The Billy Madison Project

Immersing Community, Building Empathy

Inspired by the course with Otto Scharmer, I met with Shawn Cornally last Thursday to share with him what we were learning and the importance of emerging people in an experience, building empathy, and the “shopping cart” video from IDEO that captured this as a critical element of design. To that end Shawn and I developed an idea we are calling, somewhat tongue-in-cheek with a nod to pop culture, “The Billy Madison Project.” We hope this can become adapted as a general tool for Community Builders who may need to help communities come together and better understand experiences that they may not typically experience.

In short, here’s the project:

Let’s form a fab five of non-educators, a teacher, and a student, to spend time as a student in a classroom. Taking their individual experiences, we bring them together to do a design process for a transformed school. 

The idea: let people see firsthand what happens in a classroom by being a student – going to a few classes, doing the homework, lugging along their books. Working with principals, we will place each participant in a school for 1/2 a day with them experiencing a wide range of teachers. We hope for the participants to come away with empathy and understanding about what students experience.

The important details: The key to making this work is to work with complete trust and understanding from the participating schools. As a result, we selected 12 schools who we believe we have a strong enough relationship to make this work. In short, here is what we need:

• An unfiltered, “normal” experience for the guest. As a result, they will shadow one student for their time in the school. They are to participate in the day’s lesson and will be expected to take any homework with them and to do that homework prior to attending the design team meeting.
• Teachers will be made aware and told that area people want to see school from a student’s seat and that they will not be evaluated, questioned, or called out and are to treat the guest as if they were any other student.
• We are asking the principals to select a student whose schedule will be such that the guest will get to experience one of the building’s more progressive teacher and one of the building’s more traditional teachers.

and the promise we make:

• The participants will agree as part of the experience that they will not share with others any identifying information about the school, teachers, or students they encountered.
• Participants will discuss their experiences with other design team members but without identifying information. Our task will be to examine our experiences collectively – the positive, the negative, the inspiring and the defeating – to be able to make a more informed design for moving schools forward.
• No article, expose, or story of any kind will appear in any SMG product that would, in any way, publicly identify a particular school, classroom, teacher, or student.