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Journal of Teaching and Education, CD-ROM. ISSN: 2165-6266 :: 05(01):385–394 (2016)
INTEGRATING DESIGN THINKING IN DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP
AS A DECISION-MAKING PROCESS AMONG 21ST CENTURY
SECONDARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS IN MALAYSIA
Shafina Mohd Shah and Zainab Mohd Noor
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
In line with the current Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025 and international best practices, Wave 2 of the blueprint is geared towards a model of distributed leadership where effective, high- quality school leadership permeates the entire organization of all schools. In this phase, schools that meet certain performance criteria will be given greater decision-making flexibility over curriculum, budget and other related instructional decisions. In order to achieve the objectives, school principals in Malaysia will need to upgrade their knowledge on the process of decision-making to ensure that the school leaders and teachers are able to understand the mission and vision of the school and thus, execute the assigned tasks within a given time frame. Principal's decisions on important school-related matters are key indicators as to their success in the transformation process where empathy towards teachers is the top priority. This paper contributes to the current interest in design thinking for solution generating in support of the epistemological shift of design thinking as a decision-making process in educational settings, specifically the relationship of design thinking and distributed leadership especially in decision making as suggested in the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013 - 2025. Design thinking is deemed fit for distributed leadership as reflected in the amount of intensity and collaborative efforts when drafting solutions. Design Thinking offers enormous potential to enrich learning and teaching in many disciplines and more apt to include design thinking as a process for decision making towards the 21st-century education in Malaysia.
Keywords: Design thinking, Distributed leadership, Decision-making process, Secondary school principals.
Introduction
The 21st century has brought many challenges for people in all spheres. Towards approaching 21st century, Malaysia education system often faces changes and reviews in education policies (Pihie, Asimiran, & Bagheri, 2014). Since the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013- 2025 (MEB 2013-2025) being launched on 17th of September 2012, a lot of expectations and transformations are demanded from students, teachers and instructional leaders. In realizing the system aspirations for the Malaysian Education Systems, the ministry focussed on the importance of instructional leaders in schools. The aspiration's goal is to ensure that every school, regardless of location and performance level will have a high-quality principal and supporting leadership
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team to provide instructional leadership towards excellent school performance. To address this issue, Ministry of Education has laid out a strategic plan towards ensuring the high performing leaders in Malaysia and it comprises of three waves. Wave 1 (2013-2015) are focusing on improving selection standards, improving support systems and laying the foundation for creating a large pool of highly competent leaders in all schools in Malaysia. Wave 2 (2016-2020) will elevate the profession roll out of new career pathways and progression schemes, and support the transition towards a distributed leadership involving assistant principals and subject heads. The Ministry will also expand capability building support to assistant principals and subject heads as well as increase decision-making autonomy for principals based on performance. Lastly, in Wave 3 (2021-2025), all schools are expected to have high performing principals and supporting school leaders. The principals are expected to anchor ongoing improvement and innovation. It is also expected that all school leaders will fully utilise the flexibilities accorded to them in prior Waves which includes school improvement planning, curriculum and co-curricular planning. Looking at the Ministry's aspirations and expectations for years to come, it is undeniable that school environment will become more complex and diverse, where high learning standards set the vision of educational success. It will be mutually exclusive, multifaceted and multicultural, which are substantial challenges to the current practices and manner of doing things (Ahmad and Ghavifekr, 2014). The evolving nature of school environments has placed high demands on educational leaders (Fook & Sidhu, 2009).In facing tremendous changes in Malaysian education systems, the ministry, principals, instructional leaders, teachers and students are involved and affected by this system. The principalship and school leadership will be more challenging.Principals will continue to be struggling to manage and lead their schools, to ensure that professional standards are enhanced and to manage their multifaceted jobs with increasing demands dictated by the changes and challenges brought about by the world outside (Ahmad & Ghavifekr, 2014). In handling these challenges, decision making is important as it will determine the success or the failure of the schools.This is supported by Norlida et. al (2014) by saying that timely and quality decision making is pertinent to the success of any organization. Although schools have been functioning relatively well now, it will be increasingly more difficult later, because how schools are structured today, may well be not suited to changes taking place and the increasing demands of the school brought about by the changes. Teachers as the backbone of the school are being prepared to face these transformations. Various courses and seminars are being conducted to equipped teachers with sufficient knowledge about the importance, the different views of handling the curriculum changes and administrations aspects. One of the effects of this transformation is, teachers are being exposed with the excessive workloads in multi- tiered level (The Malay Mail, 30th June 2014) In the midst of this process,it is undeniable that the role of principals is pertinent in administering the school. Apart of teachers, it is crucial for the principals and the school leaders to understand the changes, needs and necessities of this new system and its impact towards teachers. Principals and school leaders need to understand teacher's need, teacher's role, the problems, obstacles and stress that the teachers are facing. One of the ways to ease teacher's burden is that by integrating design thinking in the decision-making process where the problems will be attained with empathy by thinking of ways to respond to needs of people and what works best for them(Brown, 2008). Lunenburg, Ornstein, & Zhou (2008) asserts that frequently, school administers are not aware that problems exist.Even when they do realize that there are problems, they do not systematically define and look at all possible alternative solutions. Principals and school leaders are limited with constraints cost and the ability to process the information.Furthermore, the number of administrative tasks a principal undertakes typically leaves insufficient hours in the day to complete the necessary 'heroic activities' and to cope with these mundane responsibilities ( Elmore, 2002; Gronn and Rawlings-Sanei,2003 cited in Timperley, 2005).Principals in the 21st century faced more challenges to live up to the ideals concept of 'instructional leader'(Mendels, 2012). To date, several frameworks such as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (Partnership for 21st century skills,2007), the enGauge Framework, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Key Competencies for Education(OECD, 2009) and the Assessments and Teaching of 21st Century Skills ( Binkley et al, 2010) have been developed.
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wicked or ill-defined in nature (N. Cross et al., 1992; Dorst, 2011; Dunne & Martin, 2006; Lawson, 1990). The application of design thinking as a method in practice starts approaching a problem from a human perspective. With the primary focus on people and their needs, it integrates human, business and technical factors in problem identification, solution and design (Dorst, 2011). To date, design thinking has received increased attention during recent years and it is interestingly penetrates learning across disciplines,(Hanttu, 2013; Hassi & Laakso, 2011; R. Razzouk & Shute, 2012; Rim Razzouk, Ph, Oroszlan, & Ed, 2011; Vanada, 2011) namely business (Brown, 2008, 2009; Dunne & Martin, 2006; Martin, 2006), engineering(Atman et al., 2007; Dym, Agogino, Eris, Frey, & Leifer, 2005),design (Badke-Schaub & Lloyd, 2005; Bjögvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012; Nigel Cross, 2004, 2006; Kimbell, 2011; Kolko, 2010; Rittel & Webber, 1984; Rylander, 2009; Scheer, Noweski, & Meinel,
- architecture (Ashkan, 2014; Eagen, Cukier, Bauer, & Ngwenyama, 2008; Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Lawson, 1990) and education (Ching, 2014; Luka, 2014; R. Razzouk & Shute, 2012, 2012; Rim Razzouk et al., 2011; Scheer et al., 2012).
Design Thinking Process
While there is various model of design thinking process that has been used for scholars and academicians in various field, design thinking process developed by Standford D. School will be used in this paper.
Figure 1. Design Thinking Process Source: Standford d.School
There are five steps in design thinking process in order to make a decision in the educational setting. These process stages are called modes. The first stage is empathize mode.Emphatize is the foundation of a human-centered design process. To emphatize, one must observe, engage, and immerse with the person. In the educational context, in order to empathize, the principals must observe teachers and student's behaviour in the context of their lives. Secondly, the principals must engage, that is, interact and interview the teachers through both scheduled and short or casual encounters.Last but not least, in order to empathize, the principals must experience what the teacher experiences. In this mode, the teachers/ users or people that will be effected and affected by the decisions will be interviewed and observed in their daily routine and needs. This is important as the outcomes of decisions place empathy as the utmost priority. The second mode is define mode. The objective of define mode is to produce an actionable problem statement (D.School, 2010).In this mode, the problems are focussed based on insights and needs of teachers or person that has been discovered during the emphatize mode. Next is ideate mode. In this mode, the design process will focus on idea generation. During this process, all ideas are welcome from all the school leaders and it represents a process of going wide in terms of concepts and outcomes.The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space, both large quantity of ideas and diversity of those ideas. This is where the importance of multidiscipline background
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comes in. Different people from the different background will have different views in approaching the issues or problems being discussed. Teachers from various academic backgrounds are being represented by their appointed leaders.The most important criteria in design thinking are that there are no judgements. This eliminates the fear of failure and encourages maximum input and participation. Wild ideas are welcome since these often lead to the most creative solutions. During the ideate mode, the brainstorming approach is often used and the idea is often transferred to a 'post it'. The reason being, the 'post it' helps the keep the idea short and precise. It is also encouraged to use 'Yes... and' rather than “No, but” approach. After ideas have been generated, it is time to prototype the proposed solution. Prototype mode is the interactive generation of low-resolution artifacts realized by the school leaders that will later be tested by the teachers. Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of the school leader's mind into the physical world.A prototype can be anything that the teacher can interact with; whether it is a wall of post- it notes, a role-playing activity or even a storyboard(D.School, 2010). The resolution of the prototype should be commensurate with the progress of the project. In early explorations, it is acceptable to keep the prototypes rough and rapid to allow the school leaders to learn quickly and investigate a lot of different possibilities.Prototypes are most successful when people (the school leaders, the teachers, the others) can experience and interact with them. Those interactions can help drive deeper empathy; as well as shape successful solutions that later will help the decision-making process. After a prototype has been build, the test mode is another iterative mode in which low-resolution artefacts are placed in the appropriate context of teacher's / users life. In regards to a team's solution, the school leaders should always prototype as if they are right, but test as if they know they are wrong. Testing is a chance to refine the solutions and make them better.It is also a pathway where the school leaders can weigh the solutions that lead up to decision making.
Why Design Thinking for Decision Making in Education?
Design thinking is claimed to improve decision-making practices in multidisciplinary fields (Melles, Howard, & Thompson-Whitesidec, 2012). These include strategy and management (Dunne & Martin, 2006), health care systems and services (Duncan& Breslin 2009), library system design (Bell, 2008) operations and organizational studies (Romme, 2003) and more recently in projects where social innovation and social impact matters (Koh, 2012). In approaching 21st-century educational challenges suggested that it is essential to integrate design thinking into decision-making skills to the school leaders and teachers as sometimes, the challenges in educating in the 21st century involve complex problem solving and reflection(Lawson, 1990; Smith, 2007). Design thinking as a decision-making activity is first and foremost associated with Rittel's formulation and Buchanan's elaboration of the 'wicked problem' approach. Several solutions to the problems need to be designed and weigh upon in various perspectives.These problems are called design problems.In essence, design problems are ill-defined problems, sometimes referred to as “wicked problem”(Buchanan, 2010). According to this approach, 'the design is divided into two distinct phases: problem definition and problem solution (Buchanan, 2010).During these two phases, all the elements of the problems are identified. This is an analytic sequence. In turn, during the problem-solving phase, which is a synthetic sequence, different variants are compared and balanced against each other to create the final plan(Buchanan, 2010).The approach adopted is interpretive, emergent and explicitly embodied(Rylander, 2009). Jonassen (1997), describes design problems as “among the most complex and ill-structured kinds of problems” and “they have an ambiguous specification of goals, no determined solution path, and the need to integrate multiple knowledge domains”. In order to solve such kinds of problems, principals need to engage in creative and critical thinking skills; the collecting, editing and prototyping of ideas; and the monitoring progress and with the management of team dynamics. The educational value of design problems is, therefore, significant for the development of 21st-century skills. It can also support the
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problem, they have also been trained to use different concepts. The words they used may differ, the categories by which they sort things in the world may differ and the implications associated with one or the other categorization may differ as well. If design teams are unable to work out a common conceptual ground, they may not be able to make good use of the wide-ranging expertise of their team members (Thienen et al., 2011). To overcome these communications problems, training on design thinking is pertinent as suggested by Stanford D School. (Dolak et al., 2013) postulates that design thinking is 'an approach to foster of human-centered idea generation and evaluation in a team context. In practise, the process starts with approaching a problem from the human perspective. The primary focus in on people and their needs, and human business and technical factors are integrated into problem identification, problem solution and design. Ahmad & Ghavifekr (2014), asserts that school leadership. particularly with regards to curriculum and instruction at the school level, should not be only in the hands of the appointed principals, the chief executives of the school, who is responsible not only for setting the directions and make key decisions. Leadership should be concerned with designing the instructional strategies, the learning process, whereby the people throughout the schools, the teacher particularly, can deal productively with the critical issues they face, and develop their mastery in learning disciplines. Leadership should be concerned with guiding the vision of the group by learning to listen carefully to other's visions and adapting it holistically to make it something everyone feels they have a say in. In other words, this is empathy, that is, placing people need people's hope as the key subject in making decisions in the organization. Empathy is one of the core attributes of design thinking. Ahmad & Ghavifekr (2014), further emphasized that leadership in schools in Malaysia must be distributive, allowing for all involved to be truly involved and collaborative. Much more importance must be given to teachers. A new kind of leadership is brought to the fore, and new skills are needed to make it work. This is where design thinking is considered as the most suitable approach to distributed leadership in terms of decision making.
Conclusion
Design thinking can lead principals to apply a cognitive balance of creative and practical problem solving with empathy, collaboration, communication skills and more complex thinking(Vanada, 2011). Design thinking is about thinking of ways to respond to needs of people. At this period, the study of design thinking and its implementation in education system specifically among principals are still at its infancy stage. Design thinking in education in this country is still focusing on the training of technical skills in design as means to solve problems(Lim, 2015). In education, there are calls for educators to be the designers who create specific conditions to support education environment that has been changing rapidly towards the 21st century.Yet, there is still no widespread adoption of design thinking to support educators in educational practices(Joyce Hwee Ling Koh, Ching Sing Chai, Benjamin Wong, 2015).This is supported by Petray et. al. ( 2014), by saying that design thinking principles and frameworks are considered to be excellent scaffolds for supporting the development of creative and innovative mindsets in education but little empirical research has been conducted.There is a constant cry against educational practices that remain at the level of content instruction and regurgitation.The educational models of the Industrial Age are no longer adequate (Macdonald & Hursh, 2006) as the world of tomorrow need to be supported by educators who possess 21st century competencies or the abilities to solve complex and ill- structured problems through confident exploitation of technology, self-initiation and the arbitration of diverse viewpoints(Joyce Hwee Ling Koh, Ching Sing Chai,Benjamin Wong, 2015). However, these challenges in education are not impossible to overcome. The education system in Malaysia is dynamic and not static thus; it is always evolving and changing from time to time to suit the requirements of the country and global community. There is always room to improve on what that has been done and identify what else need to be done to improve the system (Yassin, 2010). Design thinking is about thinking of ways to respond to the needs of the people (Brown, 2008). This further reiterates why principals should be actively involved in decision-making process and get to know
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their subordinates and the principals should play an active role to react and respond to the everyday needs of the education world. This question should be constantly asked ' how these decisions can change and affects and affects other teacher's and student's performance specifically and to the education world generally?' Leadership is both transformational and distributive, and school leadership is instructional leadership, with the principals being the ultimate instructional leader. The principal is entrusted with ensuring that the school is a safe and enjoyable place to be, one that the students see something happening which is meaningful to them; encouraging all persons involved to strive for self-improvement. The principal will have also managed the schools to stay in line, and stable enough to allow the flexibility needed. Real instructional leadership practise is best shared with the teachers and middle managers in the school- the senior subject teachers and the heads of departments (Ahmad & Ghavifekr, 2014). Design thinking frameworks have considerable potential to scaffold the development of skills in problem solving and creativity across the discipline. More effective support for the development of these skills could contribute substantially to the nation's innovative capacity. To ensure that the design thinking methodology is not employed in a superficial way that would have limited outcomes, further work is needed to provide educators with knowledge and experience in using strategies and understanding where these strategies fit within the various components of the methodology. Further work in different discipline areas that specifically target the use of particular strategies in context would support effective implementation (Petray et al., 2014). Everyone is a designer, and design thinking is a way to apply design methodologies to any of life's situations.
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