Tag Archives: design thinking

Human-Centered and Relational

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From Dr. Lee-Anne Gray, “Making Education More Like Real Life Through Design Thinking,” Huffington Post, 9/18/2013

Design thinking asks students to become investigators in their world, attempt to solve problems, bridge gaps of knowledge independently, collaboratively, and resourcefully.

From Tyler Thigpen, “Taking a Relationship-Centered Approach to Education,” Education Week, 9/10/2013

What if schools used real-world scenarios to teach? What if learning were tied to complex problem-solving? What if students graduated from high school knowing how to negotiate peace treaties, stimulate depressed economies, and reduce obesity rates in America?

Now imagine a school where students and teachers decided collaboratively that the future of energy, the problem of inadequate access to safe drinking water, and the issues surrounding genetically modified organisms were among the topics of study. In this model, students would be taught to use skills and knowledge from the traditional disciplines—math, science, English, social studies, and so on—to take steps toward scaling and solving aspects of these complex issues. Teachers would work together, leveraging their content expertise in service of a problem. Students would navigate complex, unpredictable situations using a multitude of educational resources. This real-world problem-solving approach would partner with expert field practitioners, community members, research scientists, political leaders, and business owners, all showing students ways of addressing the pressing problems facing the world, from the local to the global.

“Design Thinking” and “Transdisciplinary Education” may be called buzzwords and trends by some. For me, they are long overdue innovations in the school world that promote and empower relevant, real-world solution seeking as the foundations and trunk lines of time spent in school. School should be life. School is life.

At their core, #DT and #TDed are about the corps. The people. Design thinking and transdisciplinary education are human centered and relational. They are about inquiry, empathy, and impact.

@MVPSchool is about #DT and #TDed. #ILoveMySchool

What an honor it has been to see the core/corps of our school discussed in Education Week and The Huffington Post these past few days. Thank you.

Formative assessment IS design thinking. #DTk12Chat

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Teachers are designers. Either intentionally or unintentionally, maybe. But teachers are designers.

Some feel that the word, the title, “designer” is being co-opted by too many industries and sectors and professions. But how could one really deny the essence of teacher as designer.

Teachers design with curriculum, learning environment, instructional methodology, and assessment. Together, these elements create pedagogical design.

Because of the heightened attention that design and design thinking are getting, we know more about how great designers design with the needs of the user clearly at the center of the design. Discovery, ethnography, examination, observation, interview – all of these and more are the tools of great design and design thinking.

For the truly intentional, great teachers, formative assessment is an invaluable tool – a system really – to discern the deepest needs of the user… the “student.” Through purposeful use of formative assessment, great teachers – great pedagogical designers – collect critical information by way of discovery (assessment), ethnography (assessment), examination (assessment), observation (assessment), interview (assessment), etc.

But, for these assessments, these tools of discovery and empathy, to be design-employed, the insights gained must be used to inform and transform the pedagogical design for the improvement of the user experience. Better known as “deep learning.”

If an assessment is merely something at the end of instruction to provide a grade for a paper grade book or digital SIS (student information system), then enormous potential is being wasted, underutilized, undervalued. Assessment, used as design tool, can form better design for curriculum, instruction, learning environment, assessment, etc. To reach this potential, though, we need to be intentional as designers.

If you are pursuing design thinking at your school, perhaps you are using the d.School model:

  • Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

Or perhaps you are using the model from Design Thinking for Educators:

  • Discovery, Interpretation, Ideation, Experimentation, Evolution.

At Mount Vernon, we’ve developed our own model of design thinking:

  • DEEP – Discover, Empathize, Experiment, Produce.

Or perhaps you are working to nurture and build innovators and tracking with such work as Innovators DNA, purposefully infusing the known traits of innovation:

  • Observing, Questioning, Experimenting, Networking, Associating.

Among all of these models, and among the practices of the most highly respected designers and design thinkers, empathy lives at a core – through intentional and purposeful discovery, observation, and ethnography – in order to enhance and improve design for the needs of the user.

Assessment – formative assessment – is essential for one to be a design-intentional teacher.

How are you using assessment as a systemic tool for exceptional design? For the user experience? For the learners?

#ItsAboutLearning

Numbers Count: Contextual Assessment and Quantitative Measures in #PBL #DTk12

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“He got one out of three!,” said Phil.

“Wow! Can you believe that?!,” responded Ann.

Did the “He” in this short story experience success or failure? Context makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

I can imagine one context: A teacher on a team is reviewing assessment data, and Phil announces to his team that a student “got one out of three.” The tone could be disappointment and disbelief, indicating that Phil thought the student had more command over what had been assessed. The teammate, Ann, knowing how hard the team has been working on the lesson study and assessment echoes Phil’s consternation. In fact, I’ve heard just such a conversation.

I can also imagine a second context: A young boy relatively new to baseball is talking to his mom about a player hitting one out of three at-bats during a season, as the boy figures out what batting averages of .333 mean versus averages of .250. In this context, the exclamations indicate wild excitement at reviewing the success of the young boy’s friend who made the All-Star team. The mom is reflecting the excitement with a big smile on her face, saying, “Can you believe that?!” In fact, I’ve heard just such a conversation.

As schools examine and employ strategies like project-based learning and design thinking, I believe the stories above can be catalysts for talking about quantitative feedback in context. Why is it that the same fraction and decimal is called “failure” in one context and “success” (great success!) in another? Could it be that many of us have a “movie in our mind” playing – one that shapes our beliefs about what it means to get a one out of three based on experience with traditional quizzes or formative assessments? Could it be that we have come to assume that the content and skills on such assessments should be evaluated in such a way that only 70% and above would be considered “passing?” Considering an ed psych concept like Vygotsky’s ZPD (zone of proximal development) might lead us to believe that the scaffolding and instruction is in misalignment with the student’s learning. In context one, many might view one out of three as a problem.

But in the context of baseball, a 33% means something very different. It involves a mental movie that tells us that one out of three is grounds for Hall of Fame induction if the player can do that consistently over a career. Why is 33% so different in this context? Could it be that the high-quality activity of being face-to-face with a pitcher throwing serious heat causes us to shift our expectations and see 33% in an entirely new perspective and point of view? In context two, many might view one out of three as a celebration.

As schools, when we design project-based learning and design-thinking exercises, how might they be informed, in terms of assessment, by the contrasting contexts of taking a quiz versus standing at bat? Are we putting new wine into old wine skins (please forgive the mix of metaphors) when we apply traditional grading practices and certain quantitative measures to more high-quality, intensive contexts that refuse to be assessed with the same mindsets that have historically been applied in the classroom?

How might we be more purposeful and intentional about the interpretation and context of mathematical feedback?

About 14 months ago, I counseled a group of four boys who said to a colleague and me that they had failed.

“Why do you think you’ve failed, guys?”

“Well, Mr. Adams, we only got 2 out of 10 – 20%. In school, 20% is seriously failing!”

“But in your case, through your project, you helped 2 out of 10 unemployed human beings get a job! In your case, your point of view of 20% might need to shift a bit. Just because 20% on a quiz or a test might have indicated real disappointments and ‘disasters’ to you in the past, a 20% employment-bump statistic in your job-fair project could be seen as a wildly successful outcome. It’s more like a batting average than a vocab quiz. That’s how Ms. G and I see it. You positively changed 2 people’s lives this week. Your ‘20%’ will cause ripples that will send significantly positive waves throughout that community.”

When we in schools apply quantitative measures – 100 point scales, 4 point Guskey scales, whatever kind of scales – I believe we need to do so very thoughtfully and carefully. We need to be proactive about our strategic communications surrounding these assessment measures. Students, teachers, parents – we all bring existing mental movies with us into the school setting.

Even if we don’t apply numerical measures – we did not do so in Synergy in the case of the food-desert, job-fair project – we must be aware of the mental movies and previous experiences that students bring with them to these contexts of project-based learning and design thinking. Those four boys did not receive any kind of “final grade” on that project (our course was non-graded, but heavily assessed), yet they applied previous context to a new situation and drew some profound conclusions about their perceived success. It was a powerful learning moment for me. One that has likely taken me the entire 14 months to fully process.

During the past few years, as I’ve consulted with a number of schools, more than a few are applying relatively traditional grading practices to the assessment of skill sets and dispositions. For example, on a report card or progress report, one might find a column or row labeled “Collaboration” and another labeled “Critical Thinking.” Next to the categories one might find an “82” or a “2 on a four-point scale.” One might also see a “B-” in the scoring cell. Or one might see initials like “PG” – “Progressing.”

I realize I am telling a very incomplete story here. I imagine some readers writing to me in the comments or email or Twitter and saying, “Bo, you’re missing the whole point! High-quality PBL shouldn’t even be getting a quantitative measure. It should be performance-task assessed with only narrative, negotiated feedback. No numbers at all! What’s wrong with you?!” With this post, I really mean to provide a catalysts for thinking and doing with those readers and schools who ARE trying to marry quantitative-assessment measures with high-quality PBL and DT. I, too, have serious questions about the “Why?,” and I am also deeply interested in the “How?” if a school just will not consider non-numerical assessment reporting, even for certain courses, strands, projects, assignments, etc.

Are the challenges we are curating or creating causing us to think deeply about the nature of the challenges relative to assessment? Are we orchestrating experiences that are more like the intensive match up between a super pitcher and a batter – ones in which the quantitative measures we apply communicate All-Star results at “33%?” Or are we trying to place new wine into old wine skins and facilitating experiences that challenge kids so slightly that it’s assured most will “pass” or view their Herculean efforts as failure because we’ve neglected to help everyone involved reconceptualize and pivot perspectives on what “one out of three” might really mean in our context?

Learning architecture #dtk12

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And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don’t think that needs to be the case anymore.

– Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the people by the people, TED

Clothed in the vestments of “architecture,” at its core, this talk is more universally about design thinking. And while I know that I have trained myself to suffer/benefit from the affliction/blessing I call “How-Does-This-Apply-To-School-And-Education?,” Parvin’s talk has profound implications for those in education who are willing and able to think about our design challenges for Education 3.0.

How have we in education gotten fixated on the idea of providing a certain kind of structure and experience called “school?” How might we examine and re-examine those fixations and “lead up” to what could be better for our learners and our citizenry?

How are you willing or not willing to rethink what we do as “school?” How might we use our knowledge and wisdom as learning architects to reconsider what we do and how we do it?

Design Thinking for the WHOLE School #PedagogicalMasterPlanning

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How might schools use design thinking for the WHOLE school?

In the NAIS Commission on Accreditation report A 21st Century Imperative: A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future, we can read:

Perhaps it is time for us to rethink our models and our assumptions about school and about teaching and learning. What should future learning environments look like? How should we organize time to learn? What

types of relationships and communities will nurture our students? What tools do they need? The schools based on industrial and agrarian models that have existed for

centuries may not be the schools that we need for tomorrow. What might we imagine as a different model? And how might the accreditation process serve to mobilize

schools to create a new model or models?

That’s from the National Association of Independent Schools, so I am making an assumption (that I believe in strongly!) that if one is a member of that organization, then one has accepted and embraced the notion of “being on that team” – believing that one is a willing follower of that leader.

So how are our independent schools responding to that call… those questions? How is your school contemplating, or even planning, or even implementing, for such a reimagining and remodeling of “school?”

Many independent schools are buying into design thinking for their students. That’s a great thing! I am a huge and genuine fan of design thinking. As a teacher and administrator, I was a practitioner of design thinking.

But I wonder why more schools and school leadership teams are not actually practicing what they are preaching and teaching – on their entire school. I don’t mean that in any sort of accusatorial way. I’m genuinely curious and wondering why.

How might schools use design thinking for the WHOLE school? To explore as a community the charge and challenge issued by the NAIS COA. If a school committed to such an exercise and process, prototyped several possible new models for school, and then decided that its current model is far superior to any of the other models designed by the community… then, the school could confidently stick with its existing model. But, what if… What if the process reveal new possibilities? Dare I say it… better possibilities.

“Different is not always better, but better is always different.” – Marshall Thurber

Here are just three links to using design thinking with students.

Do you know of any examples like the three above, BUT geared toward an entire school redesign? (If so, please share them with me/us in the comments.)

Now, I would challenge any school leadership team to devoting AT LEAST a meeting to discussing how the school might engage design thinking, not just as a curricular and instructional methodology, but also as a fun, participatory, community-engaging and solutions-oriented means to living an examined life as a school and a leader of adult and child learners.

And I’ll put some more of my cards on the table – the typical strategic planning processes used in indy schools are NOT design thinking.

I believe we need “strategic planning illustrated.” I believe we need the spawn of design thinking and strategic planning. Our design thinking methodology here at Unboundary has produced such a spawn…

#PedagogicalMasterPlanning

[Disclaimer: I think this post, as a thinking and doing prompt, applies to all schools. However, I did write this post specifically with independent schools in mind.]