Applying Design Abilities to Classroom Curriculum
Authored by: Maureen Carroll and Laura McBain
This post is part three of a three-part series attempting to approach what it means to become a designer in K12 education and the design abilities we need to cultivate with ourselves and our students. In this moment of flux and rapidly changing conditions developing our own abilities to respond to dynamic design challenges is a certainty. To catch up on our journey read Part 1: Looking beyond the hexagons: What does it mean to become an education designer? and Part 2: Connecting Design Abilities to Classroom Curriculum.
To be a designer is to be a steward of possibility. We search for outcomes that do not yet exist and in doing so we dive deep into the unexpected and unknown.
-Stanford d.school Public Library
Designing classroom learning experiences is often fraught with uncertainty. Yet what if instead of avoiding ambiguity, we learned to embrace it. The d.school’s Creative Director, Scott Doorley, describes ambiguity as the water we swim in. It is all around us. Navigating ambiguity involves recognizing and stewing in the discomfort of not knowing, leveraging and embracing parallel possibilities, and resolving or emerging from ambiguity as needed. We typically think of ambiguity as something to avoid, yet it is more important to learn how to navigate it. Doing so can help us notice moments when we are stuck, encourage us to seek help and force us to reframe a problem. Yet in K12 education, we often shy away from helping our students wrestle with ambiguity. We scaffold, breakdown complex problems and sometimes intentionally limit the ambiguity in our lessons in pursuit of our quest for students to consume knowledge. But the ability to both discover and to resolve problems is an essential skill for becoming a future-ready learner. The ability to do both is the hallmark of being a designer and is central to the process of becoming.
Our third workshop (see blog post #1 and #2) focused on the design abilities Navigating Ambiguity and Designing Your Design Work. We encouraged the teachers to think about a design lesson they were hoping to facilitate during the upcoming weeks. They worked in grade level teams to scope and link their lesson plans to the design abilities and then mapped out the learning goals, content standards and reflections moments. We used this planning guide to help them think through what designing for the design abilities might look like.
The teachers used a consultancy protocol, inspired by the work from the School Reform Initiative. This protocol asked the teachers to pose the challenging questions they faced in their design work and get peer feedback. The activity fostered collegiality and highlighted the concept that each of us continue to discover moments of uncertainty in our teaching moments and can learn with and from each other.
What We Learned
As we began this journey, we had questions about how an idea from the world of academia might look in real world classroom settings. To help grapple with this tension, we explored the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, (ZPD), which was developed by psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1934). The ZPD is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he/she/they can do with help. When applied to education, this concept comes to life as teachers use scaffolding, which is providing instruction in small steps as they support students’ path towards mastering new learning. We wanted to learn more about how to best teach the design abilities in the classroom and think about what the nature of that scaffolding might be. We wondered, “Is there such a thing as a Zone of Proximal Design, and if so, how might it apply to the idea of navigating ambiguity?” Just like our K12 students, we, as educators, are in different stages of our own proximal development. What works for one of us may not work for another.
What’s Next?
This article chronicled the steps in our journey to understand the role of design abilities in the classroom. In the K12 Lab we are continuing to explore how we might best identify and measure the characteristics, behaviors and mindsets of design in K12 classrooms. We are curious about how the design abilities unfold, how they can foster culturally relevant learning experiences, and how they might create an expanded view of a school’s learning goals. We know that understanding, developing and reflecting on one’s design abilities requires deliberate lesson planning, implementation and iteration, and most importantly, intentional time for reflection.
This challenge, coupled with our current work on reframing how to teach design thinking is our path forward. We know we will probably develop more questions than solutions and that the path forward will be flooded with false starts, misconceptions, missed opportunities and of course, ambiguity, which is central to this journey of unknowns that we are all on. And yet this is the design process. We will learn as we go, share our insights and struggles. We, too, are in the quest, always, of becoming.
“We are starting to notice a change in our students’ conversations. During our most recent school tour, I had a student speak about design thinking and rather than talk about a design sprint or project, she talked about appreciating the struggle and how that’s where she was learning the most. She’s a fourth grader!”
~Kami Thordarson, Principal Campbell School of Innovation
Want to learn more?
Join a conversation: We are hosting a webinar on July 31st at 10:00 a.m.PDT to explore how the design abilities can enhance K12 education. RSVP here.
Go deeper: Check out the The latest edition Zoom-Zoom Room Podcast Series with Maureen Carroll and Milan Drake on the Design Abilities
Read: Check out this Amanda Haughs’s blog on teaching the design abilities with 2nd graders!
