Transforming Brisbane schools with Design Thinking
Since the summer of 2011, NoTosh has been transforming an initial cohort of schools with The Design Thinking School programme, through the support of the Brisbane Catholic Education Department.
The most rewarding teaching experience I’ve ever had”
Class teacher | St Francis Xavier Primary School, Brisbane
25 teachers and the entire education department team participated in intensive kick-off sessions over two days in June 2011, before embarking on individual and whole-school action research projects over five months, supported online by the NoTosh team and each other. They explored how students in both primary and high school could take more control for their learning through the planning, thinking, research and prototyping skills promoted in design thinking.
Now, as we head into 2012 we will continue working with new schools throughout the city, harnessing several of the staff who have been through the action research process as coaches. The Department has also created online and offline support material to help spread practice even further through the community.
The five-stage design thinking process provides a useful set of tools for co-designing a curriculum with students, parents, colleagues and even the wider community.
We took participants through the four-part Design Thinking process, with an additional concentration on how ongoing feedback and formative assessment can be best harnessed throughout learning. We then had them prepare their ‘pitches’ for change, in order to take their compelling one-classroom-at-a-time or one-school-at-a-time practice and spread it beyond their own walls (Pitch 1, Pitch 2, Pitch 3, Pitch 4, Pitch 5)
Why try this framework?
- It provides a useful structure for the learner to know where they are in the learning journey without needing told.
- It provides choice to the learner in what they’re going to learn, and how – the student needs to work out what knowledge and understanding they’re lacking in order to achieve what they want to achieve.
- It places the responsibility for finding a compelling area to learn and an interesting approach to learning it firmly in the hands of the learner.
- It always presents the whole game of learning, the big picture, even if students have to learn some ‘expert elements’ along the way, they see where they slot in to a bigger, more epic problem they are trying to solve.
1. Immersion: Observation and Empathy
Tom: At Mount Vernon School in the United States, as part of the ITU Telecom World conference that we helped to reinvent with the participation of 10,000 young people through design thinking, one picture sticks in my mind. As part of the empathy phase young students, no more than six or seven years old, carried water, large canisters of water, from home to school. They had pain on their faces, sweat pouring down their cheeks. All this to better understand what it’s like. Because they did that, they thought up better products, through a broader range of solutions.
Ewan: It’s hard to teach that empathy/observation part. Teachers want to cover what they feel they want to cover. But empathy and observation is going to go beyond what you need to cover in any six week period, because this isn’t a six week project. It’s a way of working, a way of learning that frees up so much time later in the year or in the child’s school career, with enough cooperation between schools. I wonder whether this is why 3-18 schools, independent mostly, are able to better understand the potential time saving and the ability to reduce the repetition most school students have to put up with.
Cassie: The immersion stage is a very difficult stage. It’s not about generating a solution, drawing in a sketchbook, or Googling ideas or finding information. It’s about finding emotions, people’s feelings, finding empathy for the problem.
Miriam: When we were in that immersion stage and we were really trying to create that empathy, we were trying to get out of the students their feelings, what they thought about it and then what action can we take to be better? It was sort of empowering to them to see that they can do something about it. It’s not just your teachers, your parents your school, you can actually go out there and do something about it.
Immersion encourages us to keep adding, adding, adding to the mess of knowledge and understanding we’re gaining on a given subject, and then the process of synthesis can finally take place, where some order appears. It’s a spell, between divergent thinking of immersion and coming up with ideas, where you’re naturally heading towards more convergent thinking.
Miriam: The first question we started with, which I thought sounded epic but wasn’t sure about, was “How might we read more?”.
How do we read, what do we read, and where do we read. And it was the “Where we read” that caught their imagination. We talked about how they read at school – around a green desk, in groups of six. We went on an adventure and started looking at all these amazing reading spaces. It got them out of their bubble. Out there, people have amazing reading spaces that they have access to, and we don’t. They really had this sense of “we deserve that as much as anyone else”. That took us to our next question: “How might we persuade corporate business to provide an amazing reading space for us?”
Ewan: Key to synthesis is the Project Corner. While schools often have student work on display, it’s the final draft of their work. It serves no learning purpose as by the time it’s up the children have moved on to learning about something else.
Miriam: At the beginning of our project we set up a project corner, and once we had those immersion elements up on the corner we were able to starting bringing things together. We used some of the techniques: combinations, opposites…
Then there were the outliers. There weren’t a lot of these, and you knew that they belonged somewhere else, but you were still able to have them there.
Miriam: Ideation is trying to get the students to be what you’ve always wanted them to be: risk takers. Any idea is a good idea. it might be a far out idea but sometimes there’s a little part of that that you might be able to bring back to something else. We had so much fun looking back at different concepts, and asking ourselves what we want again, talking about the reading spaces that they wanted. Their ideas were amazing.
Cassie: During the ideation phase we brainstormed some of the ideas around our problem: “How might we make multiplication more fun?”
Kelly: We had an ideas quota – where the children were asked to come up with 100 ideas in a 10 minute time slot.
Anthony Lucey, Principal, Our Lady of Delours Catholic Primary School: Ewan talks about listening to people who are different to school and listening with new eyes and I think that’s the thing about generating new ideas. Tapping into our freedom to come up with new ideas. Encouraging us to think big and not to be limited by what we think are the constraints of our ideas. It’s reignited my passion for the fact that kids can do anything. What we’re doing with learning communities in our schools is the opportunity for kids to be passionate enthusiastic committed learners who can take risks and ultimately make changes.
Prototyping from Danielle Carter on Vimeo.
Miriam: When we started out our project and we got through to the prototyping phase, that’s where we needed to convince administration that we really needed a secret (reading) space within our school. We had to make a presentation to our administration team. The kids had to learn how to inject empathy into what we’re doing, but they also had to have data to support what they were doing. They were learning about not just asking for something and getting a result. They had to realise that there was every chance that the answer would be ‘no’ and that if the answer is no that’s not a failure. We just have to go back to the drawing board and work out how we’re going to go about making it.
How can we make sure that what they’re doing is really their own work, and not something that as a teacher I’ve contracted and said that they must do it?
Ewan: When I went to New Brunswick on a teaching tour and saw how they did French immersion, a key part of the process was keeping a learning log, or a journal de bord. In it you write down what you think you’ve learned, what you think you want to do tomorrow, and what you have to do between now and then to be able to do what you want to do. Vitally, keeping this log up to date is in the student’s hands. It’s nearly always self or peer initiated, it’s not the teacher telling them to do this. And the minute you have generated a culture of self-reflection it can happen anywhere – on the bus, at home, or in the classroom. You’ve finally freed the student from only being able to learn in a classroom.
If you look at it from a teacher’s point of view, the whole notion of being a teacher is that you are self-reflective. And sharing that reflection isn’t an extra. It’s absolutely part and parcel of being part of a profession. Every other profession shares through journals, conferences or online. In teaching, it’s a minority who share what they do, publicly. I don’t think one can call oneself a professional if you don’t share what you’re learning and doing differently with your colleagues, at scale. And that means more than teaching once a year at a conference. Most teachers could manage five minutes at the end of a day to write down the one thing they have learned that day, on a blog.
Kate Campbell: I have really enjoyed it. It has really challenged me to think of things really differently. I like to have control and I like to know what’s going on, and through my degree that’s been the thing that everyone said: “You’re really organised” etc etc. It was really a big challenge for me to step back and give up some of that control. But that has been the most useful learning experience ever.
I can sit there and try to create resources for them to get engaged and motivated, and get frustrated when it doesn’t happen. Whereas if I sit with them and talk with them and spend quality time with them working with them working towards something of quality that’s they’re learning and you’re enjoying the whole process of learning.
5. 8-minute Overview of the NoTosh Design Thinking School process
Design Thinking Brisbane from Danielle Carter on Vimeo.