5th Grade Science Fair!

In what was undoubtedly the launch point for design thinking at the Lower School in the spring of 2014, the 5th Grade Science Fair in 2015 was truly a sight to behold. This event encapsulated all of the elements of design thinking that we have embraced at Francis Parker. It was awesome!

First, it was 100% student created - all of the work was done by students during class time here on campus, and while students had consultative help from teachers and staff, they did all of the ideating, brainstorming, creating, and designing all on their own. While the final finish of these projects might not be as strong as those that involve parent help, the students owned their work and their learning in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.

During the morning of March 27, our 5th graders hosted the science fair at our Lower School campus. All students displayed their projects and were available to explain their work to parents, faculty, administration, and even their fellow students. It was truly remarkable to hear 10 year olds thoroughly explain complicated projects and processes, including hearing them discuss their iterative process and repeated testing to get a solid final product. Students also provided live demonstrations of their projects for all participants.

My favorite part of the process was that students were required to talk about successes, failures, challenges, and what they learned - not just about the project itself, but from the process of creating the project. Just behind that, my second favorite part of the event was that students from other grade levels visited the fair, and the 5th graders walked all of those students through their projects - students as teachers made for a fun morning of learning for all. Many of the poster boards that accompanied the projects included these discussions of successes and challenges. It was great to see kids realize that failing is part of succeeding, not to mention having them so professionally discuss their end results! See the photos below to get a taste of an incredible morning of teaching and learning and design thinking!

Display boards are examined by parents and faculty members. 

The science fair was a big hit for everyone! Kudos to our 5th graders.

All displays included discussions of successes and challenges - reflective learning evidence.

Here a group of students demonstrates their product in a live demo.

Another group's reflection on what worked, did not work, and what they'd do differently next time.

5th grade teams teach students from other grades - students as teachers led to powerful learning for all!

Updating Our Textbook

In 3rd grade, our students discovered that an entire chapter of their social studies textbook was woefully out of date. The wrong state governor, wrong representatives, and even wrong laws were shown as being current! Our students and teachers decided to do something about it. Enter Aurasma, a very neat app that gave a great option for students to take charge and set history straight.

Students first found all of the text and photos that needed to be updated. Then, they investigated the current and correct information that needed to be inserted. Finally, they put their iPads to use and virtually inserted the correct photos and information into the chapter using Aurasma. This app allows the students to "virtually insert" the right photos into the book. Once this process is done, the viewer can hold the iPad over the textbook and the app automatically and magically updates the photos and text when you look at the page using the iPad's camera. It is pretty amazing!

The students loved this project, and it provided an innovative and creative way for our students to learn the current office-holders in our state as well as enhance their digital learning skills. The 3rd grade teaching team shared that they had never seen their students so highly engaged in this unit of learning before. When I visited the classrooms, I was bombarded by students excitedly wanting to show off their Aurasma pages that they had created!

Chinese New Year Makey-Makey Project!

Our Lower School Chinese teacher, Sophia Dalton, was one of our faculty who had the opportunity to visit Lighthouse Charter School. During our time there, she envisioned, created, and prototyped a fun new lesson for her Chinese New Year cultural learning unit. Being brave and willing to try something completely new, she gave it a go just a few weeks later!

Final product - 100% functional. Next year: work on polishing the final display

In the past, students had studied different traditional elements of Chinese New Year, like the use of dragon dances, the eating of oranges, and the use of red envelopes for gifting money. Sophia updated this project by having the students still study the traditional elements and learn the vocabulary in the target language. Students also produced short written summaries in the target language. However, this year, they took that learning and crafted an interactive table display to teach others about Chinese New Year - not only showing off their learning, but also allowing others to learn from what they made! It ended up being a great "pay it forward" kind of experience where younger learners got to experience Chinese New Year and new target language vocabulary because of what the older students created.

Sophia shares that her kids LOVED using the Makey-Makey kits. While the lesson took a bit longer than it had in the past, she felt it was 100% worth it due to the high energy and engagement demonstrated by the students as they created the project. She shared "the project was not too overwhelming to facilitate, and I can see it could be integrated in various projects and used in our upper grades at Lower School." She went on to share that the biggest challenge was the difficulty in staying in target language due to the technical aspects involved, however, it ended up being worth it in the end.

Students having big fun working with Makey-Makey

The final product was not as polished as she wanted, but it was completely student done and engineered. Next year she is looking at ways to polish up the finished display so that it can be displayed in a public space at the school for more people to enjoy.

To quote Sophia, "WE DID IT! Bottom line: we will totally do this next year with some modifications."

The Fifth Grade Play

Our 5th grade students experienced what has likely been the most ambitious design thinking project to date! What was it? It was their grade-level play. Each 5th grade class put on their own production. 

In years past, our drama teacher had written a play for our students, and then directed the play. Students filled the roles of actors and stage technicians, with all students receiving direction on roles, duties, and responsibilities. Tasks were pre-defined and clearly explained.

This year, the approach to the 5th grade play could not have been more different, and it was truly a community affair. This time around, the drama teacher and classroom teachers made a determined effort for this to be student-centered, and they took on the role of facilitator/questioner rather than boss or director. Aside from organizing the teams that were needed to put on the production, the teachers did not overtly guide the work. The teams included script writers, researchers, actors, costume designers, prop masters, sound masters, and stage tech crew. Students self-selected into one or more of these teams to put on their production. 

The students decided the theme for their play (all three classes focused on ecology). Students wrote the script - doing all of the research necessary to fact-check their work. Students then began crafting the props and costumes with the help of specials teachers in our wood shop and art classes. Students also delved into the sound effects and music needed for their productions, with our Lower School technology coordinator acting as facilitator of their work. The technical crew led the lights, curtain, and other stage elements for the productions. Students created playbills and invitations to the production as well!

On the day of the performance, the student pride in their work was clearly evident to all who came to the event. Students approached their work with a determined but happy energy. It was incredible to watch the teachers let students take the helm of all aspects of the live performance, from the start time to introducing the production to the closing curtain. 

Students performing one of the three plays

Following the play, our drama teacher, Letty Robinson, guided the students through a live debrief of the production and the process that led students to the performance day. It was really neat to hear the students reflect on their learning, and to watch parents listen to their students discussing their learning. Students were able to clearly articulate the challenges, victories, lessons, and take-aways that their design thinking journey took them on. Even better, students referenced the specific steps of the design thinking process in their debriefing.

Parents listen in as students debrief their learning process

The teachers were so proud of their kids for all of their work, as they should be! All of the involved faculty shared how hard it was to "let go" and let the kids run with their ideas, but they also all expressed how amazing the students were in terms of working through problems and finding solutions to "make it work" in the end. The plays each had a high production value, and in the end, the involved faculty said that the productions were the best they'd seen due to the students' ownership of all aspects of production. Given that the plays had involved props, costumes, scripts, and even songs, this was no small feat.

While the efforts to pull this off were intense, and it required a lot of collaboration and flexibility among the adults in the process, the glow of happiness from our students after they took their final bow made it all worthwhile. Everyone involved feels very strongly that the net result is that our students truly "own" their knowledge about the importance of ecology, as well as the fundamental steps and processes to put on a quality stage production. Kudos to our 5th grade students!

Spanish Two: "Home of the Future" Presentations

Design thinking is beginning to pop up in all kinds of fun places, like in our foreign language classrooms! 

Our Spanish teacher, Ms. Gallardo, traditionally had her Spanish 2 students demonstrate their new understanding of house/home vocabulary by drawing their house and labeling it. This year, she decided to try a new strategy: students would use their new vocabulary to design and create an energy-saving "home of the future" and then present their ideas to their classmates!

Students were given rapid prototyping materials to transition their drawn diagrams into 3d models, which they then labeled in Spanish. Finally, as part of the test and share step, students developed a short, 3 minute presentation to introduce their classmates to their ideas, after which classmates asked questions about the design elements. 

When you look at the photos below, you can get a sense of how much fun the students had in dreaming big and creating their own "home of the future" to share. Ms. Gallardo and other adults in attendance for the presentations all shared that the students had some amazing ideas in their designs, and they were pleasantly surprised at the high level of thinking in the designs, presentations, and audience questions.

A surprise take-away from this project was that without direction, students did all of the planning and work in the target language! This was of enormous value in the students' learning process and students gained even more new vocabulary in their efforts to properly describe and create their homes of the future. 

The project combined new knowledge, core knowledge, and design thinking into a fun, three-day event for students. This was the same amount of time kids had done the previous house drawing, but the level of output from the students was much improved with the integration of design thinking. 

Here's several groups of students sharing their models:

CAIS Presentation

In early March, Parker Thomas joined me in Oakland so that we might share our work with other educators across the state at the CAIS regional summit meeting. We had strong attendance at our session and many folks asked us a slew of questions. It appears that there is a lot of interest in our approach to design thinking, and we are excited at the prospect of helping other schools achieve wonderful learning outcomes for their students as a result of a 'philosophy first' design thinking approach.

Here is the link to the slide deck and resources that were shared.

Lower School Takes a Big Step

As mentioned in previous posts, design thinking has been embraced by the Lower School faculty, and students at all grade levels have been engaging in projects that feature design thinking (both big and small). While all of this was happening, it came to pass that there were some capital projects for maintenance upgrades on deck for the Lower School that would be completed over the summer. This presented a unique opportunity to the leadership of the Lower School to actually create a "design center" in part of the campus.

The Division Head began by drafting out the possibilities, and then meeting individually with several folks who would be involved in the process. He then vetted the idea with the Lower School leadership team and got their approval. Finally, the plan was shared with the full faculty at a faculty meeting in early February, and once again, it was met with approval. Several discussions with capital project managers and facility developing personnel ensued, and it appears that starting in the 2015-2016 school year, our Lower School will have a true "design center" on its campus!

The way this will be achieved is to take several classes and programs that had been spread across campus and move them into more natural adjacencies. For example, the space where the design center will be currently houses our library, two science classes, a junior kindergarten class, and a language class. The library and science rooms will stay. The language class will move to be near the other language teachers, which means our art room can move into the area with our library and science rooms. The junior kindergarten class will also relocate into a better adjacency with other junior kindergarten rooms, which will allow our wood shop program to also move into the building.

As a result, our art, wood shop, science rooms, and library will all be in one facility together, which we'll be referring to as the "Design Center" for Lower School. These adjacencies will allow students to more easily engage in interdisciplinary projects that incorporate classroom learning, science, and art/design. Very exciting!

7th Grade Plantastic Voyage!

As mentioned in the post about our faculty visit to the Lighthouse Creativity Lab, one of the newly redesigned lessons that emerged from our visit belonged to a science teacher in our Middle School. Sergina Bach was able to fully redesign a traditional lesson about photosynthesis into a comprehensive design thinking experience - and when she returned, her entire 7th grade science team enthusiastically adopted the project across all 7th grade science classes.

The project was called "The Plantastic Voyage" and it was created to apply student learning about photosynthesis and plants by having them create a means to transport and grow plants during a mission to Mars, as well as creating a way to establish the plants once on Mars. Sergina took this project, integrated her new learning about Tinkercad, iterative thinking, and student-centered design processes, and set students off on an engaging and fun design thinking project.

Sergina and her colleagues bravely ventured into the world of Tinkercad - a first for our School. Tinkercad is a free software program that allows for 3d drafting using simple tools. It is very intuitive, generally speaking, and the students appeared to like working with the program. While we did not have the ability to 3d print student products prior to the final presentations, we discovered that the students enjoyed the digital drafting process enormously, and we saw them iterate their designs from words to basic drawings to 3d renderings, each time with improvements to the design. This project definitely highlighted that 3d printers would be something that would greatly enhance design thinking projects, and so we will be discussing ways to integrate these on both of our campuses.

On the left, a student's hand-drawn iteration. On the right, their vision realized in TinkerCad.

During the student work time on this project, I was able to visit all classrooms and personally experience the students' enthusiasm and excitement as they imagined, designed, and created their solutions. One one memorable visit, I was treated to having students give me a practice run of their project presentations, after which they asked for feedback. Not only was it great to see their enthusiasm in their presentations, I was surprised when they so openly asked for critique of their work, and more surprised when they thoughtfully considered the feedback given. In another class, I was treated to a student volunteering to get feedback from the full class on their prototype presentation. The reason I was surprised by all of these things is that my observations denote a turning point in terms of student process of creation in their projects - not so long ago students would have finished their project and been... done. Now, they approach their work as more iterative process, and before being finished, they test out their work and seek feedback.

Students loved the ability to create CAD models and also prototype models for this project!

In a couple of cases, we were able to 3d render the student's thinking. Here's a 3d print of a student's concept for a plant incubator that would keep plants alive on the space ship and on Mars too:

Faculty Visit to Lighthouse Creativity Lab

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.

View of the Creativity Lab space @ Lighthouse

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.

Using TinkerCad to design the ring/object.

The 3D printer gets to work!

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!

Sharing an English lesson involving Design Thinking

Sharing an integrated math/science lesson.

Sharing a re-vamp of a MS science lesson.

Special thanks to Angi Chau, Aaron Vanderwerff, and Parker Thomas for providing us with a chock-full two days of incredible learning and discourse, not to mention great humor and delicious meals!

4th Grade Redesign of the Culminating Project on CA Missions

Our 4th grade students have typically studied the role and history of missions as part of their larger examination of California State History. 

The culminating project for the curricular unit on Missions used to be a PBL (problem based learning) type lesson. Students would learn about a specific California mission, as well as learn about the general mission system in California. Last year, the teaching team decided to try a project form another school that was entitled "The 22nd Mission Project". After students learned about the 21 California missions that had existed, they made a 22nd mission based on meeting a need that might have surfaced in the historical era of missions. This meant that the problem and solution were both set in the past. It was a creative group project and students built a physical model, however, the net result was not very different from what they had learned about and creativity was ultimately fairly limited.

With the introduction of design thinking into the School, the 4th grade teachers realized that there was a chance to try something new. In consultancy with Parker Thomas, the project took a turn to the modern era. Rather than creating a mission for "back in the day," students would create a mission for modern day San Diego - one that would meet a community need and serve the community as it is today. As such, the project question (design challenge) became: "How might we create a mission program in the modern day to improve our community or world?"  

Here is a brief outline of how the project played out in our 4th grade classrooms this year: 

Notice and Focus: Students had post its and they began writing ideas of what organization they'd create to help others. The teachers started by having students put ideas on post its at their tables... and they ended up with a slew of post-its and lots of great ideas. After individuals brainstormed, groups of four kids began to sort and organize the ideas. Based on the student-group organized stickies, the teacher created some over-arching categories. Kids then took the stickies and grouped the stickies into the over-arching categories as a full class. Once all ideas were grouped off, the class narrowed down all of the options to 7 different ideas. These "big ideas" with associated sticky notes were then posted up in stations around the room. 

During the presentation, a group shares the origin of their idea on their display: the post it note where a student indicated their interest in creating a wildlife preserve for all species. 

Brainstorm, Design Create: The teacher then asked kids what they were passionate about and what they wanted to focus on in the design and create phases. Students were instructed to go sit under the poster that named the over-arching topic that was most interesting to them. Students began to talk with others who had migrated to the same area of the classroom and who wanted to focus on the same topic. The teachers noted that a very positive side effect was that kids didn't just follow their friends - they went where they were genuinely interested. The teachers encouraged kids to explore other groups if they weren't sure where they would fit or if they weren't quite sure which idea was the most interesting. Some students moved around a lot, while others stayed in their first choice. A second positive side effect was that kids began generating ideas collectively on their own without prompting. In one notable example, where students were going to create a free access high tech gym, the kids discovered that they were of very different backgrounds and yet somehow they found a way to really make it work. One kid stepped up to be the trainer, one the nutritionist, and the student who was very tech-focused ended up as the designer of the equipment. The kids self made those roles and group placements on their own. It was incredible to watch unfold! 

The teachers gave students several questions to consider in the design and create phases, including:  What does org look like? What is it's purpose or vision? Who will do what in your group? Who do you need to make it run? Students were to identify roles needed, not specific people who they thought should do work in their organization. General outlines and ideas were given to students, and in return students began fleshing out those ideas in detail. Teachers monitored student progress by having students hand in work daily - this was done in traditional written logs/journals as well as using iPads in the "documentation" process. 

Test: The test phase was for groups to first present their work informally to the class and all groups got feedback in this presentation. The class also asked questions of the group which further refined and fleshed out each group's thinking. It also led to a list of tasks for each group to complete in the refinement of their thinking process. The teacher had to train the class that it is absolutely a-ok to not have all the answers at this phase. :) Then, after students revamped their presentations and information, 5th graders, the principal, assistant principal, and assistant head of school came in to view the presentations and provide feedback. The groups took questions about their concepts and provided clarifications as needed. While it would have been nice for kids to once again go through a refinement process, the honest truth is that after the more formal second test presentation, students didn't make substantive changes to their program or mission idea. This might be because they didn't know how or what to do. It might be because the questions asked didn't point enough to specific areas of improvement. Budget type items are very complex and 4th grade knowledge is limited - they don't even understand the concept that taxes fund many different things. The teaching team has determined that it might be helpful to first teach where money comes from, or at least provide some basic economics understandings first.  Another thought the team had was to put another unit of study, the business unit, earlier in the year and then have this new missions project come later in the year. 

Students present their ideas to an audience and obtain feedback.

Another student group presents their modern day mission.

Reflection component: The teacher wrote questions for students to answer to reflect on their work, including: What did you learn, what was your favorite part of the project, what was your least favorite? Should 4th grade use this project again? Kids were very enthusiastic in their responses, with a vast majority stating that the project should definitely be done again for future 4th graders. Also as part of the reflection component, students were asked to reflect on their contribution to the group - what did they do, what could they do better, what did they like about what they did. This was all done in writing. This feedback set up some good conversation about each student's role and contribution.

Share: There was no formalized "share" step and there was not an exhibition night, but there were artifacts produced by the kids that were photographed and captured via video,  and those artifacts were posted up for parents to see, review and discuss with their students. 

All in all, the teaching team felt very enthusiastic about the redesign of this project, and students were highly engaged at all steps of the process. Next year will see continued refinement and hopefully additional design oriented projects for students to tackle!