My Story of Using Design Thinking in Curriculum Innovation.
Both design thinking and educative curriculum are the human-centered approaches.
I am an instructor for adults on Spiritual Intelligence Development with a background of a serial startup entrepreneur. Spirituality is considered the field of religion but students come to my courses not for religious purposes, and even they are afraid of the courses relating to religion. They look for new approaches, more scientific one to release their stress, cultivate their mental health, and improve their work efficiency.
However, Spiritual Intelligence (SI) is the new topic like an educational subject, and most case studies are practice guide relating to religion. In order words, there is almost no similar practical lesson for me to reference. Therefore, it is fair to say that my story of teaching when it comes to the curriculum is a journey of curriculum innovation using design thinking of a startup entrepreneur.
Design thinking is a powerful tool for early-stage startups to innovate product based on the problem-solving approach.
I choose the five-stage Design Thinking model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (2010) for curriculum development. These five stages are as follows:
- Empathizing: Understanding the human needs involved.
- Defining: Re-framing and defining the problem in human-centric ways.
- Ideating: Creating many ideas in ideation sessions.
- Prototyping: Adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping.
- Testing: Developing a prototype/solution to the problem.
With the view of design thinking, my curriculum development is a continuous process of empathizing students’ needs and expectations; defining the underlying problems; brainstorming new approaches on goals, learning experiences, evaluation and even attractive course’s names; creating and implementing new teaching approaches.
Learners’ needs and concerns are the reference frame for evaluating and modifying my curriculum.
As learner-centered educators believe, “people contain their own capabilities for growth, are the agents who must actualize their own capabilities, and are essentially good in nature” (Schiro, 2013, p. 5). All my decisions are based on the authentic benefit of students. By this way, my colleagues and I have designed over 50 single courses and 2 highlight programs serving various customers’ needs for 10 years.
Due to the specification of a lean startup, I take a proactive role in designing and administering my curriculum with the support of Chief Program Officer (CPO) and other instructors.
In my company, the CPO designs the core curriculum to serve students and develop internal tutors and instructors. To become an instructor, I have to attain all the goals of the core program, which highly emphasize the sense of self-responsibility and proactive continuous learning. Therefore, I am empowered to design new courses, new programs, and even a new theory.
To support me (and other instructors), the CPO and instructors have weekly meetings to update the project status and students’ feedbacks, share teaching experiences and make adjustments together.
As mentioned earlier, my curriculum journey is a story of applying design thinking into designing and implementing our syllabus as well as the whole educational environment, so I am very proactive in adapting and modifying the curriculum objectives if situations arise.
Although design thinking has five sequential stages, “in essence, the Design Thinking process is iterative, flexible and focused on collaboration between designers and users, with an emphasis on bringing ideas to life based on how real users think, feel and behave”. (Dam & Siang, 2018).
We can visualize this through the illustration below:
In practice, I modify any element of the curriculum whenever I find out a problem or what I think that it may make learners’ experience better. When I read Dewey’s short book entitled “Experience and Education”, I realize that I have focused on learners’ experiences as well as used the principle of continuity and interaction inadvertently.
I feel extremely resonant with Dewey’s (1938) comment, “the business of the educator to see in what direction an experience is heading” (p. 14) and “Continuity and interaction in their active union with each other provide the measure of the educative significance and value of an experience” (p. 18).
I have improved the curriculum even if the learner is still satisfied and has no complaints at all.
After each session, I recall what happened in my class and read students’ narratives about what they think, feel and learn during the learning time, then I do a quick evaluation compared to the goals and modify the teaching content of the next session if necessary.
I always try my best to be closer to the mindset that (1) what learners attain in the previous experience is the means to learn in the latter one, and (2) the learners must be the producer-cum-user of their knowledge. As this way, my curriculum improvement is a perpetual loop based on the proactive understanding of learners and the obstacles they face.
My agile curriculum improvement is very supported by CPO and other instructors. When I confuse any situation and want to discuss with them, they immediately help me to find underlying reasons and suggest a suitable approach. If my situation contains meaningful lessons, it becomes a case study shared in the weekly meeting, and together we reflect and adjust our whole curriculum within our available resources.
It seems that nothing hinders our continuous improvement because we all aware that reality-based change is a must-do to win the hearts of our learners, our customers also.
Some mini successes.
Up to now, I feel that the curriculum has been favorable and serves the needs of our students overall. Their satisfaction is reflected through not only what they express in their learning narrative but also that a large percentage of students are loyal customers.
Over 70% of students attend at least 3 consecutive courses, and 10% of them are yearly students. Many students say that my company is their true home, where their true selves are accepted unconditionally and even the company empathizes with them better than themselves. Some had a chance to attend self-improvement courses of other places, however, they confided that there is no place that can replace us in their hearts.
Moreover, the SI development program has contributed a profound part to our talent retention strategy. Most employees still stay with my company even with a lower salary than the market wage to enjoy the internal training programs and the continuous self-improvement culture.
The greatest curricular obstacle
Although the curriculum has such encouraging achievements, I feel that its all elements, which are analyzed in the view of “curriculum as experiences” (Su, 2012, p. 155), truly work just at the first stage, which focuses on knowledge discovery, without students core-beliefs transformation.
In the first stage, all the elements including enrolment, goals, content, method, assessment, extracurricular activities and learning, environment, hidden curriculum, and cultures align with each other and exceed students’ expectations.
Although, to Vietnamese students, SI is a new topic and the method of applying critical thinking, Socratic questioning, as well as narrative inquiry method into self-discovery, is very strange, my good preparation on learning psychology help students adapt and enjoy the class’s rhythm quickly. They really excite at interactive activities not only among students but also their inner world and themselves. They are curious about what topics and what experiences they will encounter in the next session.
Last but not least, narrative inquiry method “with its nature of creating space for critical thinking and self-reflection” (Chan, 2012, p. 114) plays a critical role in encouraging students discovering knowledge by themselves as well as increasing their confidence and cultivate their love of learning in a natural way.
However, coming to the second stage, which focuses on core-beliefs transformation, I have a very big obstacle with students’ unrealistic expectations.
Transforming core-belief requires a great deal of commitment, perseverance and deep engagement in the unconscious degree.
Students have to not only spend a lot of time but also get out of their comfort zone to handle their wrong core-beliefs. But most of the students desire incredible fruit in a short time with a normal effort. They implicitly desire that in their unconsciousness.
Therefore, my common psychological preparation techniques become less effective. Though students still enjoy new discussion topics, they just stop at knowledge discovery without changing their core beliefs. The number of core belief transforming students are counted only on the fingertips. In other words, the teaching goals and learning experiences do not align with each other.
About these such students unrealistic expectations, I think one of the critical reasons is their traditional learning habit.
Examination-driven learning has absorbed into their blood for a long time. This way of learning forms their mindset that they can attain their learning goals with not much time and effort, more dangerous, it makes them lack of responsibility for what knowledge they discover.
In examination-driven education, students learn and examine other’s knowledge. Therefore, through discussion and narrative assignment, they discover much meaningful knowledge by themselves but they think and feel that such knowledge is of others, their teachers or gurus, so they do not allow what they discover to come deeply into their deeper level of consciousness.
When facing opposite core belief, all their proper understandings are pushed back unconsciously. It happens as if there were an unconscious barrier inside them to prevent the proper understandings from coming in. This problem can be solved by a course of learning mindset transformation. Unfortunately, this course also takes much time.
In summary, my story of curriculum is a perpetual loop of applying design thinking method into discovering and implementing what experience is necessary for learners and how to deliver that experience in a proactive way. On this journey, I inadvertently perform many approaches resonating with Dewey’s theory, learner-centered ideology as well as narrative inquiry method.
I think that these resonances come from the fact that both design thinking and educative curriculum are the human-centered approaches.
Therefore, I strongly believe that the continuous improvement of design thinking into education will help me solve the curriculum obstacles I am currently facing.
References
Chan, E.Y. (2012). The Transforming Power of Narrative in Teacher Education. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 37 (3), 111–127. Retrieved from http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1724&context=ajte
Dam, R., & Siang, T. (2019). Stages in the design thinking process. A Non-linear Process [Online Image]. Aarhus (DK): The Interaction Design Foundation. Retrieved May 2, 2019, from:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Touchstone Book, Simon and Schuster. Retrieved from http://ruby.fgcu.edu/Courses/ndemers/Colloquium/ExperiencEducationDewey.pdf
Plattner, H. (2010). An introduction to design thinking process guide. The Institute of Design at Stanford: Stanford.
Schiro, M. S. (2013). Curriculum theory: Conflicting visions and enduring concerns (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc. Retrieved from: https://talkcurriculum.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/schiro-m-2013-introduction-to-the-curriculum-ideologies.pdf
Su, S. (2012). The Various Concepts of Curriculum and the Factors Involved in Curricula-making. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268348184_The_Various_Concepts_of_Curriculum_and_the_Factors_Involved_in_Curricula-making
