Brooklyn Jensen took a “really cool opportunity” and turned it into a teachable moment for herself and educators. 

Brooklyn and Reece Updyke, both seniors at Providence Day, worked on designing and facilitating a workshop at the SAIS 2025 Curriculum Symposium in February in Charlotte. 

The pair helped an audience of heads of schools, assistant heads of schools, division heads, academic administrators, department chairs, and teachers, among others, through a design workshop. 

They helped Dr. Ryan Welsh, Providence Day’s Chief Design Strategist, welcome participants to the workshop, which allowed participants to think about how they might teach design thinking to students and/or use design thinking to help craft student learning experiences. 

Brooklyn and Reece circulated between small groups, answering questions and making suggestions.

“For the conference, we helped plan what we would be presenting about and how we would teach this group of adults about design-thinking based on what we thought was most important from our semester in Design and Entrepreneurship [at Providence Day,]” Brooklyn says. “At the conference, we helped facilitate the activities but also took any and all questions the educators had and answered them to hopefully help them empathize better with their own students.”  

The rare opportunity for the students came after Dr. Welsh was invited to present at the symposium. The SAIS is Providence Day’s accreditation organization. 

“I was invited to present something connected with design thinking,” he says. “I agreed to present if I was allowed to bring students with me to help facilitate the adult learning.”

He continues: “Students participating in any professional conference geared toward educators and education leaders tends to be highly unusual. This opportunity speaks to the quality of work being done by teachers and students at [Providence Day], which led this regional organization to invite and approve of us, including students, as part of the facilitation team for this experience.” 

Brooklyn and Reece worked on designing and facilitating this conference experience as the final project for their Design & Entrepreneurship class this past fall semester. 

The experience gave Brooklyn insight into work conventions and the opportunity to hone her public speaking skills. 

“It was very fascinating and exciting to see how people from all around come together to learn from each other,” Brooklyn says. “It was really cool to see such a wide variety of people able to work together to improve in a non-competitive way.” 

According to its website, the SAIS Curriculum Symposium equips independent school educators with the tools and insights needed to create learning experiences that drive student success. 

Workshops also included instructional strategies, as well as assessment and feedback.

“Brooklyn and Reece displayed remarkable amounts of poise and sophistication,” Dr. Welsh says. “They conducted themselves as well as any other design-thinking facilitators I have ever worked with previously. They were flexible and adaptable. They were articulate and thoughtful. They brought genuine value to participants by posing and answering questions from an authentic student perspective.”