Lower School Design Thinking Year 1

    

"Implementation is invitational, but learning about Design Thinking is mandatory."  This was the message as we embarked on our Design Thinking journey.  Accepting that invitation, we here at the Lower School immediately began looking for ways to implement Design Thinking.  Our initial attempts saw us doing this in three different ways.  First, the group of teachers who would become the "Design Team" started by working with small groups of students.  We lead the Student Council through a Design Thinking exercise to discover and implement a better way to track tickets at the Halloween Carnival.

Introducing the Design Thinking process

Brainstorming ways to track the tickets

Bringing their vision to life

  
Our fifth grade students then noticed that given the upcoming holiday concert season, visitors to our campus might need more information that you would find on a traditional campus map.  So we led them through the Design Thinking process to design maps featuring the best places to park, accessible ramps, and even the coldest drinking fountains!

Students interviewed the office staff and our safety patrol officer to create this map of the best places to park.

As we were doing this the team noticed that brainstorming, collaboration, and all of the other elements of design thinking weren’t innate skills for many kids and needed to be taught.  To that end the second thing we did was to begin using Design Thinking challenges to teach/model these individual skills. 

For example, in the library,  we did a mini lesson on brainstorming.  We read a story about Queen Victoria, who loved to swim but was unable to get to the beach while preserving her modesty.  

 Right before the innovation was revealed we stopped, and brainstormed our own ideas following the rules of brainstorming…

1.  Listen respectfully/let all voices be heard. 

2.  Defer judgment/there are no bad ideas.

3.  Build on the ideas of others/ use “yes, and…” statements.  

Students had some creative solutions to Queen Victoria's problem

Here are a few other examples of ways we taught the individual steps...

This engineering challenge was the perfect opportunity to teach collaborative skills

Try, try again.  Students had to come up with several iterations of a catapult.

When we think of Design Thinking, we tend to think of product innovation, but at it's core Design Thinking is a repeatable process that can be applied to any problem or challenge.  So, the third thing we did was to go into classrooms and work with teachers to show them how to "tweak" their existing lessons to reflect a more Design Thinking approach, in other words,  show them that Design Thinking is not something that you do...it is how you do it.   

Taking a lesson and making it better.  Instead of taking a test on the Social Studies chapter on transportation, students brainstorm innovations on modern transportation and then create prototypes of their inventions.

 

As we reflected on year 1, we were surprised by many things...the exponential increase in the student's engagement, how much of this we were already doing without realizing it, and just how hard it is for us as teachers to embrace ambiguity.  Our biggest realization, however, was that the two biggest obstacles to teaching in a true interdisciplinary way were time and space-specifically our class schedules and proximity of our classrooms.  

It seems we have a new Design Thinking challenge on our hands...