Y’all. I feel like I have been away from the blog for so long. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, my posts and projects have been sporadic over the last few months. Tomorrow, I’m jumping right back in with plenty of DIY and home decor goodness to make up for it! But until then, I am dying to update you on what’s been going on in our world.
For the past three years, Tom and I have managed a team (and sometimes more than one team) of elementary school students in a program called Destination Imagination, or DI for short. DI is a program that teaches kids how to use collaborative problem solving and creative thinking skills to address open-ended challenges. The teams present their solutions in tournaments around the world. Kids from Kindergarten through University can participate, and I participated myself when I was in high school. But now as team managers, Tom and I can’t offer suggestions or help to the kids, so the solutions that they showcase are completely theirs and theirs alone. Sometimes, their solutions excite us, and other times, they make us absolutely crazy.
The first two years, our teams struggled in finding the sweet spot in collaboration. There were arguments and struggles, and they never really placed higher than middle of the pack in our Regional tournament. These were super creative kids, but they just couldn’t figure out a way to work together without turmoil. Tom and I were disappointed, because we knew that they had it in them, and we hoped that they would at least be able to look back on DI later in life and remember some of the problem solving skills that we worked on. Tom always said that if he helped instill that in just one kid, all of the time and resources we put into the teams would be well worth it. He’s definitely right about that.
This year, we decided that we’d give it one more try. I don’t know if it was fate or what, but we ended up with a smaller team than usual (5 instead of 7), with only 3 of the team members having participated in DI before. But after our first few meetings, we knew that this team was going to be different.
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