THE DESIGN THINKING CLASSROOM: THE THREE PROVOCATION DESIGN CHALLENGE

I think that all educators are natural designers.  At the heart of teaching is designing lessons for students that are based on your understanding of your student’s abilities, needs, and progress.  It's not a big leap to build on those skills and abilities to add new dimensions to what your classroom experience provides.  The book intends to add a designer's tools and strategies to your ability to design experiences for your students.

A part of this process is moving from designing for students to designing with students and seeing your students as co-designers of the classroom experience.  This requires rethinking their role as well as your role in that experience.  Rather than planning a series of lessons that students respond and react to, an educator-design issues provocations that students use as a jumping-off point that leads to the development of human-centered design solutions.  Along the way, it is possible that a teacher can serve as a mentor, guide, facilitator, orchestrator, and co-investigator.

You can begin the transition to an educator-designer by using the design process to understand who you are and where your practice is at.  I’m recommending that you use yourself as a design challenge and begin by undertaking the Discovery process - with you as the focus.  I’m going to suggest that you spend some time with yourself – the professional educator – to understand the current reality of your practice, your beliefs and perspectives, and opportunities for growth within the context of your teaching and school assignment.

Doing this can give help you not only to understand yourself but give you a start on applying the tools of the Discovery process.  It can also help you build an appreciation for your abilities and your potential for improving the experience you offer.  It is also my hope that you begin building empathy for yourself – teaching is incredibly challenging and there is always something to improve.  That’s what we are focused on here – developing a process where you can objectively assess your current reality and begin taking the steps to advance your practice and craft.

The first activity asks you to consider a range of questions focused on growth, perspectives and beliefs, and the classroom experience.  This is information that can be used to give you ideas on how to complete the You Could Be You exercise that examines your current reality, your perspectives on a future condition, and the constraints that are potential impacts for moving forward.  Finally, based on the You Could Be You exercise, consider what you need to Start, Stop and Continue doing. This will provide you with a global picture of actionable next steps that you can use to begin building out your plan, those components of your practice that align with a design thinking approach, and those elements of your practice that can be discarded.

Complete the following:

Step 1: Understand who you and your students are. Complete the two assessments and use them to provide a snapshot of you and your students are, in the context of design thinking.

Download the assessment criteria in pdf format

Step 2: Develop a future preferred condition. Use the information from Step 1 to complete the “You Could be You” to clearly focus on understanding your current reality and what a plausible future could be.

Step 3: Develop actionable next steps. Using the document from Step 2, complete the Start-Stop-Continue to develop the next steps for your practice. Use data from Steps 1 and 2 to complete this. Download the ethnography tools below.

  • Start / Stop / Continue – what can you start doing now, what is important to continue doing, and what can you discard?

  • Use the Implementation Grid to assess strategies and next steps and where you can find your biggest impact.

Resources:

Design Thinking Model used in the book (PDF)(JPEG) - download each of the ethnography tools mentioned in the book plus more in either pdf or jpeg format. Also available: are slide decks (PPT, Keynote, Google Slides) that you can use to modify the tools for your particular need.

Ethnography tools and downloads - ethnography tools for Step 2 and 3 can be found here. Available in pdf and jpeg format. These are published with a Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial License which means that you can freely use these as long as the use is not for a commercial purpose.