Month: October 2016

4 Ways to Apply Design Thinking in Your School

Design ThinkingPublished onUpdated on4 Comments on 4 Ways to Apply Design Thinking in Your School

Design thinking is a process for developing new ideas and solving problems. It is a series of “design-specific cognitive activities that designers apply during the process of designing” (Visser, W. 2006).

It normally involves:

  1. Empathising
  2. Synthesising
  3. Generating and judging ideas
  4. Prototyping
  5. Implementing and testing

A key part of my work over the last 6 years has been to help educators, and those involved with learning, explore the ways they might utilise this process in their organisations. In addition to understanding the “thinking like a designer” part.

Commonly we cite the use of design thinking as a problem-solving process that students participate in and regularly see students making and designing products or ideas.

However in the school environment the process and principles of design thinking can be applied to a number of different relevant domains:

  • Inquiry Learning Process (student)
  • School Improvement (leadership/teacher)
  • Teacher Inquiry (leadership/teacher)
  • Learning Design (teacher)

As an overview, I want to share with you, in brief, some of my own understandings from facilitating design thinking in these four different ways.

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Inquiry Learning Process

As a problem solving process design thinking has the structure and potential for scaffolding an inquiry process. After all it is commonly used as a way to tackle complex or wicked problems.

A design thinking inquiry or learning process helps students develop empathy for other people who may be at the heart of an issue or topic. Empathy leads to a much deeper more authentic level of connection with what is being explored.

The latter parts of the process, testing and prototyping, emphasise an iterative approach. You may have heard this in relation to product design. The key thing for me is that this is about increasing the opportunities for critique and feedback.

School Improvement

For many school leaders and administration teams design thinking offers a fresh approach to complex school improvement issues.

Appropriately the process puts the learner (old or young) at the heart of everything. How well we understand the learner dictates the efficacy of the process to generate new ideas.

When working with school leadership teams I often start by exploring the assumptions they might have about the school development topic. By challenging assumptions early on in the process we are immediately moving to a more open mode of thinking or mindset.

An additional value when using design thinking is the imperative to release ideas early. Iterative development demands we involve others to gain feedback. A leadership team may develop an interesting solution to a complex problem and share it quickly with colleagues, even in a rough form.

We shouldn’t be locking ourselves away, to build perfectly transitioned slideshows, too soon.

Teacher Inquiry

This is about educators exploring problem areas within their own practice and working through a formalised process to learn and address them.

These might include a wide range of topics from implementing new technologies, to engaging reluctant writers, to creating an agentic learning space.

The process of design thinking scaffolds this teacher led inquiry extremely well and can be structured to support a variety of school improvement topics.

The opening phase of a practitioner inquiry would include gathering information:

  • Empathy: who is at the heart of this issue and how might I better understand the perspective they have? What assumptions might I have about the key stakeholders?
  • Data: what different forms of data do I have access to? What new data will I need to generate?
  • Observation: how can I directly observe this issue? How can I observe without bias?

This works well if educators are working in teams attached to a similar topic. They may well be teaching different age groups but coalesce for various parts of the process, sharing insights and ideas.

Learning Design

The role of the teacher is being recast as a designer of learning. When using a design thinking process our emphasis, once more, is on how well we understand the learner.

When we are designing a unit of learning, or a sequence of our curriculum, we can utilise the design thinking process to help structure our thinking and planning.

  1. Empathising — What do we know about our students? What data and assessment information do we have that might inform our design? What are our curriculum constraints? What are the key capabilities we need to focus on? What is happening in the world?
  2. Synthesising — narrow the focus of the learning design, identify key priorities and potential inquiry questions to follow. Key resources identified and shortlisted. Strong curriculum connections are forged.
  3. Generating and judging ideas — sequences of learning are explored and developed. New ideas and concepts for lessons and learning experiences are shared and filtered.
  4. Prototyping — learning designs are sketched out so that others can understand them and offer feedback. Different permutations are explored, with possibly multiple prototypes shared. Feedback gained from students and colleagues.
  5. Implementing and testing — new lesson sequences are implemented. Further feedback is sought from observation and planning review. Critique outcomes are shared and fed back into the design process.

An additional application, that is often overlooked, is the use of different phases of the process of design thinking in isolation.

Yes, the process has a mild interdependence to make the most of it. However there has been many occasions when I have facilitated a group to use a single phase along with the associated tools, skills and mindsets.

Adopting a flexible approach to the utility of the design thinking process is an important stance. This also leads to elaborating and extending the phases with what we already know or have been already implementing successfully.

That said when there is a common process shared amongst staff and students you see a powerful shift in practice and in the learning experience.

I recall accompanying a leadership team on an impromptu walk through school to punctuate some facilitated time. We sat with some Kindergarten students participating in a similar activity that we had just explored ourselves. The common language and shared process was an ongoing, tangible, and binding experience for the school community.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Creativity, TwitterPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Join the inaugural #creativitychat

Togs on. I’m jumping into the swirling currents of Twitter chats.

Why

There is little in terms of coordinated Twitter chats about creativity in all of it’s wonderful complexity. I have decided to establish a new, regular Twitter chat for people to coalesce and gravitate towards.

#creativitychat

I want to help people become more creative. One of the ways I can do this is establish a chat that connects people, that inspires action, engagement and thinking about the subject. I hope the chat helps participants learn a little more about creativity.

For nearly ten years I have been using Twitter as my preferred tool for connecting with others and building a learning network. Whilst Twitter chats have their naysayers and their limitations, I still find them (and Twitter) a powerful and consistent way to organise a community, connect and learn from others interested in a topic.

When

#creativitychat will run every Saturday morning 7am-9am Melbourne time.

The inaugural chat is Saturday 29th Oct. Times below.

  • Melbourne / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 7am-9am
  • Auckland / Saturday 29th October 2016 / 9am-11am
  • San Francisco / Friday 28th October 2016 / 1pm-3pm
  • New York / Friday 28th October 2016 / 4pm-6pm
  • London / Friday 28th October 2016 / 9pm-11pm
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Have a look at this Worldtimebuddy link to add the event to your calendar.

I have decided to go for a longer chat because most chats I have experienced are just getting warmed up by the time their scheduled time finishes. With a couple of hours we give ourselves the best chance for meaningful dialogue.

Saturday morning in Australia, are you mad? Maybe a little, and certainly my younger self would have preferred a later time. This allows for family plans to still carry on and not to eat into a weekday evening after a long day of work either.

This is an international chat. I have always been lucky to have been connected to people on Twitter from across the world and so I wanted to go for a time that worked for the majority. Everyone will have a preference, I know, and which ever time I chose people would miss out. I think this gives us the chance to be able to share hemispherically diverse understandings of creativity.

What

Content

  • Weekly topics related to creativity.
  • Crowd-sourced set of questions and provocations, moderated (by me) into a short list.
  • Please send me a direct message on Twitter with your question or provocation suggestions.

#creativitychat / 0001 / Nailing jelly to a tree? Seeking a common understanding of creativity.

My background is in primary education and so I have a learning focus when I think about creativity. However there is so much to learn from others. I am keen for #creativitychat to have diverse participants.

We should encourage a broad representation from different fields. The chat should be a gathering of anyone thinking about how creativity impacts on our (professional) life.

Chat Structure

  • 10 minutes for introductions
  • 100 minutes for reaction and dialogue about provocations and questions
  • Maybe some time to share next steps, what actions are we going to take? What have we learned during the chat? “As a result of the chat I am…”
  • 10 minutes for networking and sharing our own projects and blogs etc.
  • Close with the next week’s topic

I have been inspired by the #agchat founder Michele Payn-Knoper who outlined some of her lessons from running a Twitter chat over the last seven years. Thanks to Simon Owens for the great guide on running a chat, which outlines Michele’s thoughts. Highly recommended if you are looking to start something too.

A call to action

  • Check out your diary for the times above and consider joining me. There will only be one shot at being part of the first!
  • Share a tweet using the hashtag #creativitychat to encourage others to get involved.
  • Join and participate in the chat.
  • Direct message me on Twitter with your questions or provocations related to the chat topic (0001 = defining creativity)
  • Leave a comment inline or otherwise with any ideas or suggestions related to the questions I still have. I need your help.

More to consider

  • What is the most efficient way to archive the chat? Should we archive it? How much do people really use a chat archive?
  • I like the way readers can comment, highlight, and engage with content on Medium. Perhaps a summary post with questions / provocations and a curated set of tweets to continue the conversation.
  • How could we incorporate a slow chat element during the week, to allow others to participate?
  • What new ideas are we bringing to the Twitter chat arena? How are we helping to advance this way of learning and connecting? How might we connect Twitter with other tools to extend what we can do and mitigate against some of the known weaknesses?
  • Need to probably use the @creativitychat handle eventually. I have contacted the current account owners.
  • Find a merry band of buddies who can help moderate and facilitate.
  • Do we need some web property to gather resources, guidelines and ideas about the chat?
  • Develop some chat protocols and rules of engagement.

Let play perish and innovation will follow

Innovation, PlayPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Let play perish and innovation will follow

David Whitebread and Marisol Basilio, in their essay “Play, culture and creativity”, explain that play is ubiquitous in humans and that every child in every culture plays.

A key adaptive advantage of the long period of human biological immaturity is the opportunity for play.

When writing about curiosity and discovery in the past I have read about these concepts through Alison Gopnik’s work.

She is a child-development psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik explains that humans have a longer childhood, a slower path to puberty in which we can exercise our urge to explore.

This occurs while we’re still dependent on our parents and have an unmatched period of protected “play” in which to learn exploration’s rewards.

Yet while other animals play mainly by practicing basic skills such as fighting and hunting, human children play by creating hypothetical scenarios with artificial rules that test hypotheses. Can I build a tower of blocks as tall as I am? What’ll happen if we make the bike ramp go even higher? How will this schoolhouse game change if I’m the teacher and my big brother is the student?Such play effectively makes children explorers of landscapes filled with competing possibilities.

Whitebread and Basilio explain that this longer childhood provides a critical foundation for thinking, establishing:

the basis for the ‘flexibility of thought’ (Bruner, 1972) which underpins the astonishing problem-solving abilities and creativity of humans.

What do you know about the links between curious children and how playful they are? How do you see children engaging in more purposeful exploration? What value does playfulness have in problem solving?

The impact of playfulness

I was interested to read of the wider implications of developing the creative problem solving capacities in children and young adults. Beyond simply the obvious value, creative problem solving skills have importance for both the individual and the wider society.

Children and young adults who are creative problem solvers have been shown to have better coping skills to deal with everyday problems and crises, and this skill is increasingly important in the ever-more complex and rapidly changing modern world.

Typically we focus on the intrinsic value of creativity, or the importance of young adults exercising that skillset in the workforce. We want those entering work to understand their own creative skills and be well equipped to apply them purposefully.

However we rarely look at the increased coping skills and resilience of creative problem solvers, as highlighted here by Whitebread and Basilio. That link between creativity and resilience is a new insight for me.

Playfulness and creativity have a strong relationship. The essay presents a range of studies that reveal the connection.

These go back as far as the 1960s, with the early studies of Wallach & Kogan showing that creative children were more playful than less creative ones (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). Subsequent studies have shown that playfulness predicts scores on divergent thinking tasks (Howard-Jones, Taylor & Sutton, 2002; Lieberman, 1977).

The ‘divergent thinking tasks’ are often used as devices to measure creativity. Divergent and convergent thinking modes are essential throughout an extended creative/innovative process.

I think there is an ebb and flow between these different modes or thinking states. An awareness of these and how we remain cognitively flexible enough to switch from one to the other, without diminishing efficacy, is a typical characteristic of those with effective creative problem solving skills.

As part of a previous article, I asked why we marginalise the conditions for children to be creative. I recognise that part of this is the reduction in opportunities for play in primary schools. Even in pre-school.

In comparing my experience from England I have noticed that classrooms in Australia don’t have as much resourcing around pretend play. Dress up and role play resources, everyday objects, sand, water and messy trays were always so plentiful in the early years classrooms I led and worked with.

It worries me to see early learning experiences morphing into readiness for future grades or preparedness for higher year groups.

If playfulness has such a strong impact on developing creativity, why are opportunities for play in school diminishing? How might we protect play environments in the classrooms in our schools? How might we help broaden the understand of this area of research?

Pressured play

One of the key challenges for early childhood practitioners, raised by Whitebread and Basilio, is the pressure of covering a prescribed curriculum.

They go on to suggest that this exists in all urbanised cultural regions and is especially evident in the Far East.

A review of attitudinal studies on play and creativity in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese societies revealed that,

a cultural emphasis on narrowly conceived academic achievement was deleterious to developing playful, creative school environments (Fung & Cheng, 2012).

Not only is the word “deleterious” a wonderful new addition to my lexicon, but I also think that this statement holds true for education systems. What do you think?

The latter part of the essay explores the impact of parents and teachers on the development of the child and early achievement. An important element of this is that “specific practices by parents and teachers consistently over-ride broader cultural influences.”

The authors conclude by focusing on the importance of the school experience and the impact of parenting.

while there are clear challenges for human culture on our increasingly crowded planet, we must believe we can overcome these, and playful, creative approaches to parenting and schooling are clearly likely to be very helpful in this endeavour.

Takeaways

Here are a few key ideas, insights and provocations that stood out to me.

  • The challenge set out by the writers to ensure that what we can control of the experience in school, nurseries or where learning happens, is a creative and playful one.
  • The influence of creative teachers as a leveller of achievement for students from different social classes and backgrounds.
  • Children with creative problem solving capacities are more resilient.
  • Creative children were more playful when they were younger. Would an increase in opportunities for different types of play help develop more creativity? How might we sustain access to play in our primary classrooms?

If we want innovation we need creativity, if we want creativity we need playfulness.

Download the essay here: “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.

This is the second in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.

Next in my series is “Building cultures of creativity in the age of the Knowledge Machine” by Michael Wesch.

How our creativity is shaped by our culture

Creativity, FeaturedPublished onUpdated on2 Comments on How our creativity is shaped by our culture

When you think of creative people who immediately springs to mind?

Da Vinci, Ive, Lovelace, Pelé?

Far from just an individual capacity, our creativity is also influenced by the environments that we live and learn in. Each of those memorable people were shaped by their culture.

our behaviour is also shaped by the culture we live in, largely through social norms, contexts that cue them, and motives that drive us to follow, reject or invert those norms.

Thomas Wolbers a Professor of Ageing and Cognition explains in his essay,”Three Pathways By Which Culture Can Influence Creativity”, that it can impact on our cognitive abilities, the creative process and the value we associate with the output.

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Creative Potential

Wolbers explores the concept that our application of creativity fits the domains that our culture values. If we are products of our cultural influences then we all carry a certain bias.

This bias is perhaps towards applying our creativity in domains that continue to affirm what our culture deems as important.

For example, Korea with its strong cultural valuation of status and interdependence is the world leader in the industry of massively multiplayer simulation games, which involve accruing and using status and maintaining coalitions

Individuals may be more creative in some domains than in others because their cultural background values those domains and focuses the individual’s cognitive and motivational resources.

I wonder what those domains are for me? I suppose in some way sharing content, thinking and understandings through my writing is a direct consequence of the culture my professional life started in.

When I say direct result, I mean I worked in the opposite direction. Much of the expertise, sharing and learning was in closed and stagnant systems. That was a norm I wanted to invert.

In what domains do you apply your most creative self? How are those choices influenced by the cultural cues you have experienced?

Creative Process

Most people don’t think that creativity has a process. It can be often viewed as a magical act of serendipity for special talented people.

This is a long way from the truth. Creative processes are much more rigorous than we think. Those processes can be clearly defined and described. Also true is the ability to describe the salient conditions for creativity to flourish.

Wolbers explains that creativity usually involves two types of processes: the flexibility pathway and the persistence pathway.

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ease with which people can switch to a different approach or consider a different perspective, and cognitive persistence represents the degree of sustained and focused task-directed cognitive effort.

The reference to cognitive flexibility and agility here reminds me of the type of language we often see defining divergent thinking. Our ability to see a challenge from a different perspective is an important creative trait.

The cognitive persistence pathway refers to a more incremental, cautious, and analytical processing in an attempt to be incremental and cumulative.

Our cultural norms and cues will push us towards these pathways differently. What is valued in our society, in our culture, directs the process we apply in generating new ideas.

“inventions result more frequently from projects with incremental objectives in Japan (66 percent) than the U.S. (48 percent), and less frequently from projects with breakthrough objectives in Japan (8 percent) than the U.S. (24 percent).”

It is one thing to look at inventions in the US, it is another to look at the professional culture of teaching in the UK or Australia. On reflection the professional culture that I spent ten years working in was a risk averse culture.

The majority of breakthroughs and shifts in education are incremental, cumulative, glacial.

I may have a preference for more significant, higher-risk ideas as part of my process, but I think the culture around me wants me to slow down.

What do you think? Does education covet the paradigm shift, but really just wants slow change?

Creative Output

The value we place on ideas can be vastly different depending on the perspective we have.

Creativity is often defined as generating ideas that have value. Wolbers points out that this can be very subjective and wholly dependent on the culture of the beholder.

A famous example is the reception of Ang Lee’s movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was acclaimed by Western film critics for its stylistic innovations, whereas Chinese critics judged it as Ang Lee’s weakest movie, presumably because they had seen many similar movies before.

Over the years I have spent countless hours talking with different groups about how we might judge different ideas as part of the process of design thinking.

All of this time perhaps our cultural preferences have been influencing what we consider has value. Wolbers explains that Chinese culture values usefulness more than novelty, whereas Western culture values novelty more than usefulness.

individuals with an Eastern background may be more concerned with usefulness than originality and engage different implicit or explicit standards to downplay or elaborate ideas and insights than their counterparts with a Western background.

As a primary school teacher I certainly had both in mind. I think the culture around me, in the schools I worked in and the wider education system valued usefulness over originality.

Original ideas were entertained on the fringes.

How does our definition of value influence the emphasis we put on certain ideas? Do you think you value originality or usefulness, or both?

Takeaways

A few key takeaways for me have been the three areas highlighted by Wolber. It is a succinct collection of elements we might consider in our own contexts.

  • Creative Potential — where we apply our creative capacity
  • Creative Process — how we go about generating ideas
  • Creative Value — what we value most about our ideas

As I have been exploring this work I have also been thinking how school culture might influence creativity. However you could replace school with company, organisation, club or whatever you like. When I say school culture I mean the implicit and explicit values, beliefs, and norms that surround each student.

Some takeaway questions spring to mind to ponder on further:

  • How might school culture influence each student’s creative potential and the domains in which they apply their creative capacity?
  • How might the culture at school dictate the type of creative process that is adopted by teachers and students (all learners)?
  • How might we explore what value systems we use to judge creativity in our schools?

Download the essay here: “Three pathways by which culture can influence creativity” by Thomas Wolbers.

This is the first in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.

Next in my series is “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.