Design Thinking Opportunity!

I started my design thinking journey by reading the book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley and David Kelley. At the time I was looking for ideas on creativity and how to foster it. I was excited to learn about the design thinking process, which I had not heard of. You can read my post about it here. The Kelleys are partners at IDEO, a design and innovation firm. IDEO, along with the Riverdale Country School, now has formed The Teacher Guild, an online community with the purpose of exploring education issues through the design thinking process. It is modeled on OpenIDEO, an online platform that tackles large, difficult problems by inviting all interested parties to participate in the process.

The Teachers Guild's first 10-week collaboration is going on now. The question is "How might we create rituals and routines that establish a culture of innovation in our classrooms and schools?" This collaboration is in the Discovery phase in which members contribute ideas, thoughts, and resources related to the question. Everyone can contribute, comment, and "applaud" others' ideas. The next phase, which starts soon, is Ideate. Participants will share and try ideas that address the question. The Evolve step continues the design process with feedback, then in Select participants vote for their favorites. The most popular solutions are announced followed by a reflection piece. The staff at The Teacher's Guild works offline in between some of the steps. Then a new problem is posted. The process is thoroughly explained on the website.

In the current Discovery stage, many people have posted. It is exciting to read so many ideas all aimed at helping solve a problem. There are ideas about question asking, mindset, failure as a positive force, physical classroom set-ups, and many more. My posted idea was creating a positive, supportive classroom atmosphere where students feel comfortable taking risks. There are also many comments posted on the ideas. It is a positive, energetic community!

I'm excited about interacting with other teachers interested in design thinking. I'm also happy to have an opportunity to experience the process, going through the steps with other teachers. My goal is not only to be able to use the design process myself, but to teach it, in a simpler, shorter form, to my students.

Sound intriguing? Check it out at teachersguild.org!

The Quick Challenge

How might lunch at school be improved/more fun/different?

This was the quick challenge my class recently tackled. The idea of quick challenges comes from the book Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley, discussed in several earlier posts. In a quick challenge, small groups are given a situation, such as redesigning gift-giving or wallets, to practice the skills of design thinking. The purposes of this type of exercise are to build confidence and to learn from failures in a safe situation. I chose to have my students consider lunch at school, since it is an easy thing for them to observe and think about.

I first assigned students to observe at lunch and come up with one thing each really liked about lunch at school and one thing he/she did not like, thought could be improved, or could be different. The discussed their ideas in small groups, making connections between ideas and  piggybacking onto others' ideas. Then we collected an assortment of lunch-related characteristics that one or more students thought would benefit from a change.

As shown by the list, there were no wild and crazy ideas, but I hope there will be in the future as the 4th graders get more comfortable with the process. All of the ideas were relevant to lunch, if not practical. As our whole class discussion progressed, themes began to emerge, and we then focused on the desire for more time for lunch. I asked why they wanted more time and the unanimous response was that they felt they didn't have enough time to eat. We have 20-minute lunch periods, which seem adequate to the adults in the school. One student commented, "But we can't change the schedule, can we?" I agreed that neither they or I could change the schedule, but we could think about the problem they identified - not enough time to eat - and look for other solutions to that. They were able to conclude that we could include additional snack times during classroom times. 

After this breakthrough, they started looking at the list with an eye to finding the things that students might have some control over. One student said, "We could bring our own chocolate mix to make chocolate milk." Other ideas were asking the adult supervisors to help with shouting in the lunchroom and bringing their own bigger desserts from home. 

We will be repeating this exercise with other scenarios. For now we have made a start in helping students realize that they can find problems on their own to try to solve, which they will be asked to do later in STEAM classes, and it’s important to ask why something is a problem, because that may lead you to possible solutions.

Design Thinking: Taking the First Steps

Sliding under my daughter's bed in search of her collection of beanie babies is a most unusual part of lesson preparation, even for an elementary teacher. But, I needed a number of stuffed animals for a creative problem solving lesson and I thought the beanie babies would fit the bill nicely. We'll return to them in a moment.

I began my integration of creative and design thinking into my 4th grade curriculum with the book Creative Confidence, which I wrote about back in August.  I realized, though, that I would have to begin by laying a foundation for my students that would include brainstorming experience, productive collaborative work, listening skills, and a variety of practice scenarios before we could use many of the ideas from the book. I have some experience using Creative Problem Solving (CPS) in teaching, so I turned to one of the books I have, Big Tools for Young Thinkers by Susan Keller-Mathers and Kristin Puccio. CPS is a method that advocates a step by step process to encourage creative solutions. Both CPS and design thinking emphasize identifying a problem to solve, generating lots of ideas, suspending any judgment on the value of ideas, collaboration and divergent thinking, so I felt that CPS activities would be a productive first step..

The first sessions with my class were from Big Tools for Young Thinkers and introduced the rules of brainstorming, which they then applied in an activity generating ideas for preventing a squirrel from stealing all the fruit from your fruit tree. The students worked in small groups with the goals of coming up with as many ideas as possible and not criticizing anyone else's ideas during brainstorming.  (They were also not allowed to harm the squirrel as part of a solution.) The next lesson we did from the book was machine creation through a drawing activity. For this exploration students drew ideas for three new machines, then switched papers with a partner. With someone else's ideas in front of them and their own in their heads, students tried piggybacking off their partner's machines to create different new creations. Our third CPS exercise was creating a new type of transportation by forcing a relationship between two different modes of transport. As can be seen, these activities are also a lot of fun.

I switched gears for the next lesson and took an idea I had gotten from Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Ming Tan. This is a wonderful book on mindfulness. One of the exercises in the book is a listening exercise in which partners take turns listening and talking. The speaker has three minutes to speak, uninterrupted, about any one topic. The topic should be a serious one that is important to the speaker, such as a time when you were upset or sad. The listener's job is to listen, look at the speaker's face, nod encouragingly, and possibly say, "mm hmm," but nothing more. If the speaker runs out of things to say, the two sit in silence until either the speaker says something or the three minutes are up. Then they switch roles. Though I got this from Search Inside Yourself,  one of the drama teachers at Quest told me this comes from drama education. I chose to do this activity because one of the aspects of the design thinking process is really listening to others (often customers in the business and engineering worlds) in order to understand the problems that you might be trying to solve. I wanted to apply this to some of the problems I would present to my class during the year.

For my 4th graders, talking is not very difficult, but staying silent and focused on the speaker was a huge step. I was thrilled at how well they carried this out. With debriefed afterwards about how they felt as speaker and as listener. Most of them found both roles challenging.

One of the stuffed animals created after interviewing a partner

The next lesson called on listening skills, as well as brainstorming. This exercise asked students to take two stuffed animals and create a new animal through the forced relationship. This is the reason I was under my daughter's bed, searching for beanie babies. She had collected a lot at the height of the Beanie Baby craze, and they are smaller than many stuffed animals, making it easy for me to bring a lot of them to school. Each student got two diverse animals and drew a new stuffed animal, with a description or name. Taking this activity a step further, I had partners interview each other, using their listening skills, about what characteristics each wanted in a stuffed animal. Then they created animals for each other, again drawing them on paper, and presented them to the class.

All of the above activities were done in our first trimester. One of the challenges in adding Creative Thinking to my curriculum was finding time for it. I spend between 30 and 60 minutes on it per week, though some weeks special events take over that time. I have a long Thursday afternoon with my students, so these types of lessons, that are more interactive, are perfect for keeping focus and engagement.

In the second trimester we will be moving into some different types of creative explorations. I am planning ways to integrate creative thinking and problem solving lessons into other subjects, especially now that me students have some of the basics of the process down. We are in the alpha stage of development - an exciting process!

Summer Rejuvenation: Creativity

I always end the school year and thinking about how various aspects of the school year went, and especially what I might want to do differently next year. This year I made a list of things I want to either think about or explore this summer. My list includes possibly tweaking the writing curriculum, reviewing the pilot year for class blogging, and thinking about ways to include more creative opportunities and problem solving in the curriculum.

A few years ago I read The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner. I highly recommend this book in which Wagner identifies and discusses seven essential skills for the 21st century, based on conversation he had with business leaders. The seven skills are problem solving and critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurship, oral and written communication, accessing and analyzing information, and curiosity and imagination. As a 4th grade teacher, I thought the skills that I could most readily incorporate into my classroom were problem solving/critical thinking, communication skills, collaboration, and curiosity/imagination. We also work with some of the other areas, but developmentally, 4th graders are most ready to work with these four. Also, it's always a good idea not to take on too much change at once.

While my partner and I have been regularly incorporating these skills into our teaching in 4th grade, I am interested in doing more. A high school classmate of mine happened to post a list of the best books on creativity on a popular online social site. I looked it over and decided to read one of them, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley and David Kelley. It was a good choice. The Kelley brothers are partners at IDEO, a design firm, and their book is written with a business audience in mind, though the ideas can easily be applied or adapted for education and other areas. They have also written a Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit, which is available on their website for free. The Toolkit is written to guide teachers and administrators through creative problem-solving,.

I really like Creative Confidence because it is encouraging, upbeat, and full of ideas. The Kelleys believe that everyone can be creative and that everyone should be part of the creative process. As I read, I found many activities that I want to try with my class, including quick design challenges, like how would you make lunch better? There are activities to be done in a short time frame and ones that take longer. I could see ways to use these ideas in writing, social studies and math. My students will have the chance to work collaboratively, to work in divergent ways, and to mess around with materials. They will be encouraged to become risk-takers in a safe environment. We have a new STEAM program in the middle school, and these types of creative, problem-solving opportunities will help prepare upper elementary students for STEAM.

I also like Creative Confidence because it opened up new ideas and tools for me to use. So not only can I use the ideas to set up learning experiences for my students, but I can use these concepts myself. For example, there is a short section on using simple drawing to communicate, which I can use to communicate while teaching. I also particularly like the strategy "to think like a traveler," using fresh eyes rather than jumping to "I already know..."

I plan to post about Creative Confidence strategies once school is back in session. Meanwhile I'll be exploring writing curricula, mindfulness, and more on design and creativity.