One of the big benefits that we have seen by integrating design thinking into our curriculum is the way in which it breaks down the thinking, creating, reflecting, refining and sharing process. As you know from prior posts, we designed our own Parker Design Thinking process. We spent a large part of our year last year ingraining this with our faculty and students. This year our focus has been to bring this process to life as we work with students to tackle integrated design thinking projects.
One of the major components of this is reflection. Theorists from Piaget to Vygotsky to Bandura have all advocated the benefits of metacognitive strategy use with students of all ages. The more students reflect on their learning and the process of learning, the more they build confidence in their capability to achieve realistic goals in subsequent projects. This is commonly known as the self-regulatory, self-efficacy cycle. When students can self-regulate (e.g., they know how to monitor their progress and adjust goals and deadlines) they become more confident in their ability which leads to increased self-efficacy (e.g., they know they can do it). Additional benefits of being able to capably manage time and articulate needed steps also arise from using structured reflection.
We are using reflection in a variety of ways within the Scripps Design Center and in our design thinking project. Sometimes it is written, sometimes it is full group, sometimes it is individual, sometimes it happens in small groups. Sometimes we orient on a specific skill or problem, while other times we speak to more generalized issues that are presenting themselves. We try very hard to adapt to the situation and where our students are in their work.
This year we are intentionally focusing kids on reflecting on their process and skill development in addition to content learning. We've tackled this in a few ways. One way we have done this is to use our design thinking process to help kids with reflecting. Below you see some great examples of how we formalized the reflection component following the completion of a project. Students articulated their work using the steps.
 |
| Each step of the Parker Design Process is articulated vis-a-vis a specific project by students. |
We often use this reflection as a way to evaluate what students got out of the day's lesson as well as to help us determine where we need to go with subsequent sessions - in other words, this has become a powerful formative assessment cycle for both kids and faculty.
A huge HUGE win is that while we (faculty) guided these reflection sessions initially, students are now leading the charge. In the photo below, you see a student up front guiding her peers through a reflection on a lesson in which they had built squishy circuits. We are now seeing classroom teachers tapping this student skill in the general classrooms as well, which is very awesome to see.
 |
| A student leads her peers in reflecting on what was accomplished in class, as well as talking about next steps. |