teacher-learner) as before? ?

We therefore had to think of a sharp target audience to orient our thinking towards concrete solutions. Following the formulation of the problem, we had to state the constraints that inspire us. The ideas resulting from this process could be extrapolated to more general situations later.

The most interesting moment was the creation of our prototype "spontracté" (cross between the words spontaneous and relaxed). We illustrated our thought pattern using photos found on the Internet, which led us to build a common concept of our ideas. From this process was born the “Spontracted Grimoire”, a bank of energizing activities designed to enhance online lessons with adolescents. The objective is to create moments of complicity in order to promote their adhesion.

Our concept aims to free the speech of the students and trigger laughter and smiles by relaxing the atmosphere. Ultimately, we hope to bond, build self-confidence and engage everyone. You will find several activities in this evolving padlet.

Dimension (s) of digital competence related to this article
10- Solve a variety of digital problems

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