We had several early steps in our Lower School during the first few weeks of school. Our drama teacher, Letty Robinson, had some fun early success incorporating design thinking strategies into her specials classroom time with students in both Pre-K and 4th grade. Here's a quick synopsis of what she did:
Pre-K (4 year olds)
- The setup: These are our youngest learners, and as such, the initial experience with design thinking needed to feel natural and fun. Letty also wanted to elicit some natural acting behaviors from the students in the process. Letty partnered with each class' assistant teacher (the asst teacher is the person who brings the students in to the room each day) for this activity. A quick note about the room - the teacher desk is situated so that the teacher's back is to the entry door, which helped with this particular activity. The assistant teacher talked with the students and encouraged them to "sneak into the room" without alerting the teacher to their presence. As the students entered the room, they did so as quietly as possible... tip toe-ing, hunching over, and not talking. Of course, being four years old, they were not silent, but a little cooperation from Letty in terms of acting surprised helped make the initial activity fun for the students.
- The design thinking element(s) involved: Once the students were assembled in the classroom, Letty engaged the students in a discussion about how she might set up a trap to catch sneaky students entering her classroom. "How might we" and "Why" and "Tell me more" were phrases used by Letty in the conversation (noticing and focusing), and she actively modeled "plussing" or the idea of building on ideas generated by peers in the room (brainstorming). She also actively modeled "thinking big" in terms of allowing students to come up with wild and crazy ideas without putting any constraints around their thinking (brainstorming).
4th grade
Letty challenged her fourth grade class to engineer a strategy that would allow them to traverse the large expanse of the drama room. The catch? They had to have their entire team make it across without anyone having any body part touch the floor, and all they had in terms of tools was some large foam elements. Take a look at the video to see how it went down:
Faculty Design Thinking Work (whisper phones)
We also had a very pragmatic application of Design Thinking in our Lower School that was about as organic and natural as possible. Our primary grade teachers use a device known as a "whisper phone" in their work with our youngest learners as they work on phonemic and phonological awareness (oral/aural skills). One of our faculty was talking about putting in an order for whisper phones through a national organization one day, and another faculty member, Mike Crone, overheard the comment. After taking a look at what precisely a whisper phone entailed, Mike decided that we could build our own whisper phones for a fraction of the cost. Here's how this experience mirrored our design thinking process:
- Notice - Mike talked with our faculty member at length to understand the essential components of the whisper phone and how it was used by our students
- Focus - Mike settled on addressing the question "How might we build our own whisper phones for our students?"
- Brainstorm - Mike spent time investigating materials and machining options to create the device
- Design/Create - He then spent time building out prototypes. The first came back a bit too big for our youngest learners, which sent him back in search of better material cut, size, width, and length. After another iteration or two, he came up with a final product.
- Test and Share - Mike presented the final product to the teacher, who was delighted! The students are using the devices as we speak. The fun part is that the whisper phones can be customized by the kids with some simple decorations. Since they are so inexpensive to build, each student can have their very own whisper phone that they get to keep.
Here are the whisper phones - one from production, one that is decorated and customized!
Here is Mike sharing his design thinking process with our full Lower School faculty:
