Empowered by design thinking

As the new school year begins, I have a concern. I am not concerned about the new course I am teaching or the new students I will soon meet. I am not concerned about inclement weather and the forecast for a snowy winter interfering with our learning mojo.

I’m concerned about buzzwords.

More specifically, I am concerned that a tenet of learning, a foundational principle for how I understand my role as an educator, will be reduced to a buzzword. What is that word?

Design Thinking.

OK, that is two words. And those two words represent the mindset from which I approach planning, collaborating, teaching, relationship-building, and my ongoing learning. Being an educator with this mindset helps me embrace and empower what I value most in my colleagues, students, and myself: creative possibilities.

When I was a social studies teacher working with students in an American Government course we would discuss what makes us human. As we set about to examine how and why the founding generation established our systems of government, we wondered: what sets us apart from the kingdom of animals co-existing in prides, packs, gaggles, herds or any other animal collective? Students had all sorts of thoughts about what makes us human, what defines our humanity. Some of those ideas were dark, like cruelty. But most were breathtakingly optimistic.

To be human, they decided, was to be curious. Not the kind of curiosity that killed the cat. Instead, unbridled wonderment. To be human is to have an imaginative capacity that inspires others to join together in pursuit of ambitious quests, to persevere against odds and obstacles, to new frontiers of exploration, discovery, and action. Why do humans do this? Because as we benefit from the very nature of those who preceded us, we are bound to serve a greater good, to meet challenges with solutions, to make a bright future for those who come next.

And that, in a nutshell, is design thinking. Design thinkers see problems as opportunities. Constraints only fuel more unusual and untried solutions. Design thinkers have empathy for the many different points of view surrounding the problem they are trying to solve. They design, prototype, and redesign to create a more perfect solution, to improve the lives of people in their schools and communities small and large.

The best part of design thinking is that anyone can do it. Anyone.

Building this capacity in ourselves, in our colleagues, and in our students is an essential component of future-ready skill development. When Google plans for the evolution of its products and the development of new ones, they think about and empathize with what they call “the next billion users”. They aren’t planning for now, they are planning for a future they can only imagine. Consider, for a moment, who those next billion users are and what their experiences have been. Think, for example, about vocabulary we use for which they have no context, words that are meaningless to them. Words like: clockwise, desktop computer, MP3 player, pay phone, gasoline-powered engine, and more. How is their navigation of the world via a handheld device that gives them access to all the world’s information, organized and made useful, an essential component to how they will learn, communicate, and contribute?

Now consider the issues and challenges that face the next billion users’ local and global communities. As their educators, we have accepted the challenge of equipping them with the skills and habits of mind they will need to jump into the void and tackle those challenges. They will suffer defeat. Some of their setbacks will be heartbreaking. And they will be resilient. They will persevere in tearing down obstacles. They will push limits and defy odds. They have no choice. The world needs them.

Remember the best part of design thinking? Anyone can do it. I was so fortunate to take a deep dive into the processes of discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and evolution that underpin the design thinking process when I worked with and learned from the Future Design School at the Google Innovator Academy. Learning to think this way, to fall in love with problems and see every challenge as an opportunity, and then to apply my energy to the steps inherent in designing solutions has transformed how I work with students and my colleagues from how I plan lessons to how I facilitate meetings and write curriculum.

In fact, one of the latest resources created by the Future Design School is a curriculum series for elementary, middle, and upper grades. The grade specific, modular programs are mapped to relevant standards and can be implemented across disciplines; the carefully crafted curricula keep student interests at the forefront. Each course contains: videos, assessment, slide decks, a robust, teacher's guide, handouts to deliver exceptional learning experiences for all students. They are a tremendously supportive resource for educators experienced in design thinking and those just getting started with this approach. Create a classroom culture that empowers students to solve-real world problems!

What will you empower your students to do?

Off-to-college packing list

In the spirit of the content of this post, I am attempting to author it entirely from my pixel 2 phone! And because I struggle to type on a phone, I'm using voice tools.

My daughter will be leaving for her freshman year in college in about 10 days. Needless to say, we have been busy preparing everything she might need to bring with her. As we have been perusing the back-to-school shelves in various stores, something dawned on me. Most of what I packed to take with me to my freshman year in college back in 1986, has been replaced for my daughter, in 2018, by her smartphone.

Some of these things that she does not need to pack are obvious. She doesn't need a touch-tone landline. Nor does she need a flashlight, or an address book, or envelopes and stamps. Some of the things she doesn't need are a bit nostalgic. For instance, she doesn't need a push pin cork board or a white board to hang on her dorm door. Who will stop by to write a message on her door when they can just send her a Snapchat?

The more I thought about what she didn't need, the list became more and more interesting. Is there really any use any longer in your dorm room for a television or a calculator? She has never owned a stereo so she won't bring that. And her headphones no longer keep her tethered to her music source. She doesn't need a checkbook or even a physical credit card or debit card. Ostensibly, she could Google pay or Apple pay her way through any necessary transactions. She certainly doesn't need a printer. Go paperless. And, I can imagine the day when she wouldn't even need a laptop.

Now the question arises, what does she need that I would never have thought of bringing with me because, in all likelihood, it didn't even exist? Likely, a bunch of portable chargers. And a complement of cords and different adapters to be sure that all of her devices can charge on the fly. It is on those devices that she will access the services to which the she subscribes and the databases her university provides, because she won't have magazines delivered to her mailbox and will have less need (any need?) for textbooks. Do college students even have mailboxes anymore?

So the question that I am now asking not just as a parent but as an educator is this: how are her professors and her university prepared to engage with her in this learning journey because she is not, and really never has, lived in an analog world? And when we engage with our K-12 students, how are we preparing them for their unknown future? How will we nurture the habits of mind of innovation, problem solving, entrepreneurship? How will we contribute to the development of empathetic, global citizens? How will we encourage and cultivate the flexible thinking necessary to adapt to and thrive in this rapidly changing world? (Please share your thoughts in response to these questions in the comments!)

Collaboration through Making

I am preparing to facilitate another meeting with our school's new teachers the focus of which will be ways the library learning commons can support their teaching and students learning. My focus for this meeting will be about Making. The guiding question to my presentation is: "How can making help my students learn?" I hope this opportunity to talk with the new teachers -- not all of whom are new to teaching -- paves the way for increased collaboration with colleagues and use of our innovation lab.

I have put together a "what if you asked your students to..." thought experiment and outlined it in these Google Slides:


 The teachers will be visiting the Innovation Lab for the first time since their orientation at the beginning of the year. Since then, I have collaborated with a few of them when their students were involved in research projects -- always in the teacher's classroom. The focus of our work on those occasions was accessing databases, savvy Google searching, and citation protocols. I am hoping that today's conversation inspires new ideas about what personalized learning means and how the library learning commons space can support all learners and teachers.

I appreciate any thoughts you have about library advocacy, working with new teachers, and helping high school teachers infuse making into teaching and learning.