Our motto: Dream it! Map it! Play it!
As part of our ongoing research, we’ve tested “Dream It!” and “The Dream Workshop” in about a dozen schools and programs. We had so much success that the facilitators started calling it “The Dream Club” because most people thought that “The Dream Workshop” didn’t sound like any fun. Here you can see how our program developed. If you want to try it yourself, download The Dream Workshop or buy Dream It!
Finally, the Dream Workshop is here to help kids live an amazing life. This was our pilot program, which, depending on how you measure it, took almost a year of brainstorming. It started with some important planning meetings with the Northside Education Committee and local schools, parents and community members. At one meeting Steve Sunderland stood up and said kids don’t know how to dream anymore. At the moment, I was writing the Dream Playbook and suddenly saw an opportunity to make it real with some hands-on activities. So, I teamed up with Sue Wilke head of the Northside Education Committee, Steve Sunderland from Peace Village, Tommy Rueff from Happen Inc and Shelley Werner and the kids at Faces Without Places (now Upspring). Actually, there were dozens of adults behind the scenes to make this happen, including a generous donation of about 20 pizzas from an anonymous Samaritan.
It is a long story to summarize a year of thinking; so, hopefully, the pictures speak for themselves. Our workshop had 3 stations teaching kids the basics of how to make dreams a reality. Back then our motto was: Dream It, Plan It, Do It. And, we had a station for dreaming, planning (now called mapping) and doing (now called playing).
- What’s Up with Steve? Focusing on what the student’s dream is.
- How’s it Going with Scott? Focusing on planning and how to make a dream come true.
- Why Not Tommy? Focusing on doing and why dreams are important with an activity to invent something new.
We were challenged to find an adequate way to express the concept of dreaming. My goal was to teach kids how to find the passion and purpose to give their lives meaning. Tommy likes to refer to it as the superpower of creativity and the ability to make it happen! And, Steve simply wanted to inspire kids to feel like they had an active role in creating their future. Any way you express it, these ideas of nurturing passion are new to the educational system, which focuses more on traditional skills like reading, writing and arithmetic.
Below are pictures with permission from Faces Without Places. My pictures focus on my workshop because I didn’t have time to photograph anything else. My workshop was called “How’s it going, Scott?” And it focused on teaching kids how to make their dreams a reality. There’s not much you can do in 25 minutes, so my solution was just to present them with a simple exercise to get them thinking that making dreams come true takes some planning and some work. I gave them a drawing of two islands. They were on one island and their hypothetical dream of a treasure chest was on the other island. And in between there was an insurmountable obstacle; in this case, an ocean full of sharks. Their assignment was to draw or write a solution to get the treasure.
Some great solutions included:
- Cutting down the palm tree to make a bridge.
- Making an airplane or wings from the palm leaves.
- Whistling to the dolphins and riding them to the other side.
- Walking on water or the sharks like stepping stones.
I didn’t want to coach or bias them, rather I wanted them to be as creative as possible. So when the kids spontaneously started making step-by-step action plans I was impressed. And another student created multiple backup plans. When the other students learned this the idea spread like fire. Though the treasure was a metaphor, only one student questioned why they actually wanted the treasure. Instead, he made a plan to fulfill his real dream of being a football star.
Red Carpet World Movie Premiere
A few days later this same group of kids went to the “world premiere” of the movie they had been making this summer about the Cincinnati Museum Center. They wrote, filmed and starred in this movie. They even made their own costumes. It was a huge project organized by Happen Inc and their Lights, Camera and Learning in Action program. It was an amazing moment to see the kids walk down the red carpet, signing autographs before their limo ride to Graeter’s Ice Cream. Wow, what a dream come true. I didn’t have anything to do with this event except I was honored to attend. During the Dream Workshop, the young director of this movie asked, “How long do I have to go to college to be a film director?” It was a pivotal moment when the idea of a dream turns into the passion of commitment.
