Design Thinking as education reform
In grad school I took a class on “The History of School Reform” where we learned that the history of reform could easily be told as a story of failure. We all know the cycle: 1) a report is released decrying the miserable state of public education in our country, 2) we search for solutions, 3) we identify a program or policy that will fix everything, 4) a report is released explaining why the program/policy did not fix everything, 5) repeat.
While it seems effecient to identify a significant problem and then try to address it with a single program, this cycle is exhausting for teachers and school adminstrators. This approach can easily create cynicism among educators. It’s cyncism rooted in a “here we go again” attitude every time a new program is rolled out. The problem with this cynicism is that it leads to half-hearted implementation of any new idea. People decide that it’s smarter to wait out a reform, rather than try to implement the new idea. This mindset guarantees failure as even the best programs can’t achieve results without a sincere attempt at implementation. We need a different mindset about school improvement.
When we launched Design Tech High School (d.tech), we built our educational program around design thinking. At a very basic level, we wanted our students to learn the skills and mindsets that underly design thinking because we knew that skills such as creativity, collaboration, and empathy would be the most difficult to automate, which would help our students in life after high school. What we have learned is that not only is design thinking a valuable framework for teaching important skills to students but it also helps defeat the “silver bullet” approach to school improvement.
Design thinking expects users (students, staff, and parents) to constantly gather feedback about our model and identify problems to solve. This means that we never expect something that we implement to meet all of our users’ needs indefinitely. For us this is captured in two ways. First, we have simplified the design process into “explore, create, learn”. Everyone one at d.tech is expected to explore the environment for ways to make things better and then create something aimed at school improvement. After creating something, we implement it and learn from our implementation by exploring again. Because we never expect something that we implement to be 100% effective forever we have adopted the mindset that “everything has an expiration date”. This mindset and process has resulted in
10 different bell schedules our first two years
4 different end of course presentations for design lab
3 different student work revision policies
3 different physical environment designs
Too many smaller refinements to list here
Many of these changes occur during the school year, as we use design thinking to break out of what commonly happens in schools, which is waiting until August and the start of a new school year to solve a problem.
One of the most significant challenges when using this type of cycle of innovation is gathering the data to know exactly when something has expired and is in need of a redesign. In a culture with a bias toward action, you have to be very explicit about gathering data.
The advantage to using design thinking as a framework for change management is quite clear though. It changes the mindset of the staff. Change is not greeted with a negative “here we go again attitude”, but instead excitement around “here we go again”, as we implement something that aims to solve a problem for the users of our school.
The other advantage of using design thinking for change management is that it makes us very responive to a world that changes quickly and unpredictably. And really, shouldn’t schools be the most nimble, agile, and flexible of all public institutions. If we want to prepare students for success, we must be able to respond quickly to the challenges presented by an ever-changing world.
