I have been DI'ed, again!

Remember those days when I spent lots of time doing DI (Destination Imagination)? I used to put in hours conducting training workshops, managing DI teams at Farragut Intermediate School in Knoxville, TN. I was also the regional director for DI East Tennessee, running DI regional competitions with 700-800 student competitors each year, over 1000 volunteers and many parents participating. I also played a role in bringing DI Global Finals to Knoxville, TN, using the facilities at the University of Tennessee. The Global Finals still goes on at UT each year with over 10,000 participating students. Well, just when I thought I was out of the loop, I was captured again.

In May of 2007, I went from St. George, Utah, to Knoxville, Tennessee, to volunteer as the interpreter for the Chinese delegations who came to compete in the Global Finals of DI at the University of Tennessee. I met the director of DI China, Li Xiao, the delegation from Shandong Provincial Education Department, several principals and teachers from schools, and also the competing student teams. Little did I know I was going to meet some of them again in Jinan, Shandong.

Li Xiao and I stayed in contact after the Global Finals. When he found out I was in China, he invited me to go to Guangdong to help him run a DI training workshop. The distance and my teaching schedule didn’t allow me to make the trip. I told him to let me know if he brought it to Shandong. I was joking, but Li Xiao arranged a training workshop in Jinan for Wednesday, Nov. 26 and invited me to be the speaker for the training. I was surprised, but delighted to be a part of DI again.

On Nov. 26, Wednesday afternoon, I went to the Shandong Youth Activity Center to help with the DI training. I found out I was going to be the keynote for the event and instead of training 20 teachers, 50 were going to show up. Wow…I know I can do it. I think I can, I think I can… Actually, the biggest challenge to me was doing all these in Chinese. Since I wasn’t familiar with the DI terminology in Chinese, DI China e-mailed me a copy of DI terms in Chinese, all 17 of them, not quite enough, but it would help.

Upon arriving at the Shandong Youth Activity Center, Tina was waiting for me at the front of the building. I met Tina in Knoxville when she brought a team from Beijing in 2007. I was her interpreter. It was a happy reunion, as we didn’t think we were going to see each other again, especially not in China. During the training, I showed a few pictures of the Knoxville Global Finals with Chinese students performing (I found DI pictures in my old thumb drive). During the break, one of the teachers came to tell me that those students in the pictures were from her school and they had that picture with me in it at their school. It was amazing. What a small world!

Below are pictures of some of the activities during the training.

The teachers who came to the training never did DI before. I was asked to talk about the philosophy of DI and the theoretical framework of creative thinking and problem solving skills. Since that was in my area of study, I was happy to comply. I was elated to teach the Chinese teachers about the paradigm shift from teacher-centered approach to student-centered approach in teaching and the need to maximize the students’ learning opportunities by enriching the environment. It was fun and I did most of it in Chinese.

We proceeded to do an “instant challenge” by organizing the teachers into 7 per team. They were given a problem to solve. Each team has 5 minutes to prepare a skit to showcase their solution to the challenge.

The challenge was for each team to present a PERFORMANCE in which they choose 3 different ways for team members to act in the skit. The action choices were as follows: Each team must choose 3 actions from the list.
1. One team member may not move.
2. One team member can only sing.
3. One team member can only walk backwards.
4. Two team members were glued together.
5. All team members are 80 years old.
6. One team member has 4 arms.

I’m not sure if the teachers ever were asked to do such silly challenges. Each team came out with some very interesting, humorous skits to incorporate the actions. It was fun and I hope they learned a lot from doing it. We ended the 3-hour training with Elwin speaking to the group about the importance of problem solving skills in work place.

And yes, I have been DI’ed again.