What if we employed more “design thinking” into our programs in K-12 education in Atlanta? In “Innovation 101,” Carolyn Geer detailed a bit of Stanford’s d.school (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) and founder David Kelley. What would it take to integrate more design thinking across curricula in our schools? How could we use design thinking as “connective tissue” among the curricula? To design potential solutions for identified community problems certainly provides glue that holds together what is typically thought of as history, science, math, English, art, etc.
How could a K-12 Design Lab for schools in Atlanta be grown right here in our surrounds?
Throughout the talk, I was fascinated by the experimentation that she implemented in order to test her hypotheses about baby cognition. Looking at the totality of her results, Gopnik posits that babies can decipher what others are thinking, that babies think more like a lantern than a spotlight, and that babies naturally experiment and hypothesize and prototype to test their understanding of the world.
Listening to Gopnik, I found connection with her talk and Tom Wujec’s Marshmallow Challenge – the key to building better things is experimenting, failing, and prototyping improvements. It turns out that kindergarteners are really quite good at this reiterative learning.
Additionally, I was reminded of Steven Johnson’s The Innovator’s Cookbook, in which he encourages us to “get a little lost” and “play each other’s instruments.” By placing ourselves in novel situations, we can deliberately disorient ourselves and return to our “baby brains.” When we are young, we are all artists, inventors, astronauts, and aliens! Unfortunately, too many of us unlearn these perceptions about ourselves.
We have a great many transitions and transformations to make in school and the ways in which school is structured. I believe our world demands us to re-imagine “school.” Just today, one of the student-learners in Synergy 8 posted this pondering on our group Posterous:
How much in school has changed since the 1800’s?
Posted by josephka to Synergy-8-2011-12-S1
Even with computers and smart boards not much has changed since the 19th centruy, but why not? the world has changed so much. People don’t have tha same jobs that they would have had 200 years ago. Maybe the system should be changed.
Another Synergy 8 team member commented back:
sumterf just commented on the post “How much in school has changed since the 1800’s?” on Synergy-8-2011-12-S1
I think if someone came to the future from the 1800s, they would recognize that our science, math, english, and language classes are school, but they probably would not recognize Synergy class as school.
And even if you don’t believe that school could stand a makeover, then perhaps you could allow that school should at least be re-examined…re-explored. To stand still is to grow stagnant and to ignore current research and learning from emerging best practices. Let’s employ the scientific method to our own structure…let’s play with ideas and possibilities like a child plays and integrates imagination with future possibility for reality. Let’s tap the butterflys that are our children and learn to flutter from their capacities and potential for creation and reiterative examination of enhancing prototypes. Let’s DO DIFFERENT…to discover and improve our current attempts.
Here’s to playing, to thinking more like a lantern, to trying another’s instrument, to disorienting ourselves, to wanting to know what others might be thinking. Here’s to not yet knowing that math, science, English, and history will be taught separately and from the vantage point of a individual desk and chair.
It’s not about convenience nor convention. It’s about learning!
This weekend, I am participating in Re-Imagine Ed (RE:ED) – Next Chapter (on Twitter at #nxtchp2011). I am part of an integrated network of design teams working to imagine the K-12 libraries of the future. From the website:
An Active Process:
Instead of another traditional conference — speakers talking at passive audiences; vaguely connected sessions — you’ll join a dynamic 3-day design event focused on imagination and action.
Becoming Part of a Design Team
“Next Chapter” participants automatically become members of 7-8 person design teams.
This will allow passionate, creative, professionally-diverse attendees to collaborate actively with innovative peers and design facilitators in imagining new futures for the K12 library.
Over the course of the 3 days, teams will work closely with their experienced design facilitators to solve a variety of real world case studies in an effort to create new visions for K12 libraries:
Listen -> empathize, ask, seek
Imagine -> ideate, brainstorm, wonder
Make -> prototype, craft, test
During the first two days, I have made some short movies, just to capture some of the action. I will write more later.
Synergy 8 is an interdisciplinary, non-departmentalized, non-graded, community-issues, problem-solving course for 8th graders at The Westminster Schools. Jill Gough and I co-created the course, and we co-facilitate it, as well. This morning, I posted a summary of our engagement in the “KP Challenge.” Today, we initiated the process of Game Planning – creating game plans to frame and scaffold just about any project work. Ms. Gough and I captured the beginnings of the game plans in a short, one-minute video:
Interestingly, we are using the same “Game Plan” framework with our adult teacher-leaders in our Junior High School PLCs (professional learning communities).[See an example here.]
The Synergy team is utilizing tools that are employed by the pedagogical leaders in our middle school. I find that parallelism so exciting!
it's about learning 