I am excited to share with you my latest nerdy idea pushing my own boundaries of hands-on learning for teaching new concepts and fostering connections between ideas among students. As you dive into this post which is quite long, you’ll get a glimpse of my creative journey thinking to engage students in understanding the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and helping students build connections to their own personal lives as they are the next generation of change makers.

How this post came to be:

A bit of background: I was en route to the 26th International Human Rights Conference at the University of Iowa, where I was presenting an interactive session aimed at helping students grasp the interconnectedness of the SDG’s and using their own interests and passions to build bridges of learning. And what better way to capture my thoughts and ideas than by using my iPhone’s voice memo app while driving to share and record my thinking? I later transcribed them using an academic research AI platform that I love called Notably, allowing me to refine my thoughts into less chaos and something presentable for others to learn from and sprinkle it with my unique style and approach. You are now reading the words from me babbling to myself out loud while driving. I also used ChatGPT to help me organize and offer some writing suggestions for this longer post.

Last, a few other tools used

• starryai.com – I used this image creator to design the blog title image
• iMovie – to merge the two videos together. I pulled apart the video and audio and used Adobe Enhance to clean up the audio for the video as some students were quite soft spoken. This helped me to clean up the audio and layer it back into iMovie.

As an educator who loves to bring creativity, energy, and innovation to the classroom, I’m all about authentic learning experiences, valuing the process over the product, and creating work that has real meaning for our students. This mindset led me to develop a hands-on activity that brings together the power of conversation and connection with everyone’s favorite building tool(at least it should be): LEGO bricks. As stated earlier, I thought it would be helpful to create a post capturing my thinking and key insights pre session and post session.

Here’s how it goes:

After a brief introduction into the word “sustainability” and unpacking what this word means, students pick one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that resonates with them. They then have to build a LEGO model representing that goal in just five minutes – talk about a creative challenge that has some serious pressure! And by the way they cannot build a goal that someone else is building so they will have to communicate with one another in their groups to figure out who is building what. Next, they create a “connector” using a smaller base plate that links their individual goals to those of their peers, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these global objectives. This idea was modified from the very popular and useful activity called hexagonal thinking. There are so many incredilbe examples of how this has been used by educators, but I took this concept and modified it to a LEGO version.

By constructing these connections, students are pushed to think critically about the relationships between different goals and how they can collaborate to create a better future. You can access the slides to see how I have constructed the process.

Throughout this process, I made sure there was a plethora of resources for students to express their ideas, and even set up a LEGO “inspiration station” slide section for those who needed a little caffeine-like boost to jump-start their creativity. However, I  I am working with middle school students so I don’t think they will need any extra caffeine! Additionally, I documented the entire session to capture the power of metaphor, analogy, and collaborative learning as students built their connections and presented their work to their classmates.

I truly believe this strategy can be applied to any content, standard, or assessment and can have a powerful impact on the way students think and learn.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts, experiences, and ideas on how we can empower our students to think critically, make connections, and develop a lifelong love of learning.

Pre Lesson Thinking

Challenges & Goals:

The main challenge is engaging students who are unfamiliar with the material and creating a space for them to learn effectively. The goal is to create an interactive, hands-on approach that allows students to explore their own understanding of sustainable development goals while fostering authentic learning experiences. And I need to consider how to quickly create a safe space for students to work with others they have never met, feel safe to share ideas, and create opportunities to work with others in a new space and environment.

Emerging Patterns:

Throughout the development and execution of this lesson plan, several emerging patterns become apparent, such as utilizing basic human needs for enhancing educational processes(humor, play, space to think, respect of ideas, etc.) focusing on student engagement through hands-on activities, encouraging vulnerability and open-mindedness among students, exploring various ways of connecting ideas within a given topic, and adapting teaching strategies for different content areas.

Key Moments From My Voice Recording to University of Iowa:

• “I believe in a hands-on approach… work that matters with the life of students.”
• “I’m going to remix the Hexagonal Thinking Activity with LEGO… they’re going to build a model on a larger base and removing the sides of a hexagon.”
• “How do we create engagement? How do we create a space where they take in all the learning?”
• “This was just a crazy idea I had in the middle of the night stressing about how I was going to engage students in this learning… I wanted to create something powerful and not just be another adult that comes and goes in the life of kids.”

Space Setup and Lesson Materials

• Slidedeck
• Cheat sheet of ideas to help understand how to connect the goals with various LEGO build techniques

Explanations of images below

Image 1: Picture of space with room divided by both tables and post in middle. I placed LEGO in circular fashion to convey a communal gathering which happened on their own when they began to work together.

Image 2: The pile of 50+ lbs of LEGO

Image 3: The gray baseplates were used for the Goal Individual build. The blue would be used to build out ideas, but we bypassed this due to time.

Image 4: The space of room from the front. You can see unity and collaboration is not designed into the space.

Post Lesson Thinking and Reflecting:

Here is my reflection aimed to inspire other educators by sharing my experiences with using LEGO to address global issues.

I’m always seeking to empower educators by emphasizing the importance of inquiry and hands-on learning. This time, I was pleasantly surprised with the results of a collaborative LEGO activity focused on the SDG’s as this was all a new idea and concept for me to test out.

General Review

During the workshop, I facilitated two sessions, both consisting of diverse groups of middle school students from different schools in Iowa. As an educator, it’s essential to adapt to different cultural dynamics and student personalities. To make sure the students could collaborate effectively, I decided to make the groups larger, which led them to work together as one cohesive group of 10 instead of my original idea of smaller groups of 4-6 to nudge them to work and communicate with students outside of their school. After all, this is the experience of the conference and I needed to support that learning. I am glad I made this change so that they had to work with new people and build some connections.

After we broke down the word, sustainability, I started the activity with the students individually building LEGO models representing the global goals. Most of them didn’t know the in-depth meaning of the goals, so they had to rely on their working knowledge. They had to come together, talk to each other and come to agreement on who was going to build what goal as only one student could build one goal. This created an initial conversation and working together to agree with one another.

The students then had to find connections between the goals and form a cohesive story. Another change I made was after the 5-7 minutes to build their individual model I had them all present what they built and how it connected to the goal. I challenged students to listen with a focus on what were they hearing that connected to their own build. Teaching and guiding how to listen and what to listen for is really important.

After they presented, they then were given the next task of networking and connecting all their builds into one cohesive story model. This is the adaptation of the hexagonal thinking where they could connect in different ways besides the shape sides. I provided them in the slides various ways to think about connecting ideas, but most had a vision and were ready to get to work.

What stood out to me was the focus, engagement, and determination of the students as they built and presented their models. They were able to articulate their thoughts in a powerful way, even though some were nervous or lacked confidence.

Despite the time constraints of a 50-minute session, this activity demonstrated the potential for more comprehensive lessons. By breaking the activity into smaller chunks and giving the students time to research the goals, the end results could be phenomenal. And true for any subject matter that would push students to build connections between ideas.

This experience inspired me to consider how we could integrate universal constructs into similar activities. Students could build their understanding of universal constructs and provide examples from their learning experiences over an academic year. This activity would help to create a more impactful and comprehensive learning experience for the students as part of a reflective culmination of learning.

Of course, testing this activity with kids highlighted areas for improvement, but overall, the engagement and focus of the students gave me hope for the future. It reinforced the importance of providing authentic learning experiences, inquiry, and better pedagogical practices.

I firmly believe that when these practices become more widespread, we’ll see the true potential of what our students can achieve. As educators, it’s our responsibility to empower and support them on this journey. I hope this reflection has inspired you as much as it has inspired me. What questions or ideas have sparked for you? I would love to hear from you.

Challenges & Goals

Throughout my sessions, I faced various challenges, such as managing diverse groups of students, adapting to some language barriers, and ensuring cross-collaboration between students from different schools. My goals were to help students understand global issues, engage them in collaborative problem-solving, and explore the potential of using LEGO as a tool for learning and communication.

Surprising Takeaways

I was impressed by how quickly the students were able to build models representing global issues and connect them into one cohesive story. The activity kept students highly engaged and focused, even those who initially lacked confidence or were hesitant. The potential of expanding this type of activity over a longer period or applying it to other educational contexts (e.g., exploring universal constructs) excited me.

Emerging Patterns

Observing the students, I noticed that they naturally formed circles around shared resources (LEGO pieces) when prompted to collaborate. Middle school students displayed various leadership styles and ways of articulating ideas. Additionally, tangible tools like LEGO can help boost confidence and facilitate idea-sharing among students. And of course no matter where you are in the world, middle school students are middle school students. If you know, then you know 🙂

Key Moments

Some pivotal moments during the sessions from my voice recording included:

• “I wanted them as part of an international day of human rights to intermingle and intersect across school lines.”
• “Again, kids blow you out of the water when you get out of their way.”
• “What can kids really truly do when this type of learning becomes more of the norm in all classrooms?”

In conclusion, this reflection demonstrates the power of inquiry and hands-on learning in fostering collaboration, problem-solving, and communication among students. By sharing these experiences and insights, I hope to empower other educators to explore innovative teaching strategies and unlock their students’ potential. Let’s continue to create powerful learning experiences and cultivate authentic inquiry in our classrooms.

Here are their final explanations of learning.

Some other images of the builds