A Designer’s Holistic View of Education

Why I Left UX to Pursue Education and What I’ve Learned So Far

Norman Tran
3 min readOct 20, 2015

CONTENTS: My Story → The Approach → What’s Next?

A living, breathing document capturing my learnings, which I’ll share below after I provide some more context.

My Story

In the summer of 2014, I became seriously ill with Grave’s Disease, which attacked my breathing, heart rate, and nervous system. With my bodily functions greatly weakened, I could not even open a water bottle. For the first time in my life, I had to face my own fragility and mortality. Though the illness proved treatable, the sheer human terror of ceasing to exist gripped me. I still had yet to accomplish my dreams, or figure out my purpose in life. I revisited the reason I began my career at an edtech startup, Declara: I joined because of the opportunity to work alongside brilliant minds at the intersection of learning, design, and technology to help every adult achieve his/her full potential through personalized learning.

I wasn’t satisfied with this answer, so I dug deeper and asked myself, “Why do I even care about education?” The answer revealed itself with alarming clarity and urgency: The education system systematically exterminates the qualities we are all born with: curiosity, imagination, compassion, and creativity. How? If we have learned anything about neuroplasticity, it’s that neural pathways either strengthen, or they atrophy. By focusing on meaningless tests and narrow-minded definitions of tests, students go through assembly-line style into a system that slowly but surely extinguishes these qualities. No wonder society is rampant with what William Deresiewicz call “excellent sheep.”

After over a year at Declara, I realized two things: (1) The wicked problems in education cannot be solved by software alone; and (2) The impact that Declara has on individuals is indirect — I wanted to be more viscerally involved in K12 students’ learning. So here I am now, pivoting from software to education, realizing that the real bugs aren’t in the software, but in the way our hearts and brains have been molded by invisible incentives all around us — the education system. I want to dedicate my life now to the Dalai Lama’s vision of an education system that not only nurtures brighter minds, but ultimately better human beings.

The Approach

Without being formally educated about the history of education, policy, and curriculum design, I was faced with a daunting game of “catch up.” Instead of jumping into a masters program, I decided to take an eccentric and eclectic approach by asking myself:

“What do all the greatest minds of past and present, agnostic of their discipline, have to say about what enlivens the human spirit, and how can the education system do that?”

I scavenged Maria Papova’s BrainPickings and found a wealth of insights from every discipline imaginable: Journalism, Philosophy, Animal Pathology, Architecture, Biology, Theater, Anthropology, Physics, History, Religion, Technology, Politics, and the list goes on.

From these myriad excerpts, quotes, and articles emerged themes of what we as humans need in education:

  • Metacognition
  • Courage
  • Independence
  • Critical thinking
  • Social emotional learning
  • Creativity
  • Relevance
  • Supportive environment

Each theme contains relevant concepts, as well as quotes from passages written by luminaries in their respective disciplines extolling the themes and concepts. Passages marked in gray are commentary from Maria Popova, who curates BrainPickings. Blue passages are quoted from academic sources. This is very much a work in progress, but I hope this type of holistic analysis of education can spark a new conversation around what it means to teach and learn.

For the higher resolution doc, you can download it here: http://bit.ly/HolisticEduNeedsPDF_NT_v1

What’s Next?

Leave a response below about a concern, idea, suggestion, improvement!

  • Formatting
  • Expansion of concepts under the broader themes
  • Consolidation of themes / naming suggestions
  • Ways that this document can be helpful to the larger education community

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Norman Tran

I design how we design @Tradecraft. Ex @MissionU, @StanfordGSB, @IDEOTeachersGuild. Impish improviser. Junior jazz pianist. Passable poet. Alliteration addict.