In the latter part of January, a group of 11 Parker faculty visited the Lighthouse Charter School, which is located in Oakland, California. We had participants from all three divisions on the trip. Why? Well, Lighthouse not only has a really fantastic and fully outfitted "maker space" (this is essentially another name for a design lab - both of them are spaces that allow students and faculty to produce both rapid prototypes as well as finished products), Lighthouse also provides specialized instruction to visiting teachers about how to best engage design thinking in their instruction. We were very fortunate to not only have Aaron Vanderwerff, the director for the Creativity Lab, as our guide - we also were joined by Angi Chau, who runs the Bourn Idea Lab at Castilleja School. Our consultant, Parker Thomas, also came each day to assist us.
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| View of the Creativity Lab space @ Lighthouse |
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| We were all impressed by the "wall of stuff" in the room! |
One purpose of our visit was to allow these 11 faculty to receive hands on experience using many of the tools that are used in a maker space or design lab, including 3D printers, computers with CAD design and basic programming software, laser cutters, and other "tools of the trade." Over the course of two days this group of faculty went from having zero knowledge or experience about these things to producing finished products that related to potential projects they would later use with students. The majority of faculty in our group had never been exposed to these technologies, and so having the opportunity to receive an introduction and guided practice on these various technologies was enormously beneficial. We had English, history, and foreign language teachers learn, use, and develop lesson ideas that integrated these technologies to improve a lesson they'd previously used in the classroom. Meanwhile, our science, technology and math teachers learned some new approaches to integrating technology into their lessons, as well as learning some new technology as well.
However, the main purpose was for our faculty to be exposed to the nuances and various iterations of design thinking - which includes elements of engineering design, art design (creative process), the philosophy of making, and also studying complexities in systems. As a result of their learning on these topics, each faculty member would then engage in crafting a lesson or series of lessons that featured design thinking (and perhaps some of the new technologies) to take back to their students at Parker. This work was the main focus of our time and energy.
Our first activity was to examine the parts, purposes, and complexities of an object in small groups. This served as a focusing activity wherein we took an ordinary object and examined it very, very closely. We were encouraged to take the object apart to truly examine the many facets of its composition. My group had a remote control from an older TV. On the surface level. we understood the remote and its purpose. But opening it up to see the chip, wiring, LED light and circuit board that made the entire thing work brought an entirely new level of understanding about the complexity of a relatively simple device. All groups undertook this close examination - and yet the way each group went about that task was fascinatingly different.
The net result was that we had a greater understanding around the first two steps of our design thinking process: Notice and Focus. We also discovered that an activity such as this is a really great orienting tool for student examination of a variety of things ranging from literature to the scientific method.
We then engaged in an extended discussion about the word "design" and what it meant. We obtained new perspective regarding the intersection of design thinking with teaching and learning. Angi and Aaron shared their respective journeys in founding their design labs, including the victories and challenges that they encountered. While some significant learning outcomes have been observed and experienced, they both shared that the work was ongoing and evolving - and that they did not forecast a close to the iterating process of the design lab. It was fascinating to hear how different each school's design lab journey was. They have both cultivated a culture of design thinking in their schools, but it looks and feels very different in each location.
It was also interesting to hear just how long it's taken them to get to where they are. Both schools were well over five years into developing a design thinking program in their school, and they were still hard at work to establish it throughout their curriculum. This opened up a lot of questions from Parker faculty in terms of what worked, what didn't, and how to continue making progress at a tempo that felt natural. The learning we took away was that there is no one right way to engage in design thinking - and that for us to be successful, we need to find our unique Parker approach and continually refine it over time moving forward.
As briefly mentioned above, our groups also delved into the use of new software and hardware as part of delivering a design thinking curriculum. Our group particularly enjoyed its experience with TinkerCad and then 3D printing items. As we were all beginners, we began with a relatively easy object: a "Mickey Mouse" ring. Great fun and a lot of insight from our hands-on experiences with this. As a result, we have a host of faculty eager to try these things out with their teams moving forward.
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| Using TinkerCad to design the ring/object. |
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| The 3D printer gets to work! |
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| The finished "Mickey Mouse" ring - a success! |
The faculty worked extraordinarily hard and really pushed their thinking in terms of not just design thinking, but engineering design and the application of coding/programming into all facets of the curriculum. Due to our small size, each faculty member received generous amounts of one-on-one time with all of our facilitators. At the end of the second day, we spent time having all faculty present their lessons to one another using a structured feedback protocol. As a result, what were already solid lessons became even more creative and meaningful. In the next post, you'll see one of the lessons that was re-imagined in the Creativity Lab brought to life!
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| Sharing an English lesson involving Design Thinking |
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| Sharing an integrated math/science lesson. |
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| Sharing a re-vamp of a MS science lesson. |