As I think of the power of the conceptual lesson cycle, I naturally connect to the Design Thinking Process, which looks at conceptual ideas from the big picture. If you haven’t heard about it, no worries, I didn’t until a year ago. For those who have been engaging with design thinking for some time, we are going to explore some possibilities that will strengthen your usage of it. I’m as giddy as an early years child on their first time bringing in a show and tell artifact. For those rubbing their hands together thinking this series is about design, I’m sad to tell you it's not the case. We will not be going through the process to create prototypes in the traditional sense. For those ideas, consider listening to Design Cast: A Podcast about Design and Steam Education by Jason Reagin. He’s super talented and passionate about all things Design and STEAM. He has a lot of guests that are just as nerdy as he is about design and I always walk about with new perspectives. We are taking a journey on the Design Thinking Process. It’s the same process of design, but applying it towards organizational structures. What does that mean? Well, it means we are going to look at Design Thinking from the lens of education and how it impacts lasting change within our school system. I know it’s quite deep, but we need this type of thinking as we emerge into a new educational landscape post pandemic. Now is the time to make lasting changes, rather than sliding back into how it’s always been. We are not the same educators that we were two years ago, so why should we teach the same way? Why should our learners be forced to learn in the old model? OverviewI’ll be honest, Design Thinking has been around from quite some time and I was completely unaware of its genius. In 2021, I was researching a new PYP workshop, Creating a Curriculum for Transdisciplinary Learning. I noticed that the design thinking process was the structure for making lasting change. FYI, the workshop I just mentioned is my favorite, because it really pulls back the layers of transdisciplinarity and what it looks like and what it does not. Genius! The Designing Thinking Process just made sense to me. It codified everything I believe needs to take place in order to make changes that are sustainable. Like everyone else, I went to the most reliable source on the internet to learn more: YouTube. To be honest, I was overwhelmed with the amount of content, because it ranged from anywhere from Design to Design Thinking. The one that really resonated was a video by Tim Brown, who is known as the father of Design Thinking. You can watch the video here. As a nerd, I started to dig deeper into this concept of design thinking, I made so many connections to our school structures. It explained why some schools function better than others. The school leadership team understood the basic principles of design thinking and continuously revisited them throughout the year, not just on professional development days. Design think in the PYPThinking back to my first year as a coordinator, I wish I had the design thinking process to guide me at that time. I can remember if I shared my story, so please excuse me if you’ve heard it before. In the fall of 2018, I started my new position as a PYP Coordinator at Foster Elementary in Houston, Texas. The Superintendent noticed that most IB schools were found in affluent areas or areas with a strong parent-teacher community. My school was one of nine campuses granted the opportunity to begin their IB journey in traditionally underserved areas. Looking back, here are the mistakes that I made during my first year that could have been fixed by the design thinking process. Step 1: EmpathyAlthough I was a new staff member and a pedagogical leader, I was encouraged to begin building the program of inquiry right away. Being new to the role of coordinator, I tried to inspire through inquiry-based learning engagements. The teachers thought they were “cute” but didn’t see how they would apply them to their practice. While others wanted to see the correlation from the state standards and the PYP curriculum framework. I felt such pressure to lead in the work that I failed to see what was right in front of me. If I were to do it all over again, I would have kept my mouth closed for 3-4 months and just observed the best practices currently happening within the school. I would have become a master note-taker and captured evidence of the PYP already in action. Then, I would have shared possible next steps to make it better and allowed my staff to choose their own pathway/ This is what it means to empathize and garner buy-in to systemic change. Instead, I ignored the empathize phase and polarized the staff. Many took umbrage that I wanted to come into the school to make big changes. They had the right to question my tactics, because I did not take stock of what was already in place and to build relationships with my team. Big mistake. Step 2: DefineWhen we roll out the PYP program, we need to be clear to define our focus at different points in time. We can’t do everything instantly, which is a major misconception by many campuses. For existing schools, we need to be mindful that we can’t make tons of big changes to our program all at once. What do we do instead? One suggestion is to identify the root issue that we need to solve to move forward. Going back to my experience as a new coordinator, I had to ask tons of questions to get to the root issue that was troubling my teachers. Many were afraid to make tons of changes quickly as they had just come out of being a school that needed improvement by the state and didn’t want to slide back. The question to define: How do we implement the PYP with the current system in mind? Step 3: IdeateWhen we ideate, we are considering the question we have defined and try to consider alternative, out-of-the-box solutions to solve the problem. We recognize that previous steps were a stepping stone, but they did not solve the problem because we would be at a different place on our journey. My team had to come up with ways to implement the PYP while ensuring the Foster Way of doing things was left intact. This is a huge undertaking, so we broke it down to bite-size pieces. For my staff to move forward with inquiry and conceptual understanding, they first needed to see how the state standards married with the PYP curriculum framework. We spent an entire year completing this process. The result was a comprehensive plan where teachers were clearly able to see the foundation of the standards, but how the elements of the PYP enhanced the thinking and learning. Step 4: PrototypeAt some point, we have to launch our product and test it out. This was our unit of inquiry. It’s one thing to have the standards mapped out and it’s something else to create units of inquiry. We had to dig deep to create unit planners that were rich and full of practical strategies that could be easily implemented by novice PYP educators. This took time, regular collaboration sessions, and reflection. Step 5: EvolveA big part of the PYP is reflection. I think this drives the evolutionary process. We dig deep to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what we would suggest doing differently next time. Since we began writing unit planners right after the PYP enhancements, our unit planners look differently than current iterations. This is okay.
The importance of this step is to evolve. How are we going to take what we have learned in the design thinking process to move the work forward? If we don’t evolve our practice, what is the point of the process? I recognize that change is difficult, but it’s worth it if we want our school to become more agentic and aligned with the IB philosophy towards learning and teaching. In this series, we are going to take a deep dive into each phase of the design thinking process and apply it with a challenge. You heard me, it’s time for another challenge. It’s time to put on your thinking hat.
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