4 reasons why you should run a design sprint for education
The education design sprint mindset: facilitators are teachers!
The sprint methodology was created by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. By following this methodology, you will work for 5 days to solve a big problem. Each day, you go through a series of exercises developed to guide you to achieve the main goal for the day. There is some pre-sprint preparation required, for instance before you go into a sprint you need to define a challenge worth sprinting for, set the space, time and prep the team for the marathon (yes, when you sprint for a long time you call it a marathon). You need the apparatus (mainly post-its, sharpies, a whiteboard and a timer), think about snack and a playlist for your team. Then, during the sprint the facilitator needs to keep an eye on the timer, instruct the team to do the exercises, keep the energy level up, and if the facilitator is experienced enough and feels like it, they can even take part in the sprint. After the sprint, there is a deep reflection on the sprint and analysis of the data collected by the test, so the team can learn and plan the next steps. And of course, let’s not forget iteration. You can jump right into an Iteration Sprint, which is a sprint you work on small adjustments to the previous creation in order to retest, if need be.
This all seems to be a lot of work to any ordinary person, but an educator has super powers! If you are a teacher, all this may sound very familiar to what you have already been doing on a daily basis, probably for years. As educators, whenever we are planning our lessons, we go through a similar checklist: find a challenge, or learning objective, set the space, think about time, prep the team (students), rehearse instructions, check for classroom apparatus, sometimes take part in the lesson while guiding them during the exercise, reflection, feedback, learning, planning next steps, repeat.
The main difference here is how much less facilitators work. In more traditional classrooms, teachers are responsible for learning all they can about the subject and passing it along to students who passively take it all in, absorbing whatever they can to get a good grade on the test. This model of teaching and learning no longer applies to our modern learning style.
So, here are 4 main reasons why you should adopt a sprint mindset in education today:
1. Innovation: Design sprints are a great way to innovate and lead an interaction-centered experience. If you compare a classroom today to a design sprint war room, you will notice they are pretty similar: both follow a structured methodology with step by step procedures that result in finding a solution to a big problem in a fast and creative way. Both need a facilitator, one person who will manage time, conversations and the overall process. Sprints and classrooms both focus on a single outcome; time restraint does not allow you to waste too much time working on a solution; you work together with a team, but the end result might be different for each member of the team.
2. Skills: Sprints go beyond just solving a big problem. It is an exercise of collaboration, communicating your ideas to the team, unbiased arguments, decision-making and critical thinking, and most importantly, creativity. Educators struggle to develop these skills in students on a daily basis, in order to better prepare them for what comes after they graduate, or as some call it, real life. In this so called real life, everything is based on our skillful creative problem-solving. These social-emotional skills we work on during sprints are part of the teaching routine today. So, by using sprints in education we are preparing students with a methodology they can take with them to help with their professional experience (and personal as well, why not). By using sprint in education, you will be providing a meaningful and real learning experience for the students.
3. Educators’ experience: Let’s not just think of students; how about educators? The entire educational system has undergone some profound changes, and educators everywhere are somewhat lost in the learning process, at times not knowing how to facilitate learning, at other times clinging tightly to a traditional and outdated way of teaching. How can we help these educators understand their role as facilitators to learning, and allow them to learn and have fun along the learning process as well? Well, sprint them up! In a sprint, more experienced facilitators can be part of the problem-solving process. Yes, they have a more significant role, as they need to manage the time, the team, the discussions, the food, the energy during the entire process. But that does not mean they can not be a part of the sprint. Not only can they be part of the sprint, they can take part in learning and helping come up with the solution to be tested. Educators can have a chance to be part of the creative process, develop their own social and emotional skills, learn and have fun, all the while facilitating the process and managing the class.
4. Failing required: Getting started is more important than being right: this is one of the principles of a design sprint. What does this mean? That there is no right or wrong when it comes to creative problem solving. Whenever an idea fails, it serves to validate a hypothesis that something needs to be done differently. It can actually be more favorable to have it fail so you can steer the entire project in the right direction at an early stage. However, when it comes to learning, failures (or mistakes) have such a negative connotation, especially when it comes to educators. This can be reversed if we create a safe environment for learning, and actually welcome failures as it happens during a sprint. That way, mistakes and failures can be considered mere adjustments to the path to acquiring real knowledge.
This is the first of a series of five articles depicting my experience as an educator and a design enthusiast.
