How might we involve elementary students in the design of their own learning experiences?
CURRICULUM DESIGN PROCESS
As a New York City public school teacher I was expected to use quantitative data to demonstrate student progress toward a set of clearly defined objectives. This was something with which I struggled because, in my mind, these methods rarely gave the full picture. For that reason, I used this curriculum design project as an opportunity to pursue a more qualitative approach, guided by a set of open-ended questions. Based on what I already knew of students in my target age range as a result of my ten years of teaching experience, I designed lessons and activities aimed at introducing Design Thinking methods and mindsets to students. I used video and audio recording to capture and analyze student interactions during each lesson I piloted, and used the insights I gained through this process to inform subsequent revisions of my instructional approaches.
Though my initial motivation for undertaking this project was to learn more about how to use Design Thinking as a tool for building empathy and civic engagement with elementary students, an even bigger question about the curriculum development process itself soon began rattling around in my brain. Given my interest in Participatory Design methods (an approach that relies upon the direct participation of target users as co-designers to craft more meaningful products and services), I began to wonder: To what extent can young learners be involved in the design of their own educational experiences in a public school setting? I tried to address this question both in the methods and lenses I adopted in during user research process, as well as in the resulting educational experiences I designed for kids and their teachers.
User Research:
When I was a classroom teacher, I generally viewed student departures from the intended trajectory of a lesson as problematic and took such moments as an indication that I had failed to adequately scaffold or explain the directions and/or that my students’ had failed to invest an appropriate amount of effort. In this project, I aimed to silence that inner teacher voice and to pursue these child-initiated modifications as evidence of students’ attempts to mold activities to more closely align with their developmental needs. While I plan to explore new ways to more directly involve students as designers as I continue to move forward with this project, I consider the iteration shared here as a significant first step toward my personal goal of envisioning a more developmentally responsive curriculum design process.
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Design of Educational Experiences:
It generally takes a few years of experience at a given grade level or within a given subject area until a teacher feels comfortable digressing from a lesson plan or mandated pedagogical approach. While I recognize the challenges associated with teaching new content and adopting new methods, I have made the conscious choice to design a curriculum that does not aim to indulge a desire for comfort or predictability. There is no script. If anything, my goal is to guide teachers and students toward becoming more comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing exactly how things are going to go. Of not knowing exactly which boxes to tick-off on the mile-long rubric. Of daring to value intuition and experimentation as much as we do organization and careful planning. The content of most of the lessons and activities I’ve proposed will ultimately be determined by the interests and experiences of the students who engage in them. Kids (and teachers) might choose to pursue a line of inquiry or an approach toward solving a problem that just doesn’t work. And that’s OK. I promise it will not be a waste of time. And I would venture to guess that it will resonate more with learners than it would if everything had gone exactly according to plan.
DEFINE
Research Findings & Insights
The findings below represent a synthesis of the observations I made based on data collected during my K-2 and 3-5 Design Thinking workshops.
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DEFINE
Research Insights & Associated Design Considerations
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KEY FINDINGS
Grades K-2
K-1 could sketch their own problems but struggled to visually represent their partners' problems.
Students were, in general, more interested in pursuing solutions to their own problems.
Some students were unable or resistant to identifying any of their own problems connected to school.
Most of the problems students identified were social in nature and not specific to any single classroom or school environment.
Students were very drawn to the idea of prototyping, but not as engaged by the earlier (talking and sketching) phases of the process.
Significant developmental divide between K and Grade 2 (more pronounced than between Grades 3 & 5)
Most successful K student developed the features of her idea while prototyping (often in response to available materials) as opposed to during ideation.
DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
Grades K-2
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Assist students in understanding their own goals and needs as users. Offer them opportunities to articulate and share these perspectives with others. This will likely serve as an important stepping stone toward their ability to consider other users' needs in conjunction with or at the exclusion of their own.
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Get students prototyping as quickly as possible. Consider beginning the design cycle with the prototyping of an idea based on students' own preferences, but then moving students to iterate upon their original designs based on user feedback and building empathy for others.
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Consider merging the ideation and prototyping phases of the design process. Hands-on work with physical materials may give way to more divergent thinking than sketching.
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Consider the differing needs of Grade 2 students who are generally more developmentally similar to third graders than first students in terms of their attention span, ability to express thoughts in oral and written form, and ability to work collaboratively.
EMPATHIZE
Primary Research & User Personas
To learn more about how kids might respond to different Design Thinking practices and activities, I designed and conducted workshops with groups of academically, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse K-2 and 3-5 students during a school-based after school program in New York City. The lessons lasted for one hour and were based on an adapted model of the Stanford d.school Crash Course in Design Thinking. (I also conducted research with students in Grades 6-8 since I initially envisioned this project as a K-8 curriculum. This work primarily centered around students' issues with gender-based stereotypes and involved a role-playing activity in which they had to answer interview questions from the perspective of a different gender identity.)
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With Grade 3-5 students, I initially centered the design challenge around the redesign of a concrete everyday object--a backpack--because I thought this would be more accessible to students. (You can see the lesson slide deck and student packet I created here.) While I appreciated the fact that self-expression was an important consideration for students at this age, I wanted to explore ways to help kids move beyond this focus on aesthetics and into the terrain of using critical thinking to identify and solve real world problems that affect their lives. As a result, I decided to focus some of my research with K-2 students around identifying and developing solutions to personal problems associated with their lives at school, many of which were social in nature. I then conducted additional research to better understand the sorts of school-based problems that resonated most with upper elementary students. I learned that many students were preoccupied with problems that were more academic in nature (feeling like they couldn't keep up or master a skill in class, for example).
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Using the insights I gained from this research process, I developed the Grade 1 & Grade 4 student personas below. Given my extensive experience working both as a teacher and with other teachers, I also developed a third assumption-based teacher persona to help me maintain a focus on implementation issues related to teacher buy-in and training needs throughout my design process.
Gina
First Grade Student
Gina attends a public elementary school where 90% of students qualify for free lunch and 50% of students (including Gina) are English Language Learners.
Lisa
Second Grade Teacher
Lisa is a third year teacher at a Title 1 public elementary school. One third of her students are ELLs and about half of are below benchmark in reading or math.
Project Goals
Project Rationale
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Why Empathy and Civic Engagement?
The Partnership for 21st Century Learning argues that there are certain Learning and Innovation Skills--referred to as The 4Cs of Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication--that are fundamental to success in modern and future work environments. While current STEM-based initiatives aimed at fostering the first two of these Cs are laudable, some express concern that 21st century developments may in fact pose an obstacle to the development of the latter Cs of Collaboration and Communication. Sherry Turkle, in her recent book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, calls attention to the demise of empathy and meaningful conversation among children as well as adults in a digital age which prioritizes technology-mediated and text-based correspondence over face-to-face communication and the cultivation of vulnerability it necessitates. At a time when educational funding and focus appear to be shifting away from the humanities and toward the sciences in the interest of competing with the technical progress of other industrialized nations, it seems more important than ever to reconsider the role of empathy and authentic collaboration in our schools and culture at large. The discomforting tone of current political discourse and events similarly highlight a need for a direct address to instruction in empathetic thinking during children’s earliest and most formative experiences as members of a classroom and school community. Furthermore, recent upsurges in racial and ethnic discrimination, political initiatives aimed at the disempowerment of minority groups, and low voter turnout suggest the imperative nature of placing a stronger emphasis on civics education itself, with the goal of cultivating young students to view themselves as agents of social change.
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Why Social Studies?
In an ideal world, I would have designed a stand-alone curriculum in Design Thinking, because I believe that the skills and attitudes it promotes require a great deal of practice to develop. But I chose to align and integrate much of the curriculum I've written into the New York Social Studies Scope & Sequence instead. Why?
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Because I'd like to see it actually implemented. In order for that to happen, it is necessary to acknowledge how little time there is for long-term diversions from the core curriculum in modern day public school classrooms. Teachers also lack the time and expertise to develop and effectively teach design thinking right off the bat. While the ultimate goal is to increase the amount of instructional time devoted to design thinking practices and mindsets, this feels like an appropriate first step in that direction.
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Because design shouldn't take place in a vacuum. Most of the New York State K-3 Social Studies standards are devoted to a study of communities, cultural difference and civic responsibility. Students' insight into these standards will likely be enriched by aligning human-centered Design Thinking approaches.
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Because the humanities still matter. For better or worse, technology and educational initiatives to support its future development are currently all the rage. I do not mean to disparage STEM education. On the contrary, I am excited by all the inspiring work emerging in this field. But I think it is important that we avoid the inclination to pursue creativity, innovation, and technology as ends unto themselves without remaining grounded in what makes us human. From narratives of the past and present, students can learn about how empathy and civic engagement can have a long lasting impact on the way people live and think.
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Why Design Thinking?
On the most obvious level, Design Thinking offers an answer to the increasing call for an address to 21st century skills in modern day classrooms. It also encourages risk-taking and vulnerability which, I would argue, formal education environments do little to encourage among students and teachers. With so many standards and units to get through, teachers are often left with no choice but to adopt the shortest instructional path from A to B. The teacher who enters her classroom with a plan to let a lesson organically unfold with cues from her students is deemed lazy, while the teacher who adheres to a narrowly defined plan backed up by spreadsheets of data is perceived as "highly effective." Design Thinking encourages students and teachers to say What if... and to build their understanding together in a way typical school-based research projects cannot.
The learning theories described below further support the case for teaching Design Thinking to elementary age students. A full list of references is available here.
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Constructivism
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Piaget (1930), Vygotsky (1978; 1962),
Bruner (1996; 1980)
Design thinking is fundamentally a knowledge-building practice, and therefore constructivist in nature. Designers acquire knowledge of their users through first hand observations and interactions, and ultimately work in teams to synthesize their findings in an attempt to discover emergent themes and trends. These social aspects of the knowledge-building process are further enhanced by team-based interactions in which practitioners with different perspectives and areas of expertise scaffold the refinement of their partners’ evolving mental models. Furthermore, design thinking’s culture of iteration aligns quite well with Piaget’s description of child development. At every step of the process, designers are forced to challenge their previously held assumptions in order to make way for new insights that must ultimately inform their subsequent approaches.
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Constructionism
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Papert (2000; 1991)
While design thinking is not implicitly constructionist in nature, its bias toward action mindset speaks to some of the core principles espoused by Papert. It is true that the prototyping process does not always result in the fabrication of physical objects (it may lead to a two-dimensional journey map or a role play experience); however this stage of the design process is predicated upon a need to make abstract ideas tangible. Students who partake in the proposed learning experience will not painstakingly refine their prototypes over time as they do with their computer programs, soap sculptures under Papert's watch, but they will need to move beyond more traditional school-based modes of communicating ideas such as reading and writing. Furthermore, through the process of making these ideas tangible, they will further refine and understand them, as this is one of the fundamental goals of the prototyping process.
Situated Cognition
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Brown, Collins & Duguid; (1989),
Bransford et. al (1990), Lave & Wenger (1991)
Situated cognition is another learning theory that informed my design solution. In addition to being situated as they engage in the same activities practiced by professional designers, students’ conduct research that is firmly grounded in the cultural context of their own communities. My proposed design ultimately offers students opportunities to recognize the utility and power of their context-specific knowledge to a broader community of learners who are also invested in social change. Finally, my design is situated because it is anchored in a set of real life problems identified by students that impact their everyday lives in their school and larger communities. The problems students will discover and address in their design teams are not fictitious or theoretical, but grounded in the real world. Through implementing and testing their solutions they will come to better understand their ability to affect social change.
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Social Learning
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Vygotsky (1978; 1962), Wenger (1998)
Design Thinking relies heavily on collaborative learning. Students interact directly with their classroom teams to conduct on-site research and prototyping activities and to synthesize their findings and brainstorm and refine design approaches that incorporate and address a multitude of perspectives and needs. The creation of communities of practice, in which students come together to explore facets of Design Thinking along with a mutual interest in improving the quality of their own and other communities, is also a key feature of this design.
Landscape Audit
Unfortunately, there is a notable dearth of Design Thinking programs and curricular materials geared toward elementary learners situated in formal learning contexts. The resources described in this document represent a few preliminary efforts toward incorporating Design Thinking into K-12 classrooms.
Literature Review
Read a review of the related academic literature devoted to Design Thinking as a tool for building empathy, civic engagement, and other 21st century skills among K-12 students. This review also addresses research and theory pertaining to the fields of curriculum design and participatory design.
KEY FINDINGS
Grades 3-5
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Students continued to interview their partners throughout the entire design process--even during moments when they were instructed to independently draw conclusions based on the interviews they had already conducted. The inclination was to ask, rather than to infer.
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Students' had difficulty moving beyond aesthetic preferences and into discussions pertaining to emotions, struggles, and motivations. Self-expression was prioritized.
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Some students struggled to articulate their own needs and struggles as users during the empathy interview.
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Interview activity appeared to scaffold students' understanding of their own needs and motivations (perhaps more so than those of their partners).
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Interview activity appeared to scaffold tangential (off-task) dialogue that indicated the foundations toward a more authentic sort of empathy-building process.
DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
Grades 3-5
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Give students substantial opportunities to converse. Allowing students to return to acquire additional information from target users in the midst of a different design phase may prove a beneficial scaffold toward promoting empathy and more sophisticated human-centered approaches.
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Push students to synthesize information they obtain during the define stage. Make it clear that their initial ideas may not be quite right, and that through testing these assumptions they will better understand their users' needs. Do not discourage conversation, but be sure to emphasize a Bias Toward Action.
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Incorporate scaffolds to help students understand the difference between needs and preferences. Self-expression and aesthetic preference is important to children in this age group. While it is important to move children beyond these considerations, it is also important to acknowledge and make a place for them in the design process.
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Many students in this age range will also benefit from opportunities to understand and articulate their own goals and needs as users prior to empathizing with those of others. Students should be encouraged to note the similarities and differences among their own perspectives and those of their peers.
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Consider incorporating other social activities aimed at scaffolding empathic thinking. For example, students might role play a different type of user in an interview scenario to gain insight into that person's perspective.
K-5 Social Studies Aligned Scope & Sequence
PROTOTYPE
This table provides an overview of how Design Thinking instruction and activities will connect to the already established New York City Department of Education's Social Studies Scope & Sequence for Grades K-5. In addition to each Unit's Social Studies essential question, I have included a complementary Design Thinking essential question to guide the recommended extension activities. For more detail on relevant standards and a summary of each Design Thinking extension activity, please visit the Instructional Resources pages of this site.
IDEATE
How might we use Design Thinking instruction to build students' empathy and civic engagement in a way that is meaningful and manageable for teachers?
AFFORDANCES:
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flexibility (no need to align to standards)
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doesn't require teacher or admin buy-in
CONSTRAINTS:
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staffing, space
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inconsistent attendance makes it difficult to evaluate program success
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would kids/families sign-up?
AFFORDANCES:
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ability to focus on DT for concentrated period of time in PBL context
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content flexibility
CONSTRAINTS:
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infrequent instruction and feedback
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requires teacher training and/or designer mentors/teaching artists
AFFORDANCES:
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students gain deeper awareness of process & mindsets leading to metacognitive benefits
CONSTRAINTS:
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time consuming
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no alignment with currently adopted standards
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requires buy-in at district level
AFFORDANCES:
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aligns with NGSS Engineering Practices
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easier to integrate prototyping activities
CONSTRAINTS:
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Science often taught by cluster teachers at K-5 so less impact on school-wide culture
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more challenging to emphasize human-centered aspects
AFFORDANCES:
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teachers often must seek out their own resources for SS instruction so buy-in more likely
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no SS state exam in NY
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emphasis on communities and civics in early grades--conducive to focus on empathy and civic engagement
CONSTRAINTS:
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many teachers don't have time to teach SS
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not as in-depth as stand-alone curriculum
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history content in G4 & 5 more difficult to align
AFFORDANCES:
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concentrated practice
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no need to align with standards
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flexible structure
CONSTRAINTS:
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how to create equitable access (i.e. make it free)?
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perceived as an "activity" rather than a valid area of academic focus
While I would have preferred to create a stand-alone design curriculum, I felt the chances of such a curriculum being implemented in the here and now would be somewhat slim. Given that Social Studies is the curricular area in which elementary level teachers are probably the least likely to have resources and adequate professional development, this seemed like a good fit. The curriculum in Grades K-3 is primarily about understanding the similarities and differences between various local and international communities, making it a good fit for a Design Thinking curriculum focused on promoting empathy and civic engagement. In Grade 5, I did decide to provide students with a stand-alone enrichment program in Design Thinking, with the idea that this would give them the opportunity to synthesize and build upon all they had learned in previous grades to make a difference in their own school communities.
TEST
Recommendations for Future Research & Revisions
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is a growing field of research which aims to critically engage students in collaborative problem-solving to promote social justice and equity within their own communities. Much like Design Thinking instruction and research, YPAR efforts tend to be focused on older students rather than those at the elementary level. Moving forward, I would like to use this curriculum as a foundation for exploring how Design Thinking and Participatory Design methods might be used in conjunction with more typical YPAR approaches to foster self-efficacy and empathy among K-5 students.
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I welcome feedback from anyone who has used any of the materials provided through this site with students, or who has expertise in the fields of YPAR and Design Education to help inform future iterations of this work.