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Innovation in the Classroom:
Design Thinking for 21
st
Century Learning
Swee Hong “David” KWEK Abstract This qualitative study seeks to explore how design thinking as a new model of learning is used in classroom learning. The participants for this study are the school leader and teachers from a public middle school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through lesson observations and interviews, this study aims to develop a fuller understanding of the motivations that drive teachers to adopt this innovative approach and the considerations they have when using it in the teaching and learning of core content. The findings showed that the teachers were not passive recipients of this new pedagogical tool and have “appropriated” it in multiple unique ways – to suit different purposes, different learning contexts and their different subjects. Another key finding is that mastery of academic core content still drives how design thinking is used to intersect with classroom learning. This study thus emphasizes the need to promote 21 st^ century skills and academic content knowledge as similarly important student outcomes. The cultivation of a broader set of skills and dispositions beyond core content knowledge is critical, and they merit the investment of more time in the classroom. Cite as: Kwek, S.H. (2011). Innovation in the Classroom: Design Thinking for 21st^ Century Learning. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/group/redlab/cgi- bin/publications_resources.php
Introduction The Current Educational Landscape The profile of our learners has changed. They are digital natives weaned on video games and Web 2.0, and have been described as “marching through our schools, carrying a transformational change in their pockets in the form of powerful multimedia handheld devices” (Chen, 2010, pp. 213). Without the constraints of classroom relevance and test accountability, these digital technologies have changed the traditional pedagogical paradigm, bypassing the educator to reach the student directly and revolutionize their learning experiences. While many educators today lament that these learners are impossible to engage, game designers are solving with enviable success the dilemma that educators still grapple with: getting students to master something that is time-consuming and challenging, and derive pleasure from it. Gee (2003) made the plea for educators to build schooling on better principles of learning, which currently comport poorly with the theories of learning in good video games. For a long time, school has been endured rather than experienced by students as “a series of exciting explorations of self and society” (Aronowitz, 2004). More recently, Prensky (2010) asserts in Teaching Digital Natives that what today’s kids do have a short attention span for are “our old ways of learning” (pp. 2). Against such persistent portraits of student disaffection, it is time to reflect if our curricular and pedagogical approaches are congruent with the learning styles of this generation. Today pockets of innovation are sprouting up across the educational landscape, but many schools continue to keep at arm’s length the democratizing imperative of “giving voice” to the students, asserting instead a singular top-down authority in the classroom (McWilliam, 2008). The underlying assumptions and organization of the school into classrooms, hallways, and departments that were instituted so long ago also remain unchanged, and “the basic instructional approach of teachers talking to students as they sit passively in their seats” continues to be the main teaching strategy (Kelly et al, 2008, pp. 12). This could be attributed to the educational policy in the United States, which continues to shape curriculum to reflect the realities of priorities: academic performance is taking center stage especially when many countries are clamoring to join international tests like TIMSS, PISA to benchmark their education systems with the best in the world in their quest to create world-class education systems – based on test scores. Yet Asian countries like Singapore and South Korea known for being frequent high flyers in international comparative studies are exerting great efforts to allow more autonomy at the local level and reduce the pressure of testing because “they know very well the damage that results from standardization and high- stakes testing” (Zhao, 2009, pp. 63). Indeed the current culture of testing shapes curricular ideology and often subordinates teachers to the role of drillmasters. The unintended consequences of high-stakes testing are the narrowing of curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation (Herman, 2004), excessive enforcement of attendance policies, repetitive class and grade-level assignment, and a generally non-supportive environment for low-achieving students (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008). Today the accountability movement continues to limit the opportunity for time in the school day to engage learners in activities that require creativity, innovation, critical thinking, and problem solving – the same competencies that Partnership for 21st^ Century Skills identified as essential for our future workforce. In addition, academic rigor is traditionally equated with mastery of academic content alone, and these 21 st^ century skills are still perceived as “nice to have” rather than “must have” in education (Kay, 2010,
6). In the spirit of student-centered accountability, a 21 st century education must thus be tied to outcomes and proficiency in both core subject knowledge and 21st^ century skills that are expected and highly valued in and beyond school. In other words, rigorous academic standards should drive learning and provide the context for learning 21 st century skills. In “Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization”, Zhao (2009) outlines five core assumptions which can be used to guide decisions about what schools should teach:
- Skills and knowledge that are not available at a cheaper price in other countries or that cannot be rendered useless by machines;
- Creativity, interpreted as both ability and passion to make new things and adapt to new situations;
- New skills and knowledge that are needed for living in the global world and the virtual world (examples include foreign languages, global awareness, and multicultural literacy, and knowledge to cope with the global world, and digital or technology literacy for the virtual world);
- High-level cognitive skills such as problem solving and critical thinking;
- Emotional intelligence - the ability and capacity to understand and manage emotions of self and others, the ability to interact with others, understand others, communicate with others, and manage one's own feelings (pp. 150-151) These five assumptions are not unfamiliar and support much of the ideas of leading theorists and researchers prior to Zhao. The question however remains: How can schools and teachers provide for this type of learning? Design Thinking to Optimize Student Learning Historically, curriculum has been conceived as an instrument of school reform but changes in schools that require “new repertoires” are likely to be met with passive resistance from teachers who have defined for themselves “an array of routines they can efficiently employ” (Eisner, 1992 ). If reform were to take place, the seeds of change would have to be planted in the classroom. That is why Clandinin and Connelly (1992) reconceived the role of teachers as “curriculum makers” – beyond being curriculum transmitters or implementers because they are an “integral part of the curriculum constructed and enacted in the classroom” (pp. 363). To move away from the convergent-thinking tasks that are currently persistent in the system, it is thus incumbent on teachers to design instruction to engage students in “divergent thinking to generate multiple and varied approaches to problem solving” (Hardiman, 2010, pp. 231). Although the recent shift toward standardized, subject- specific, back-to-basics curricula driven by high-stakes testing across the nation makes it difficult to implement any alternative progressive visions, we do not have to throw up our hands and mourn the end of a holistic, constructivist, child-centered approach to education. One way, Drake (2007) suggests, of increasing relevance of students’ learning while maintaining rigor and accountability is to adopt an integrated approach. This is where the design process can come into play. Design Thinking is an approach to learning that focuses on developing children’s creative confidence through hands-on projects that focus on empathy, promoting a bias toward action, encouraging ideation and fostering active problem-solving – skills and competencies that align with the five core assumptions outlined by Zhao. In a report put together by the REDlab (Research in Education and Design Lab) team at Stanford, it was recommended that design thinking be integrated into academic content for while it may stand
alone, its power as a tool for learning comes in the ways it can support a diverse range of interdisciplinary academic content (Carroll et. al, 2010). Instruction that uses design thinking as leverage for learning can thus provide rich experiences that encourage meaning making without the imposition of a fixed set of knowledge and skills. Through the implementation of curriculum that integrates design thinking and academic content, educators can help students develop a skill set that includes ideas generally not fostered within traditional school settings. This process would contribute to different levels of creative knowledge, creative skills and creative mindsets that can be achieved by design thinking education, culminating in a capability that is called “creative confidence” (Rauth, I. et al, 2010; Carroll et al, 2010). By applying the techniques of design to education, teachers loosen the narrow, rigid process of traditional learning and tap into students’ deep wells of creativity, encouraging them to see nuanced problems from inside the very core of an issue, and make critical thinking essential to solving any problem (Barseghian, 2009). In the area of neuroscience, where much research interest has been cast on creativity, it is also now commonly accepted that activities associated with creative thinking produce differentiated patterns of activity across multiple regions of the brain (Fink, 2007, as cited in Hardiman, 2010). The co-activation and communication among brain regions that are not ordinarily strongly connected during noncreative activities (Heilman et al, 2003, as cited in Hardiman, 2010) can now be stimulated by immersing the learner in processes which encourage them to demonstrate divergent thinking. These findings thus augur well for design thinking as a learning approach in the 21 st century classroom. Dewey advocates that education be facilitated through activity-guided problem solving and the connections associated with the relationships that the problem has to the real world – essentially, exploring the relationship between reason and sense. The design thinking process moves beyond problem solving and project-based work by including a human- centered approach. With a focus on addressing user needs, learning through design thinking therefore becomes an active endeavor of students that takes place in an environment that stresses problem-solving, reasoning, and thoughtful interaction among students. Through design thinking, the learner does not simply “take in” information handed to him, but rather undergoes a process akin to what Steinberg (1998) describes as creating “knowledge and understanding by active engagement with problems and efforts at resolution that involve transforming the environment in some way” (pp. 21). From Dewey’s perspective, students have already learned the habits of mind that their future requires, but they may not currently exercise these habits in the academic work in the school. Prensky (2010) also illuminates the irony: it is this generation raised on the expectation of interactivity that is finally ripe for the skill-based and “doing-based” teaching methods that past experts have always suggested are the best for learning, but that were largely rejected by the education establishment as being “too hard to implement” (pp. xv). Through design thinking, the school can become a microcosm in which students practice the roles they must face in later life — and deal with the related problems and complications. In fact, design thinking fosters iterative problem solving and solution generation, making it relevant to projects in academic subjects while adding an inventive imperative highly consistent with 21st century skill sets. The hypothesis generation and testing that is inherent to design approaches is very effective for reducing fear, and the way to succeed, to innovate, is to experiment in the low-risk context of the school. Dweck (2006) found that students with a growth mindset seek out learning, develop deeper learning strategies, and strive for an honest assessment of their weaknesses so that they can work to remedy them. These students have continued to outperform their peers with fixed mindsets, thus demonstrating that the twenty-first century will belong to passionate and resilient
projects and challenges. The design thinking process is also embedded within the curriculum of core academic content from sixth to eighth grade in the school. The school principal, Dr. Alice, who is also working closely with the REDlab (Research in Education and Design Lab) group at Stanford University School of Education, can be described as a leader who has a heavy hand in shaping the school’s instructional program. Teachers can try to introduce innovative practices in their classes, but it is a job only half done without the support and clear vision of the school leadership. Today’s school leader is expected to be the “chief learning officer”, an individual with a vision for a future of the school who can articulate that vision to all stakeholders, paving the way for a collaborative school culture focused on teaching and learning (Green, 2010, pp. 3). Dr. Alice is one such leader – she is a strong advocate of design thinking and has a compelling vision of its role at New Horizons: “Design thinking should influence all aspects of school, not just the curriculum. Design thinking puts them (the students) in an environment where they are challenged to think differently. It encourages natural curiosity and ‘don’t fear to fail’. The vision is for everyone in the school to ‘try things’.” In her conversations with students, teachers and even parents, Dr. Alice frequently uses design thinking lingo like “ideate”, “empathize” and “fail early” to engage them in ideas-sharing, and explain the decisions she makes as a school leader. In fact, during the course of this research study, it was observed that the language of design thinking has found its place both in the classroom and beyond. The teachers participating in this study frequently used these words during classroom instruction, and in a meeting that Dr Alice was hosting for parent volunteers, the parents frequently used the term “design thinking” to reference classroom learning and to share about their creative ideas for events at New Horizons. On another occasion, when the earthquake and tsunamis devastated northwestern Japan, she seized the teachable moment to teach the students about empathy. Apart from making a morning announcement about the tragedy, she also went into every eighth grade class to share with the students about the lessons to be gleaned. When the class was ready, she (Dr Alice) started talking. She told them that it was simply a coincidence, but she was going to talk about the tragedy in Japan and then about another occurrence in the school – which is preventable. “The occurrence in Japan is calamitous, very scary. A lot of people have died and more separated. We should feel empathy. We should be involved, be caring, show our love for others. People should go beyond themselves. Personally, we should be shaken and we should be reflective. We can’t control a disaster, can we? Japan is an advanced country under serious duress and sadness. Yet in school there’s another occurrence that we can control. Don’t use swear words. When you are in the hallway, don’t use swear words, don’t use profanity. This is an occurrence you can control. You can control what comes out of your mouth. I am beseeching here. You know what that means. I am pleading with you to think about how you treat each other. You hurt my feelings and then I do the same thing. These are virtual tsunamis. When you are making fun of others, think about what one can control.” (14 March 2011, Amended Field Notes) School leaders play a pivotal role in building an expectation of innovation into a school’s learning and teaching strategies, and Dr Alice has shaped a design thinking culture that permeates most areas of the school by involving students, teachers and parents in creating stimulating environments at New Horizons. The organization, however, cannot flourish by the actions of the top leader alone. Fullan (2002) warned that the commitment necessary for sustainable improvement in an educational culture of change must be nurtured
in the “dailiness of organizational behavior”, and for that to happen there needs to be many leaders around us – teachers as instructional leaders with the ownership and commitment to manage change in a sustainable way that can lay the foundation for improved school and student performance in the future. It is therefore also the interest of this study to gain deeper insights into the processes that are of strategic importance in building a sustained culture of innovation and facilitating the development of engaging and stimulating learning practices. The Participants Because the main intent of the study is to understand how teachers embed design thinking processes in classroom teaching, the key criteria of participant selection was teaching proficiency and confidence in using design thinking in classroom learning. Dr Alice thus played an important role in the recommendation of teacher participants. With her strong endorsement, I approached two teachers who knew well that their principal had already given me a favorable response and, I admit, probably felt some pressure to participate in the research. I was, however, met with warm and positive responses from both teachers who welcomed me to enter their classroom whenever I wanted. Miss Estella was the more experienced teacher, who had been in service for seventeen years. She enthusiastically shared with me (after my first lesson observation) her rich teaching experiences and milestones both in the United States and Philippines, where she was originally from. Having taught for four years, Miss Jacqueline was still relatively young in the teaching service but recommended that I observe her class of GATE (Gifted and Talented Education program) students who were “faster thinkers” and therefore “more challenging to teach”. At New Horizons, GATE students have the opportunity for acceleration to an appropriate instructional level in Math by early admission to Algebra 1-2, Geometry, or Algebra 3-4. During the duration of the study, the teachers were never defensive and did not make any effort to guard their privacy. In fact, they perceived the pragmatic value of the study as feedback for them to improve their instructional practice – to which I tried to emphasize that I would be assuming an observational role, not an evaluative one. Another teacher I was recommended to was Mr. Lawrence, who taught the introductory STEM-design thinking class. As this foundation course is unique to New Horizons, I was curious and excited to see how students learn design thinking through projects with different engineering themes. Unlike his two colleagues, he was not trained in design thinking at Stanford’s d.school because he only joined New Horizons a year after the workshop took place. However, he possesses varied credentials and what one might deem a wealth of experiences that extend beyond teaching. Trained as a high school teacher, he is qualified to teach history, language arts, science and physical education. Outside classroom teaching, he had also dabbled in teacher training, aircraft mechanics and warehouse management. Although initially less warm and mildly enthusiastic, Mr. Lawrence soon developed a more comfortable relationship with me as he anticipated my consistent presence and engaged in occasional dialogue with me. Qualitative Study The aims of the research and the questions that have emerged pointed to the qualitative case study as the most fitting methodology. Case study is “an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a bounded phenomenon” (Merriam, 1998, pp. xiii), involves systematically gathering enough information about a particular person or group and situation to permit the researcher to effectively understand how the subject operates or functions (Berg, 2004, pp. 251) and can “penetrate situations in ways that are not always susceptible to numerical analysis” (Cohen et al., 2001, pp. 181). Indeed the personalized and contextual
the teachers on several occasions about their lessons and what they had planned for upcoming classes. In addition, four students were interviewed to capture their views and experiences about design thinking in classroom learning. The criteria for student selection were based on the student’s willingness to volunteer and their parental consent for participation in the interviews. They were also drawn from classes that I observed so that I would not be viewed as a complete stranger. About six students volunteered but eventually only four were selected because the other two students were extremely shy and were not predisposed to sharing more than a few words even with probing. These final student participants were Asher and Jake, GATE students from sixth grade, and Osvaldo and Jessica who were eighth graders. To make the students comfortable with the process, I interviewed them each for about thirty minutes in the computer lab of the school library, which was rather isolated and free from disruption. They were each interviewed once, and during their PE lesson so that they would not miss out on the learning in their core content lessons. The interview protocols are presented in Appendix 1 (Table 1.1-1.3). Data Analysis The study focuses on the processes and structures that influence the teaching practice of three teachers and their approach to using the design thinking process in classroom learning. The interpretivist nature of this study means that the researcher is bound up in the situation, rather than being a detached, objective observer, reflecting the belief that “knowledge is constructed by the individual and is socially negotiated” (Guba & Lincoln, 1989, p. 13). The careful use of source material is thus imperative, and the perspective of the outsider researcher is balanced with the views of the participants – teachers, students and school leader – so that the truth is more likely to emerge when all these perspectives are synthesized. Data sources included field notes, audio and video recordings of the lessons and interviews. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, data-coded and analyzed using the comparative procedure of open coding (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), where every sentence in the field notes and transcripts was labeled with terms that best captured what the main idea and concept was about. An initial set of codes was developed and then applied to the remaining data. Codes that shared more abstract qualities were amalgamated into broader pattern codes (Tables 2.1 and 2.2 in Appendix 2 capture the codes developed for the observation field notes and interview transcripts respectively). The data was analyzed at three levels: the individual case studies of teachers, a comparison across the case studies and a generic inductive qualitative analysis to consider the data in the wider schooling context. Finally, the data was triangulated among the participants’ responses as categories emerged. During the development of codes and categories, memos were also written to interpret the material, especially in light of how design thinking was being used to intersect with the teaching and learning of academic content. As the key concepts and themes emerged more distinctly, I also looked up relevant literature to further clarify and integrate with the analysis that has developed. This proved important in ensuring that the assumptions made were not solely the result of interpretation, but also grounded by actual data and literature to demonstrate that the analysis is grounded in lived experience (Charmaz, 2006). Findings Design Thinking at New Horizons: Motivation, Appropriation and Manifestation
“When I hire people, I say to them that I don’t think this is a school for everybody. You have to have a special set of talents. You have to be good enough to understand the curriculum. You have to be wise enough to understand that the students are coming from situations that are bereft of all kinds of support. I can’t just have everybody here. You have to be dedicated to changing the world (laughs).” Dr. Alice’s words may conjure images of unruly students, rowdy classes and dirty school compounds. But the smiles that greeted me were warm, the environment visibly clean and I did not sense the tensions and sharp divisions of power that often accompany student- teacher relationships in middle school. Sure, the buildings look a little old but many of the classes are well furnished and some are equipped with smart boards. As we took a whirlwind tour of the school, Dr. Alice pointed to chewing gum stains on the ground and said as if with disappointment: “Those, we could never remove.” Yet, these faint marks bear proud testament to the school’s success in purging the “mayhem”, “riot mentality” and “messy sloppy environment” that once plagued New Horizons. Under Dr. Alice’s leadership, the school has seen an evolutionary change. The fighting got under control, the ugly behavior was gradually displaced, and New Horizons also became a STEM school in 2008. Teachers now have their personal laptops, and students enjoy the comfort of learning spaces equipped with updated technological equipment to facilitate learning. The hardware has changed. However, Dr. Alice and the teachers in this study reminded me that the student profile still presents a challenge. Helping the students experience success continues to be top priority at New Horizons. As Miss Jacqueline explained, “Our group of kids is a little different and I think for them it’s important to have a safe place to come to, to feel comfortable at school and to feel like they can succeed.” Dr. Alice described the majority group of students at New Horizons as the “Teflon group”: They come from families with middling or modest incomes, and face many learning challenges. “It’s very high academic work. Nothing sticks unless you do things in a particular fashion over and over again so that whatever construction of knowledge that hasn’t been put into place firmly in the frame, in the schema for those kids, it is there after they are here in school. We get kids who’ve been through seven years of schooling already, and some of them can’t read past third grade level. They can’t do math past third grade, and they are supposed to finish algebra by the time they are done with eighth. And now you have the psychological issue that these students feel like failures as learners. So that whole group and whatever that’s about – that the students come in either from impoverished households in terms of not language- rich, not syntactically-rich, not ideas-rich, not dialogue-rich families so those kids come to school and that’s why they are at a disadvantage. And whether or not the school is able to build up that a psychological infrastructure for the kids so that they could survive in school is a really good question.” Motivation One: Feeling of Success Dr. Alice envisions New Horizons to be the school where learning gaps could be bridged, a place where learning experiences orient students to succeed instead of merely helping them to avoid the negative consequences of failing. In short, it is a place where students will find greater motivation to learn. She emphasized that some students – the “school-proof” ones whose parents make sure they read, who are exposed to rich ideas and go to museums –– are intrinsically motivated to learn, but other students need and expect their teachers to inspire and stimulate them. Indeed whatever level of motivation students bring to the classroom will be transformed, for better or worse, by what happens in the
towards a broader understanding of the concepts’ relevance to every day life. To Miss Estella, this goal is at the heart of teaching math because students not headed in technical directions often do not appreciate the practical use of mathematical concepts – in fact, giving up is the easy and natural path if they do not recognize math concepts as practical and relevant. “That’s what we teach for. That’s what students should experience. They should understand the relevance of every concept that is being delivered in class so that in the future they can apply it. For example, one of my students would say why would I bother with square roots? I would do gardening in the future. I want to be a housewife or I just want to do carpentry and all these…” Showing students how math relates to real life thus dominates Miss Estella’s daily lesson agenda. She works on cultivating mental habits of connection making by linking abstract concepts to everyday examples. Having taught for seventeen years, she is adept at creating such “a-ha” moments and frequently reaches beyond the conventional boundaries of the topic. In a lesson I observed, she built a case for learning parabolic graphing with its practical applications in the building of suspension bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge. The boys in the class were especially interested, and there was a higher level of alertness as the students seemed more invested in understanding the concepts. In the case of Social Studies, a subject new to students in sixth grade, Miss Jacqueline described a similar challenge: Helping the students experiencing Social Studies as a living subject, one that is relevant to their world. “It’s very foreign to students. They are kind of like ‘Who cares about what happens to people from across the world thousands of years ago’? That’s the most challenging subject for them because it’s about ancient civilizations. So that whole idea of understanding, points of view, and other cultures, and other societies, and why things occur is really important… We don’t look at memorizing dates and, you know, people’s names and time periods because all of these are irrelevant to the kids.” From Miss Jacqueline’s perspective, the “light bulb” moments, when they emerge, are indicative of “something has clicked” – a connection has been made and the students have transcended the learning of isolated facts which otherwise would hold little significance in stored memory. These are the moments that these teachers seek to create on a daily basis. They expressed a common desire to go beyond traditional methods of memorization and recall and develop creative strategies that help students connect abstract concepts to their own ideas, experiences, feelings and motivations, therefore maximizing their chances of experiencing success. Appropriation: My Own Version of Design Thinking In the lessons where elements of design thinking were present, I observed students generating and developing ideas – and these were often solutions to problems for which answers did not exist or were not readily apparent. From conversations with the teachers in this study, it was also apparent that the “light bulb” moments often came on when the students were pursuing and developing original ideas – especially through the prototyping phase of the design thinking process. Yet just two years ago, despite its transformative promise for learning, design thinking was very new to everyone at New Horizons, and incorporating it in classroom learning was nothing short of challenging. “You can ask any language arts or social studies teacher here. It was a big undertaking. There weren’t any real concrete examples for our type of kids, our
grade level, anything like that so we kind of had to make it up and we kind of took a lot of projects that we were already doing and tweaked them to sort of make it more design thinking and allowing the kids to have more input and that kind of thing. And from there you know once it starts to connect for the teacher, then all of a sudden you get the “Oh, we could try this. We could try this! It’s absolutely working”. It’s my own version of design thinking, maybe. I don’t know.” “My own version of design thinking” – indeed it was clear from the lesson observations and interviews that design thinking as a new approach for learning had undergone “appropriation” by the teachers to align with the desired outcomes of their subject, perceived needs of students, and their pedagogical objectives, skills and experience. Though the teachers of this study are similarly committed to their students, they bring different values and personal experiences into the school. Most importantly, they are probably the most insightful knowers of their classrooms, who reflect upon, justify, and critique what goes on there, and whose understanding of themselves and of their students will have an effect on how design thinking is appropriated to achieve different sets of objectives and priorities. Wertsch (1998) defined appropriation as the process of “taking something that belongs to others and making it one’s own” (Wertsch , 1998 , pp. 53). More specifically, at New Horizons, appropriation appears to be an active and iterative process where the teachers demonstrated that they were not passive recipients of a new pedagogical tool. To enable the adoption of design thinking, they adapted and used it in multiple unique ways – to encourage student motivation, and to suit other different purposes, different learning contexts and, more importantly, different subjects. In fact, Dr. Alice acknowledged that design thinking should be used as tool to intersect with the existing classroom learning culture and routines and emphasized, “Design thinking doesn’t belong to every time, every moment… Design thinking has a place at its time.” At New Horizons, every teacher is expected to incorporate design thinking in at least one subject unit. The school administrators recognized that in the absence of precedents and exemplars such efforts would take a leap of faith and a lot of courage. Teachers also needed to invest time and energy to understand the conceptual underpinnings of design thinking as a flexible and divergent learning approach, which necessitated a process of re-formulating their pedagogical instruction. However, Dr. Alice emphasized that the teachers were granted creative license to experiment and explore. “We manage the school differently. It’s partly the teachers we have here. They wouldn’t stay here if we want the things to stay the same for thirty years. And also there’s some hope in prototyping. Ok, didn’t work so let’s fix it. We are not going to stay with the same thing. Remember you have top-down and bottom-up. I have a choice to decide whether I want to do it again. That’s the grassroots. You don’t have one entry point in good policy management. You have it everywhere.” Although constraints and personal values will shape the way teachers use this tool for learning, Dr. Alice believes that design thinking should be “appropriately utilized to help inform practices, to help people see things in a way that they have empathy for every group they are working with”. The journey was not easy, but she let on that she had encouraged the teachers with the assurance of “Don’t worry about it, get there when you can”, “It doesn’t have to be right”, and “It’s already part of what we do”. However, she expressed deep faith in her teachers who “walk on water”, are “incredible” and “that’s why they are here”. Manifestation One: Design Thinking Is Not New Although there is no whole-school approach for incorporating design thinking in
She then invited students to volunteer and present parts of their draft while assuring them “it is only a prototype”, that they were testing for user feedback, the users being the classmates. This was a familiar scene of students presenting their work for class critique – some were nervous, some more confident, but the activity was not new. In this manifestation, using “design thinking” lingo to describe familiar classroom practices appears to stem from the intent to provide more positive frames of reference – and according to Dr. Alice, this may not be just a renaming exercise: “If I say prototype, you say prototype. You make meaning, you generate meaning, and you are not doing it to brainwash. It’s like reading a book; you are reading a book because it’s interesting. You are not reading a book to read a book.” Manifestation Two: You Don’t Have to Do All the Parts In exploring the application of the design thinking process, the teachers were deeply concerned about how the approach and its different steps could be used to support and dovetail with the objectives of their discipline. During one of the staff discussions about how design thinking could be instantiated in their own subject curriculum and teaching, an “amazing insight” emerged – one that has been instrumental in helping teachers at New Horizons make the leap of faith to use design thinking in classroom learning. Dr. Alice explained the implications of this discovery: “You don’t have to do all the parts of design thinking. They can teach parts of it in different places of the school. They (the teachers) were like ‘Thank God! I get it.’ The takeaway was you don’t have to do all the parts. So that informs the history teacher, the language arts teacher. Because when you are reading a novel, you just want to build empathy around the character. Maybe you are going to ideate… Maybe you are going to write in a history class. And we have a foundations class in sixth grade that teaches them the process. And in Math class, in Estella’s class, she does lots of projects where the students are thinking of prototypes.” Indeed Miss Estella is not only adept at using real-life examples to anchor students’ understanding of abstract concepts. Her sensitivity to creating the teaching moment potentially explains why she uses prototyping whenever “it seems right”. She is of the opinion that design thinking should be used “spontaneously” and not enacted like “it’s scripted”. Her belief is “if you just do it spontaneously as part of your curriculum, then over time you just do it as part of your system.” Coincidentally, Miss Estella’s personal beliefs appeared to coincide with Dr. Alice’s description of what a good Math teacher should do: “The moment you are going to make an analogy in the class and a great teacher will know – this is a design thinking moment. It is now appropriate for us to prototype something versus ‘No, you have to learn how to solve this equation today.’” In fact, in a lesson on functions and relationships, students moved from practicing examples and reviewing answers to working on prototypes. The transition appeared seamless but according to Miss Estella the activity was not planned. The prototyping idea emerged because she realized it would be a good way of recycling some old and unused color paper in her cabinet, and that also presented an opportunity for students to “play”. About fifteen minutes before the end of the lesson, she called the class to attention and issued the instruction: “Now your goal is in 15 minutes create something that you think has a function. Everything that you do has a function.” Then she went on to share about how a group of graduate students from Stanford developed “d.Light” to bring affordable, clean and efficient LED light to households in a rural village in Myanmar. The example demonstrated that ideas often have a function to serve the needs of other people. She then reminded the students that
they were working on a “prototype” and “it doesn’t need to be perfect” – a statement that drew a query from a curious student. Student: It doesn’t have to be perfect? Miss Estella: It doesn’t have to be perfect. The prototyping idea is the idea of having the idea. You can modify it and make it perfect when you have proof. At this stage, we are only coming up with the idea for the functions we are studying. The students then swarmed towards her teacher’s table, picking up pieces of paper and tape, and as chatter filled the room the students quickly developed unique creations with the limited resources and limited time that they had. Although this exercise was borne out of a spontaneous decision, it seemed pedagogically strategic because students were empowered to “interact with new knowledge” they had acquired. Miss Estella embraces the divergence and creation of the students through prototyping because the outcomes represent the students’ interest, ability, and self-confidence to extend learning. In fact, she was rather pleased with the outcomes (although whether the activity helped to anchor the students’ deeper understanding of conceptual knowledge was not clear). “To my surprise, their thinking of what a thing can do is beyond my expectations. Like one student put squares on his piece of paper and said, ‘This is like a pad for when you do play and your hands get wet, so all you have to do is put your fingers on it so that it dries quickly, because it sucks the sweat and then you can play again.’ Because he is into sport and he said he doesn’t like to put a towel and so why don’t we just a put a pad here and just place the fingers there and you are good to go – as quickly as possible. It’s like seconds. That’s a nice idea, and they built lots and lots of things that are not even in the context of my lesson, my imagination. So actually the kids are into that area, they build things that are beyond my imagination.” For Miss Estella, the idea of “You Don’t Have to Do All the Parts” fitted nicely with her teaching paradigm – a “teach, learn and apply” sequence, which I observed to be the standard of her lessons. Her lessons typically begin with her going through or reviewing basic concepts with practice examples (sometimes she brings in real world examples to establish conceptual relevance). She scaffolds the whole-class learning by drawing on different students’ input and demonstrating the procedures and skills needed to solve problems related to the concept. Then the students practice either individually or in groups where direct instruction takes place – she provides students a high level of support and guidance by moving around the classroom and helping them with the practice. Design thinking or hands-on tasks, if they do take place at all, usually happen after these routines. For Miss Jacqueline, this linear sequence also made sense because “of the fact that there are concepts (in Language Arts and Social Studies) that just need to be directly taught” before engaging the students in hands-on activities: “What I learned just by experience is that when we are doing the design thinking activity it does have to come after some of the background knowledge. If we threw those kinds of projects a little too early then they get a little off-task or they sway away from what my end goal was. I thought that has kind of been our learning curve here. By making sure that when we do these projects once they have got a little bit of the background and knowledge formed, then they take it a step further in the design thinking process.” That is why in her classes, design thinking projects are often culminating tasks “to make sure that they (the students) are exploring the concepts”. Situating design thinking activities near the end of the curriculum was apt, but identifying the step of the design
thinking primer” – it is intended to be a unique educational experience that immerses the student in the application of knowledge and authentic expression of their views and skills. The “danger”, she acknowledged, is that “it is not hard enough, not structured enough, a series of activities that is too loose.” Therefore this foundation course may not have the academic rigor and high expectations traditionally associated with core content subjects. Indeed, as the teacher for all sixth-grade STEM-design thinking classes, Mr. Lawrence identified student “apathy” as a key challenge. “One thing I’m struggling with and it’s something that I keep running into is, there’s a lot of apathy. The kids are like ‘why are we doing this? Is this going to be on the…’ It’s this whole thing on ‘Is this going to be on the test? Is this going to be on the big test that we have to take?’ Like the big thing of the future. Uh. And it’s supposed to be an elective. It’s supposed to be fun so there’s this element of it. So I try to make it fun, not just me talking at the moment time, but I keep running into the apathy.” Aiming at enticing student engagement through fun and play therefore would not suffice – what was needed was the molding of dispositions to invest in the learning that took place during STEM-design thinking lessons. Mr. Lawrence shared that he had addressed the challenge – though not always with success – by making connections to key concepts and skills in core content subjects. With his wide array of experiences that extended beyond teaching, he was also interested to structure his lessons to show students how knowledge and skills from different disciplines can connect to the development of original insights and ideas. Therefore, instead of simply showing real-world examples (I had observed him to possess an impressive supply of ready examples and anecdotes, probably because of his varied work experiences), he adopted as strategy the integration of knowledge and skills that the students had learned in their core content classes. “Those connections are made, and nothing’s isolated like a vacuum. They all tie in together so… The test scores of the school, they are on the low end so we do need to raise their test scores. And there’s all the funding. I mean it’s for the kids. It’s the kids first and foremost that you are trying to do a master of education. So, yes, they are going to learn to brainstorm, they are going to tape sticks together with tape and glue, but they are also going to learn math, they are also going to learn science. So if there’s something to reinforce in this class that makes it clearer when they are doing the Pythagorean theorem, and if they do not understand tectonic plate, then this (class) helps clarify because they are getting it twice. That is a good thing for me rather than just doing random stuff and why are we doing this?” In a class project to develop disaster-proof houses, his students revisited measurement conversion and explored how geography affected the susceptibility of certain U.S. regions to natural disasters while simultaneously engaging in the design thinking process to generate original solutions. The students developed blueprints of their houses and built cardboard prototypes, which were put to the “water and sand” tests that simulated malevolent tsunamis and earthquakes of high magnitudes. This experience was especially memorable for Jake, a GATE student in sixth grade. “That was fun because we got to find out what we should have put in it (prototype of the disaster-proof house), like materials – water-proof or fireproof or wood, or like steel inside to keep it from breaking during earthquakes. And the design, for example, the triangle keeps the building most secure. My teacher shook the table really hard (the water test) and our house did not survive, but at least we know what we can improve on the next time.”
Mr. Lawrence likened this process to the scientific inquiry process, but with lower stakes. “I like that they are able to stop and go, ‘Okay. We are brainstorming here and then we are going to use this to build our prototype. And then we are going to test our prototype. If something doesn’t work then we can go back to this (pointing to the steps of design thinking poster on the wall).’” Besides the STEM-design thinking foundation class, all sixth graders also experienced the integration of design thinking with STEM and other core content subjects in the “Cultural Awareness Project”. In September 2010, the students each chose a culture to focus on in this year-long multidisciplinary project where a research report was first put together in language arts class before prototypes were developed in STEM-design thinking class. These prototypes would be tested at New Horizon’s Open House later in the school year. At the point of this study, when data collection was still taking place, the students had just completed the first part of this project. In the process of producing and finishing the report, the students had invested themselves deeply in their work. Miss Jacqueline explained that the Language Arts team decided to focus on “the empathy piece” of design thinking and let the process driven by the student’s interest: “We went through a cultural awareness kind of lens and basically the language arts teachers took on the actual research and the actual report portion. So each student picked a culture. It could be their own culture or just one that that they were interested in. We wanted it to be their project and let them research an invention or a creation from that particular culture.” The team’s belief was that the students would be motivated to learn what they wanted to know and would assume more responsibility for the direction and quality of their own learning. Miss Jacqueline explained: “There is freedom for the student and in a sense they are more free. We always give them guidelines but when it comes to the design thinking project, we basically just give them a prompt and let it go. And they can really take it a thousand different directions. Because when they are wanting to do something and that they can take it their own way, it’s a completely different story.” Indeed the students seemed to enjoy the process, which stimulated and challenged their motivation to explore things they did not learn in class. To Asher, another GATE student from Miss Jacqueline’s class, this project provided him an opportunity to learn deeply about a topic that was intimately linked to his heritage. He developed a deeper appreciation for his Israeli heritage after researching on the Pillcam, a very small camera that is placed in a swallowable pill to allow surgeons to see the organs of patients without putting pipelines in the throat. This invention was created by an Israeli company. “I got to learn more than any other project. I got to learn things about my own culture and this invention that I never knew before. I started finding out even more once I did the research and wrote the report. Many of the other design thinking projects were about coming up with something yourself, but I really liked finding out the facts for this project. And it was kind of like free so you could do almost anything you want.” Perhaps more importantly, for Asher, who confessed that he was not a “big fan” of writing, putting together the report turned out to be “really fun”: “It is really fun when I can take one of my not-most-favorite subjects (language arts) and be able to do something I like and connect that subject with STEM, and I find that really nice.”
