Middle School Science - Mr. Vandegrift's Class

Meanwhile, in our middle school science classes, students have annually engaged in a fun challenge wherein they test theories learned about basic physics and engineering. Mr. Vandegrift had previously used this lesson, but had kept it more focused in prior years. This time around he decided to once again use this project, but he converted it to be more design thinking oriented by casting an open ended pathway for students and incorporating some of the design thinking ground rules so that the spirit and process of design thinking was realistically applied.

The design challenge was: how might we build a structure out of 150 toothpicks that weighs less than 10g at completion but will support a significant amount of weight on top of it when it's built?

Students were allowed to build any shape of structure and explore various geometries in their construction to meet the challenge.

I was able to observe the students during the brainstorming phases of their project. There were a lot of great ideas being discussed, and it was great to hear students "plussing" ideas - in other words, rather than everyone tossing out tons of ideas, students methodically listened to their peers completely explain an idea and then the teammates contributed that idea before the group moved to hear another idea. The words "no" or "that's impossible" wasn't heard once!

Also, the "blue sky" thinking during the brainstorming sessions was truly inspiring and fun to watch. Some amazing and new ideas presented themselves, and students dove into deeply exploring and considering these ideas. Out of all the groups I saw, maybe one had what I'd consider to be a "traditional solution" of a basic tower with support beams. Very interesting!

In any event, I noticed that each team ended up with 3 to 4 well articulated brainstorming theories to consider for designing and creating. Something else that made this more fun for students was that Mr. Vandegrift let them roam free during brainstorming, including having them brainstorm on the windows of the classroom. This gave each group some space and also provided a neat visual capturing the process. Here are some photos of the students hard at work brainstorming:

Students post their initial ideas and begin sketching out their thinking on the glass. 

 

Mr. Vandegrift asks some prompting questions about the students' work as they brainstorm. The group on the right was already dabbling in design - looking at the physical possibilities with toothpicks.

This group had some incredibly creative ideas and it was a joy to overhear their collaborative discourse on the different ideas they were considering. 

Design Thinking: Mr. Walcott's Middle School 3D Animation Class

Our Middle School faculty have been making great strides towards more integration of design thinking principles in their classrooms. I wanted to share a couple of outstanding examples with you!

Our 7th grade 3D animation classes have been using the design thinking process in their work. They have been developing space themed animations ranging from basic to moving complex animations. Here's an incredible movie that the class made showing the process and finished product, starring our G block animators. You can see where they did their research and understanding (noticing), focused their work on particular elements (focusing), thought up creative ideas (brainstorming), and the designed and created their products. This film is their test and share. It was a natural connection for this class. Kudos to DJ Walcott and his students! All animations were 100% created by kids.

CLICK HERE FOR THE YOUTUBE LINK

Whiteboard Tables

This is just a brief update about the use of our new "collaboration zone" which is located in the Library of our Middle and Upper School campus. As you may recall from a prior post, we re-purposed the lower floor of the Library to be more of a collaborative environment for students (that post is HERE).

Part of the re-purposing involved a great deal of new furnishings coming into the space. One of the major changes was the installation of white board tables. These tables have seen a large amount of academic use by our students. Here's a photo showing a group of our students hard at work:

Design Thinking Professional Learning Experience for Faculty and Staff

On Friday, October 10th, we held a school-wide faculty professional learning event focused on design thinking at Parker. All 150+ faculty and classroom assistants were invited to participate in the session.  Faculty arrived on campus, ready to learn. We had a busy morning planned - all of our faculty would engage in a hands-on design thinking experience, followed by a collaborative exercise in which they would apply design thinking to a lesson which they could implement in their classroom in the coming weeks.

The stage was set for all faculty by a dedicated group of facilitators, all of whom arrived early to help us get the tables set up and have the room ready!

First things being first, the facilitator group felt that it would be important for our faculty to experience the design thinking process first hand. As we had some time constraints combined with working with a very large group, we settled on having a design thinking experience wherein the faculty themselves would be the client or user - as such, they would do the empathy work (notice) collectively for themselves.

The challenge we gave them was: How might we design and create the ultimate faculty lounge?

Faculty dived in to the challenge, and we methodically worked through the Parker Design Thinking steps, pausing to provide instruction at each phase. Facilitators roamed the full room, providing follow up instructions and suggestions as they moved around. At the close, groups shared out with one another, after which we had a few groups share out their ultimate lounge with the full group. Pictures really tell the story better than words, and so here are some photos from that first part of the morning:

 

Groups practice "noticing" and collecting thoughts about how they have experienced teacher lounges in the past.

 

This group is brainstorming ideas to make an awesome lounge and they are gathering the brainstorming into themes to focus their work. 

 

During the create and design phases, the room was a hive of noisy activity!

 

All hands on deck to complete the task in a short timeframe!

 

This group takes their brainstorming to create and design an ultimate lounge. 

 

An "ultimate teacher's lounge" takes shape. 

 

A finished prototype of an ultimate lounge!

Following the hands-on design thinking session, we had faculty reassemble into practical work groupings (grade level teams for Lower School, and department teams for our Middle and Upper Schools). Faculty then engaged in an exercise wherein they applied design thinking to a lesson they already had in play. We asked faculty to collaborate and improve the lesson by incorporating some or all of the design thinking steps. We overheard some truly outstanding conversations among collaborative teams about improving lessons and how they could/would incorporate design thinking into their classes. Our English department came up with a wonderful capstone project concept which they then shared out with our full group when we debriefed the session.


 Collaborative teams work receive instruction from our consultant, Parker Thomas, before diving into work on their lessons.

All in all, it was a very busy, very full, and also very productive day of learning. We solicited faculty feedback following the session, and it was overwhelmingly positive. We also got some suggestions that should help us for future design thinking learning events. If you'd like to know more, please feel free to contact us.

Planning a Design Thinking Session for 150 Faculty

October 10, 2014 - Faculty arrived on campus, ready to learn. We had a busy morning planned - all of our faculty would engage in a hands-on design thinking experience, followed by a collaborative exercise

Wait a second...

Let's stop right there - at least, let's pause for a moment.

Before we can talk about October 10th, we really need to rewind a few weeks.

A passionate and dedicated group of faculty, the same group who attended our mini-conference back in August, began meeting in the early part of September to talk about how we would best move forward in our work with design thinking and our full faculty. Feedback from our initial presentation revealed that there was a sincere desire on the part of the majority of our faculty to learn more about design thinking, and that many of them wanted the chance to experience design thinking for themselves. They also requested some guidance to create and implement design thinking lessons in their classrooms. The planning group definitely had their work cut out for them!

And so, over the course of a month, this dedicated group of people came together and talked about our next steps, specifically, how we would bring design thinking to our first Professional Learning Day of the year. In tandem with our consultant, Parker Thomas (me@parkerthomas.com), we debated and discussed merits and demerits of various activities, learnings, and projects that we could undertake during the day. Ultimately, we landed on a two-part session that would take approximately four hours.

The first part of the day would be set up to give all faculty a hands-on experience with the design thinking process. After reviewing our Parker Design Thinking Process V 1.0 with everyone, we would dive into a design challenge that was relevant for faculty and which would involve all of the steps. Following that exercise, we would then reorganize faculty into collaborative teams so that they could settle in and work on specific lessons that would be able to work in their classrooms following the professional learning day.

The planning group set up the agenda in general terms, and provided some great "think abouts" to ponder as we got set for October 10th. Parker and I then spent several hours via Skype to hammer out the agenda in a high degree of detail as well as ensure we had a bead on the needs for our planning group, who would be serving as our facilitators for the day. This was going to be something very new for all of us - hosting 150+ people in a design thinking experience all at one time.

I then set to work organizing the myriad supplies and ensuring we had a slide deck set up for the morning so that we had all of the materials on hand, ready to go on the morning of October 10th. The days leading up to October 10th were chock-full with last minute details, supply organization, and consulting with Parker to ensure we had everything we needed for the day to be a success.

Supplies at-the-ready!

Have Post-Its, Will Learn!

Parker arrived the day before, and we held a meeting with our planning group so that they knew their specific roles and tasks as facilitators for October 10th. We also finalized our presentation slide deck, and rehearsed the steps of the process with the planning group. Finally, we ensured that all materials and copies were in place. We were ready for a day of design thinking learning!

If you are thinking about setting up something similar for your faculty group, please don't hesitate to contact us with questions or wonders about how to get it done. We're happy to help!

First Steps - Dabbling in Design Thinking at our Lower School

The opening weeks of the school year found several faculty engaging in "dabbling" with Design Thinking... in other words, we had many folks take small and large jumps into using our newly created process as well as trying out some lesson strategies that incorporated some or all of the steps. I wanted to highlight some fun examples from our Lower School faculty. As we move further into the year, I will be sure to continue sharing some of the great work that is happening around design thinking in our classrooms! Our wonderful Lower School librarian is spearheading a project that will showcase many other areas in which design thinking is happening, and we'll be sharing those very soon.

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:

CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO LINK! 

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:

First Steps - Dabbling in Design Thinking in our Middle School

While our Lower School is actively trying on design thinking in a variety of ways, our Middle School is also starting to work with design thinking in several classrooms.

6th Grade: Digital Foundations Class
Most notably, a new course was rolled out this year in our Middle School wherein all 6th graders will obtain exposure to the design thinking process with specific instruction on the process itself as well as the opportunity to engage with the process with a major project. We will share the details about this when we get closer to the time when the classes are engaged in design thinking in a more intensive manner.

8th Grade: ROV Project
Some of our 8th graders are in a class that has an intriguing first project: they are going to build a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) that will operate in the water upon completion. This project presents a nice window into design thinking for our middle school students as it is both "tight" (defined parameters) and "loose" (student choice and decision making are essential).

The ROVs come in a boxed kit that have tons of parts and interesting tidbits, but zero instructions. The students work in teams to figure out the purpose of the various components and to also determine the best way to build out the ROV given the supplies they have. This emphasizes the brainstorming component of design thinking - students tossed out all manner of ideas about where the project would end up. The students also had to mentally engage in designing the outcome mentally before they began building things out. They did some diagramming and a lot of thinking and discussing about options for their ROVs. After that, the students began creating the ROV, building it out with their team. In a few days, the students will move to the test phase where they will put the ROV through its paces and determine if their design works. If it does, they will move on to share the ROV with a larger audience - if their design does not work, the students will return to brainstorming, designing, and creating phases until they land upon a successful modification to their original designs.

When I observed the class, the students were highly and deeply engaged in the ROV process. They were easily able to articulate what they were doing, the purpose behind it, and how they came up with their ideas. Here are a couple of photos:

7th Grade: LEGO Project
Some of our 7th graders are involved in a course wherein the students are building basic robots that will automate a particular task or function for the student. This is a two-pronged project that involves the students physically building out the machine and also programming the robot's activities.

The teacher, Ryan Griggs, wanted to ensure that the project was not "closed ended", or in other words, he wanted to ensure students had to think through the options and come up with their own function and outcomes. As such, he removed the pre-determined kit functions and handed over large boxes of parts and pieces to students, and gave them the option to create all manner of movements. Each group ended up focusing on different possible outcomes, ranging from having a robot pick up a can of soda and bringing it to you to being able to turn pages in a book.

Students obviously engaged in brainstorming as they considered the parts and pieces in their kits, as well as determining the work of the robot. They then had to mentally map out the design with their teammates before they began the process of creating the final product (programming and building). In the coming days they will begin testing their designs, at which point they may return to the earlier steps of the process or move on to share their successful design.

The students were again highly engaged and very active when I observed them in class! Here they are in the design phase, trying to figure out how they would build out the physical aspect of the robot: