Design Thinking – Day 3

By: Tammy Flanders

We had four workshops today – two for secondary level students and two for elementary level.

It was great having an opportunity to work through the elementary scenario of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf a couple more times. There is definitely a marked difference in the tone of activity between the elementary and secondary students. Whereas the secondary students worked through a more real life example (helping an immigrant/ refugee settle in a new country which they took very seriously) the elementary student teachers were able to let their imaginations go and have some fun.

Paula and I still think there’s merit in having the secondary level students work through the fairy tale scenario just to introduce a bit of levity into the workshop and highlight that the work is about the application of the process not the specific scenario we’ve centered the task around. We just have to screw up our courage and try it out.

Paula and I, in reflecting on today’s teaching, have noted that we have added an element in the definition component of the design thinking process for the sake of clarity. If you read through the literature written about the design thinking process it never actually suggests coming up with a defining problem that will then be ideated. But we found that students struggled to get down to the ideating part, the part about coming up with ideas that look for possible results to help move forward with whatever problem they might be working on. Giving the students a couple of minutes to focus on an actual question or problem made the process a little more apparent.  They had something to ideate or focus on.

Another recommendation that has come up in several of the workshops for the secondary level student teachers is providing them with ‘character cards’, that give them an immigrant character to become when doing the interview with an aide worker.  Some students did get into the role playing and came up with characters who had children, who had never worked before, had specific job skills (ie. Doctor, engineer) they were looking to transfer, etc.  Other students felt like they didn’t know enough about immigrants to make up a character.  Paula and I have resisted this idea so far thinking that using the imagination was of value. We’ve since reconsidered and will make up a few characters that students will have the choice to assume or not.

Stay tuned for tomorrow – two more sessions.

Design Thinking – Day 2

By: Paula Hollohan

Today, for the first time, we gave our Elementary edition of the Design Thinking workshop and then another iteration of the Secondary version.  The only difference is the task that the students work through.  In the Elementary version, our task follows the story of the Three Little Pigs.

Here’s the thing.  Students are requesting that we supply curriculum connections and that our task be something they can experience and then replicate in their classrooms.  We are not trying to connect design thinking to a specific part of elementary or secondary curriculum simply because we want students to create those links themselves.  In order to show some examples of these links we are collecting information about various tasks on our libguide and we will be adding to them as we come across other great examples.

Using Design Thinking in the classroom will require students to choose the curriculum content that they feel best suits this process.  They can then plan what the process will look like in their classroom and see how it develops.

Design Thinking lends itself to the study of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects very well but is harder to imagine in Social Studies or English Language Arts.  Our rationale, in tying both workshops to familiar stories, is to show how design thinking can be used in the humanities.  The work around this use of design thinking is really just in its infancy and showing students the example connected to these resources shows them a path less traveled.

Why don’t we prototype something practical like a toothbrush or a play structure?  We are hoping students see that it may be easier to plan for design thinking within the science curriculum.  In grade 4, Simple Machines, students can be given tasks like playground design that will include most simple machine illustrations.  This process would take some time and developing a prototype would definitely be at least a class on its own.  Unfortunately, in our 80 minutes, we can introduce students to the process but would have to give up too much to include the prototyping.

And so we come to Thursday. Tomorrow we will teach 4 workshops in a row and will try to publish a blog by the end of the day if we are still standing.

Design Thinking – First Feedback

Contributor: Tammy Flanders

I’m only going to take up three points that came from the student’s feedback in today’s workshops.

1.A few of their points, we felt came from not meeting their expectations. Even though we set up the introduction to outline our objectives and how we meant to achieve them students felt that we had come up short.

For example, they wanted to see specific examples of design thinking in a physics, math and English classroom. Someone else wanted to know “Why design thinking?”. Finally, more students wanted to be even more involved in some of the activities.

Let me elaborate.

As an introduction workshop, Paula and I did not consider presenting specifics about integrating design thinking in content areas. Or why design thinking was a focus within this particular course. These questions would be better addressed in their regular class and will likely become clearer as they engage in the process when doing their assignments.

So, how to better to meet student expectations? A stronger introduction stating what we will and will not cover, recommend the Design Thinking library guide for examples of different teaching situations, and following up with their instructors.

2. The comments about having the students doing more of the work were excellent points. Having students write their own post-it notes as they generated ideas, questions, problems related to immigrants/refugees instead of Paula and I doing this work, we agree would be better. Or having students rework their ideas created during the ideation component would also be fantastic and reflects a more realistic process. Design thinking is about revisiting your work over and over again.

But TIME was our major factor here. Eighty minutes isn’t very much time when working through this.

The rationale for doing this the way we have was strictly done as a consideration of time. Based on Paula’s experiences teaching other workshops having participants generate ideas in this way or revisiting and reworking their ideas, requires a considerable amount of time.  Having experienced this, myself at conferences, being pushed through this process in a couple of minutes is frustrating and sometimes results in confusion.

The questions then are:

What other sections can be significantly shortened or removed from the workshop?

If one section is given more time than the others, will this make the other components weaker?

What else can we come up with to overcome time constraints yet still give a meaningful workshop?

How much tighter can we make the introduction (i.e. talk less about the process we’ve undertaken in designing the workshop) before there isn’t enough information there for students to get any real meaning?

For the moment, we’re sticking with our format but will consider if there are other ways of doing this.

3. Another point that a few students brought to our attention was the ’inauthenticity’ of the scenario we had them work through. As Paula has described above our scenario was based on immigrants and refugees settling into a country different from their own and how to go about meeting their needs in terms of employment, accommodation, food and finding community. We thought by using the two books to give them the mindset of a new arrival and talking about what they knew about Syrian refugees, or other situations based on their own experiences that would be enough for them to take on the role of either an immigrant or a social worker. By interviewing each other as a way to derive more information about the problems associated with a new arrival, we thought we had addressed empathy in an interesting way, a technique that could be used in their own classrooms, perhaps.

However, some participants felt this was a difficult undertaking and were not comfortable being an immigrant or refugee in case they misrepresented or based their representation on stereotypes.

Paula and I are not convinced that this is a real problem (at this point, at any rate). It may not be entirely authentic, granted, but taking up roles is a way to learn about what our biases are, what other kinds of information we need to learn about to really understand the situation and problems that come with living in a new country. This only highlights the importance of empathy for us. In the real world, you would of course go beyond an interview and research data from multiple sources.

What this really speaks to, in terms of our own teaching is the challenge of task design. To read more about designing task please visit a couple of other posts Paula has written, one from October 19^th, 2015 and October 27^th, 2015.

Stay tune, folks.   We are making changes to the workshop as we go and we’re so much through this process. Hopefully, you will too.

 

 

Design Thinking – Iteration #1 and 2

And so we began, first thing this morning, to introduce 2^nd year Werklund Education Students to the Design Thinking process using the prototype of our own workshop to show them, through a humanities based task, to incorporate empathy, definition and ideation (and not present but also discussed, prototyping and testing) into their teaching.

We began with our objectives and what the workshop meant to us.  We showed the video from 1996 (some students mentioned how old it was) from Nightline that showed the whole process in the IDEO studio to design a shopping cart that is safer and easier to use.

During the second workshop, we felt that a tight summary of what went on in the video would be a good idea.  Examples were given from the video for empathy, definition and ideation.  The summary tied it together for students to give vocabulary to the vignettes they saw in the news story.

Again, we walked students through our experience, having conversations to create the empathy piece in our workshop and showed our thinking process through the definition stage.  We have all of the outlines we used as the evidence of the ideation process but did not present them in either workshop.

We, then, moved to student work.  Tammy presented the story of Home and Away by John Marsden and Matt Ottley while I showed the pictures from the book using the document camera. This picture book powerfully records the experience of an ordinary family, forced by war in their country, to become refugees.  In the interest of time, we chose this book for the secondary level pre-service teachers because of its impact and message.

Prepared packages of images from The Arrival by Shaun Tan, featured immigrant experiences captured in his graphic novel of finding food, shelter, employment and community in a new country.  In the second workshop, we removed the general immigrant experience images from the package and just left the specific subject area images.

Students used these images along with their own personal reading and watching of social media to form an impression of the immigrant experience in a new country.  Table groups were asked to brainstorm ideas about this immigrant experience within the context of the four areas mentioned above.

In order to experience empathy with the scenario at hand, students were divided into groups of two, where one student took on the role of the immigrant and the other was an aid worker.  We made some assumptions for this activity like that all immigrants could speak English, that you use all the general information you know about this issue to facilitate your understanding and that money is not an object.  Once the interviews took place, we asked students to tell us the identity they had assumed and the ideas that had come from their interviews.

Once we had recorded this information on post-it notes, we looked for patterns and clustered like ideas. From here, students were asked to ideate, picking a problem they wished to focus on and to start to write these ideas on a big sheet of paper with markers.  They were asked to draw or capture an idea that may be an outcome or a solution to their problem.

We had some interesting ideas from an all-in-one living and services building to people who would take public transportation with the new immigrant to places to get familiar food for them.

After a quick review of the process they had just experienced, we returned to the discussion of our “workshop as prototype” and asked for written feedback from them about whether or not we had reached our objectives.

Students, overall, felt they had a better understanding of the process and especially the three points we covered in the task:  empathy, definition and ideation.  We will address several of the comments over the next several blog posts and reflections.

For us, the number one factor in the design of a new workshop was addressing the limited amount of time most workshops allow for processing all of the Design Thinking process.  Most of the initial feedback we have received mentioned that the time allotted was suitable.  More comments came in about task design and the practical application of Design Thinking especially in the secondary classroom.  We will address more of these concerns in following blogposts.

Design Thinking Workshop Prototype

And this is the last peaceful moment we will enjoy at the Doucette for some 5 weeks.  Beginning on Monday, what seems like the sprint to the finish for 2nd year Werklund pre-service teachers will begin with the shot of a starting pistol (only figuratively) and continue at a break neck speed until February 14th.

Not that we, here at the Doucette, have been quiet.  Quite the opposite.  We have been developing a workshop for those same 2nd year students as they test the process of Design Thinking within their grade level and specialty teaching areas.  In order to end with a bang that we are metaphorically beginning with, a Maker Faire will be held here to showcase all of the prototypes of their learning on that final day, February 14.

Back to the workshop.  My partner in teaching, Tammy and I have been generally frustrated by each Design Thinking Workshop we have attended.  We began to visualize what the perfect workshop would look like in order to savour the language and process of Design Thinking.  During the brainstorm of our successes and disappointments, the number one reason for most of our frustrations was TIME.

In infomercial style, many workshops offered complete Design Thinking Training in 30 minutes or less.  And in order to experience Design Thinking, we bought into these workshops to soak up the process we had been reading so much about.   Let’s face it, spending two minutes to empathize with a real world problem is not enough.  Coming up with ideas to alleviate said problem with a 5 minute deadline is dreadful.

Developing our own workshop using the Design Thinking process embedded us in the steps to create a great learning experience for our students.  We decided, (listen carefully), to develop the workshop using the Design Thinking process making the workshop our prototype and having students test and give us feedback.  With me?  Okay, then we developed two humanities based scenarios to work with students through the first three defined steps of Design Thinking: Empathy, Definition and Ideation.

And so we begin the journey of walking 300+ students through the Design Thinking process using our workshop as prototype.  Beginning Monday, I will try to blog at the end of each day to let you know our successes and inspirations to change for new iterations. Notice how the word failure does not appear in this blogpost.  “Inspirations to change for new iterations” is the new failure where failure is, clearly, not an option.

Hang on, it is going to be a bumpy ride!

 

 

Design Thinking and the Undergraduate Student

The beginning of January is the harbinger of another whirlwind term for our second year undergraduate education students.

The coursework for much of their time centers on design thinking and working through the process to successfully complete a task based on the tenants.  Many instructors call on us, Tammy Flanders and I, to walk their students through our “Introduction to Design Thinking” workshop.  There is one problem – time.

The perennial problem with every design thinking workshop we have ever been to is time.  Not enough time.  In working through the five steps of the design thinking process:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test and Re-Test

students are expected to work through an authentic task to develop their knowledge of the process.

If we do our workshop and help them to learn the Stanford-inspired language for Design Thinking and how we have worked through each individual step, then we are forcing the experience and requiring creative solutions on the spot.

In our most perfect world, our Design Thinking workshop would take place over days, in which students would have time to empathize with the end user of their prototypes.  They would have time to define the task at hand, mull it over and return to further define the task.  Upon further contemplation, various parts of the solution would occur to each group and there would be time for them to consider each aspect of each solution.  Prototyping would come quickly with on-the-spot feedback and testing and re-testing would prove to be a valuable learning experience.

In this current framework, we touch on the deeper thinking nature of the first three steps and hope the prototyping and testing will take care of itself.  We hope that this rapid introduction to the steps and process of design thinking leave them wanting more through the Doucette’s Research Guide.

And so we spread the word about Design Thinking and the authentic learning prototype it can bring to each classroom but we struggle to give it the time it needs to fully be explored.

Creativity and Classrooms

In the five weeks of the Robert Kelly hosted Book Lab about his latest book, Creative Development: Transforming Education through Design Thinking, Innovation, and Invention, I feel I understand where we, as educators, are headed better than I did before.

I also  have more questions than ever before.

Creating a culture of collaboration and creativity is essential to move towards a more student-centred decision making model. Kelly’s notion that by flattening out the hierarchy in any educational environment, it allows for true collaboration among all participants.  He articulates the idea of teacher as facilitator and student as captain of their own learning in a way I wish I could.

Kelly challenges the structure of the classroom and the mindsets of those within it so thoroughly as to set the whole concept of education on its head.  And that is a good thing.  Through anecdotal evidence, we see how students who direct their own learning are highly motivated and engaged in self-motivated challenges that round their learning not tied to curriculum but more in tune with how learning takes place in the real world.  This type of learning is messy, not highly structured, not completed in a period, a day or a week. This learning is inclusive, consuming and relevant.

Educational technologies are the tools that suit the task, not a separate skill to be acquired through artificially created and staged outcomes.

Robert Kelly’s ideas challenge how I see students engaging in their education and that is exciting and interesting and scary all at the same time.   Look at this book to promote some “outside the box” thinking for yourself and your students.

 

Awakening the Maker

Having maker minded people in a maker space makes for a more interesting learning experience for students.  You may invite experts to help on occasion or have students who have more making experience facilitate classes.

Another way to promote a creative atmosphere in a learning space is with browsing materials.  Students make connections through the visual browsing of books and magazines.  Of course, Make Magazine is the first resource that comes to mind.  These magazines focus on projects, makers and ideas. Keeping back issues on tables would be a great idea.

Two new books that have recently come into the Doucette Library also make for wonderful maker browsers.  First, Things Come Apart, by Todd McLellan, a book containing 175 colour illustrations and 21,959 components and 5 relevant articles.  The author has dismantled a variety of items like a stapler, a sewing machine, and a two-seater light aircraft.  He has arranged the component parts in an organized photo display and also photographed the pieces as they dropped through the air, sometimes layering several images to complete the picture.  Articles like, “The Repair Revolution” authored by Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit extolling the valuable learning gained by “tear-downs,” the disassembling of electronics are also featured. Let’s face it, though, the real charm in this resource are the amazing photographs.  Set it beside your Take Apart Station for greatest impact.

DK has published the “Smithsonian Maker Lab: 28 Super Cool Projects” a resource aimed at the elementary and middle school maker space where definite recipes for project outcomes help students to experience hands-on making and gain essential foundation skills that they can later apply to more creative making.  Photographs show step-by-step instructions and the sidebar always shows “How It Works” to reinforce the science behind each maker project.

Choose carefully but surround your makers with various resources that they can browse in their own time.  Ideas can come from the exposure to what other makers are doing, creating or photographing.

Visit the Doucette Library to take these and other books out to showcase making in your space.

Maker Mindset

The Maker Movement is much more than just a space to provide students in the K-20 environment with a tricked-out place to “do” what they are learning.  A Maker Space without the mindset is just another static museum installation.  The pressure on schools, currently, to install a Maker Space complete with 3D printers and technology to rival NASA does not address the making at all.  The space is just a place before you gather the people with the maker mindset to facilitate within the space.

What does that look like? In most schools, it means looking around for staff who are “makers” and are naturally curious about the space and tools and match them with the space and students to see how the relationship works out.  Before teachers adopt making into curriculum teaching, they may need a chance to see what it looks like in an after school or lunch time club setting. The road to adoption for many staff may be in seeing the learning that goes on in the space before they imagine it working in a particular unit.

I am currently reading and working through the ideas in Creative Development by Robert Kelly.

In a series of 5 workshops held here on campus by the author, we are learning about creativity, innovation, design thinking and collaboration and what each concept looks like in the future of education.  It is an exciting time to think what is possible if the learning is experienced by students at the hands of creative facilitators.  Although these notions won’t be adopted immediately into K-20 classrooms, the more we know about each concept and how to recognize it in teaching and learning, the better chance we have to be moving towards adoption.  More on these key concepts in upcoming blog posts.

The Horizon Report K-12, 2016 (Preview)

Horizon Report K-12, 2016 Preview

The Horizon Report compiled by the National Media Consortium is the report that names the trends in education that are most important to pay attention to in the coming year, 5 years and 10 years.  It will be published on September 14, 2016 in its entirety but the advance sample or preview is available today.  NMC also collects information for the coming report in a comprehensive wiki and you can join to view the background information.

This Horizon Report will focus again on the adoption of the makerspace model of learning and teaching into classrooms.  It has moved to the “one year or less” category and teaching students seem to be adopting this model through their studies.  Many workshops and ideas are introduced during their time in the teaching program.

The second trend to on-line learning also remains on track for adoption in the next year or so with the continual changes in the open-source resource market.  Many contributing trends are also affected like blended learning where students are responsible for the background work of watching videos and reading resources in non-class time.

Long term trends in education are generally accepted as more evolutionary than revolutionary, happening gradually over time in schools that are creating new spaces for students to learn in.  Because re-designing spaces takes huge budgets, “re-arranging” of learning spaces in more the norm in most school districts. Here, screen installation for collaborative learning areas, and more flexible work spaces are technology use and general group work adaptations schools can make without a large investment of cash.

Another long term trend in education is the “rethinking how schools work”  and this trend addresses the move to a more authentic, multidisciplinary environment for learning. Teacher education is also meshing with the mid-term trends focused on collaborative learning approaches  based on the four principles: “placing the learner at the center, emphasizing interaction and doing, working in groups, and developing solutions to real-world problems.” And the other mid-term student-centered trend delving into deeper learning approaches in the classroom.

It is exciting to see the acknowledgement that coding is a new literacy to be addressed by educators in the short-term and the notion that students are becoming the creators of their learning rather than consumers.  These two notions are coming to the forefront of education practice especially from a teacher education viewpoint.

The report is rich in topics that are so important to our students as they enter or continue their education to become teachers and to practicing teachers who provide mentoring for our students.  More news when the complete report is released next on September 14, 2016.