As part of our planning for the U@Uni Summer School program, we worked together with high school teachers over a full day using Design Thinking to develop a high level plan for the two week Summer School. Having the high school teachers in the room allowed us to engage directly with them to understand what their experiences were with current high school students, what they felt their students would find interesting (based on data teachers gathered from discussion with their own students), and actively include them as we co-created a high level vision of our program on the day.
High school teachers were asked to survey their students for perspectives on what they have interests in learning about, and what they would like to experience from attending a Summer School. My 5 top tips for Design Thinking from my experiences from the day:
- Focus on the user – design thinking relies on a user centered focus (in our case, both teachers and the perspectives and data gathered from their students), and we all carry bias in our perspectives
- Be open to trying new things – The session introduced me to different methods in using the Design Thinking process, such as different ways of using the Stanford D-School Empathy Map, using Tubric for developing a driving question, and using “Yes, and…” for ideation was both fun and refreshing for me (see resources below)
- Recognize biases – We each carry our own biases, including what we perceive to be the “right” way to teach students or what we feel they should learn, and this can get in the way of during the early stages of the process as it narrows our field for creative exploration. By recognizing our biases early on in the process, we opened ourselves to imagining new ideas for topics areas and student experiences that would not be considered in a traditional teaching or discipline setting. Also building on this,
- Ditch criticism of early ideas – idea filtering statements based on feasibility like “it won’t work like this” or “this is now how we do this” prevents the exploration of new ideas (and typically ends up yielding the same ideas), and was something we strongly avoided on the day.
- There’s never enough post-its and butchers paper. 🙂
For Transdisciplinary’s Summer School from the day, we developed a high level scope for the U@Uni Summer School which applies working with industry for co-creation, gathering real-world data with surveying and interviewing, telling stories from visualizing data, and exploring entrepreneurship.
Resources to look at:
- Standford D School Empathy Mapping to develop a project or learning design with end user in mind: https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/3d994/empathy_map.html
- Play the ‘Yes and….’ game as a way to brainstorm new and creative ‘out of the box’ ideas in a safe space: https://www.dramanotebook.com/drama-games/yes-and/
- Use a ‘tubric’ to help you develop a driving question: https://www.bie.org/object/video/the_birth_of_the_tubric