Using Design Thinking to Include Students in School Change
I don’t think anything has been more impactful and beneficial for my overall perspective on education as a system and a practice than spending my last three years outside of a school building, working for an ed-tech game design company in Shanghai, China. Not only did this work allow me to “pull back” and get a more objective view of educational practices in the U.S. and the world simply by exposing me to whole new philosophies of education, but it also allowed me to view education as a profession in comparison to other professions (specifically, tech and design), instead of simply comparing educational organizations to each other.
And throughout that work, I kept coming back to a key thought - why don’t we, as educators, think about the work we put into the world (classes, school structures, etc.) as “products” with a specific user base (our students)? Why don’t we learn from other fields, where full processes and systems have been developed to do just that with the minimum amount of lost time, energy, and resources? We often design curriculum with our students in mind, of course, but seldom do we formally interview our student users, test out ideas, or prototype rough versions of our lessons before committing to a full classroom environment - most often improving via mistakes that affect (at minimum) a whole classroom of students, as opposed to being able to ditch our least effective work long before any students actually miss out on learning as a result.
With these thoughts in mind, just imagine my surprise (and excitement) when I left China to come to High Tech High as a School Leadership Masters resident and heard teachers and school leaders talking excitedly about the “Design Process” and work they had done with representatives from the Stanford d.School. And so, of course, it wasn’t long after a few conversations with faculty at High Tech Middle school that I found myself part of a committee coming up with Professional Development workshops to teach all of the staff at HTM the basics behind the Design Process in order to apply those principles to examining - and possibly re-structuring - school protocols to best create cross-grade-level project experiences.
(for full details and reflection on this process, download the file below)
And throughout that work, I kept coming back to a key thought - why don’t we, as educators, think about the work we put into the world (classes, school structures, etc.) as “products” with a specific user base (our students)? Why don’t we learn from other fields, where full processes and systems have been developed to do just that with the minimum amount of lost time, energy, and resources? We often design curriculum with our students in mind, of course, but seldom do we formally interview our student users, test out ideas, or prototype rough versions of our lessons before committing to a full classroom environment - most often improving via mistakes that affect (at minimum) a whole classroom of students, as opposed to being able to ditch our least effective work long before any students actually miss out on learning as a result.
With these thoughts in mind, just imagine my surprise (and excitement) when I left China to come to High Tech High as a School Leadership Masters resident and heard teachers and school leaders talking excitedly about the “Design Process” and work they had done with representatives from the Stanford d.School. And so, of course, it wasn’t long after a few conversations with faculty at High Tech Middle school that I found myself part of a committee coming up with Professional Development workshops to teach all of the staff at HTM the basics behind the Design Process in order to apply those principles to examining - and possibly re-structuring - school protocols to best create cross-grade-level project experiences.
(for full details and reflection on this process, download the file below)
designthinkingpitpgregcallaham2012.pdf | |
File Size: | 71 kb |
File Type: |