The Power of Linking & Leveraging Assets
I returned Sunday from a wrap-up event in Albuquerque – under the leadership of the engineering outreach initiative of New Mexico State University, teams of high school teachers and university mentors from all over the state have spent the last eight months working on ways to integrate career & technical education (CTE) with STEM (science, technology, engineering & math). Lab colleague Scott Hutcheson and I were with the group in June to orient them to Strategic Doing and help them through the process of clarifying their strategic outcomes and pick first Pathfinder Projects. Since then, they’ve worked with their mentors and met in 30/30s to keep moving. Saturday’s event featured wonderful presentations from the teams that vividly illustrated the power of various aspects of Strategic Doing. Here’s one that captures why linking & leveraging assets creates such great opportunities for collaboration:
The team from Atrisco Heritage Academy High School identified a host of assets in June, but three stood out: an enthusiastic biology teacher, a strong film program in which students wrote and produced videos, and a great culinary arts program.
How they linked these assets was truly inspired – the team decided to create a unit on entomophagy. To you and me – eating insects. The biology teacher has a deep interest in the use of insect protein as a sustainability strategy. As they combined these assets, here’s what resulted – in biology class, the students learn the science and are raising crickets; the film classes are creating a video about the process; the culinary arts teacher is researching recipes to make use of the crickets.
Check out this YouTube video, including great footage of the students introducing their peers to cricket cuisine:
Think these students are going to forget this science unit?
Liz shepherds the expansion of the Lab’s programming and partnerships with other universities interested in deploying agile strategy tools. A co-author of Strategic Doing: 10 Skills for Agile Leadership, she also focuses on the development and growth of innovation and STEM education ecosystems, new tool development, and teaching Strategic Doing.