The Peck School will be introducing students to the concept of design thinking, a paradigmshift in educational philosophy that touches all aspects of teaching and learning. By re-framing or considering problems using a design thinking mindset, students apply their creativity to develop meaningful solutions for the classroom, for the community, or the world at large. An active process, design thinking carries the confidence that everyone has the power to create a more desirable future. Beginning this year, eighth grade students are taking a deep dive into design thinking processes through a new, yearlong Capstone Lab class.
Seeing
PROBLEMS Through The Lens of POSSIBILITY IT IS A RADICAL THOUGHT PROCESS: a new way of thinking intended to foster innovation. Practitioners describe it as a tool to tackle the unknown. Like going on an expedition without a map or destination, but having the confidence you will end up somewhere really great. It is a problem solving approach—or rather, a problem finding approach—that can be used to generate solutions to a variety of challenges at school, on the job, and throughout our students’ lives. It is “design-thinking” and it is perhaps one of the most potentially transformational proficiencies The Peck School can offer its students. Over the coming year, The Peck School is formally introducing students to the concepts and process of design thinking. This is a recommendation that arose from the school’s STEAM Task Force, which was formed as a result of the school’s ambitious and exciting 2015 Strategic Plan. Specifically, one pillar of the strategic plan commits the school to an invigorated academic curriculum, through the creation of “authentic learning experiences that allow meaningful connections between each other and across disciplines.” So what, exactly, is design thinking and why is Peck infusing it throughout the curriculum?
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Why is the school going as far as to consider a master plan for campus modernization that will better accommodate design thinking? How is design thinking being introduced to our students, and what will it enable them to do? Design thinking refers to a formal series of cognitive activities that designers apply as they seek to create something—but in a particular way that combines the inventive with the systematic; the artistic with the logical. It is an active, meaningful, and empathic process that asks students to “define” and “do,” rather than simply “solve.” This applies to any design process: for a product, for a public space, for a community service, or just about anything that is being created for a stakeholder—even if that stakeholder is you. It is, at its definition: “a methodology for innovation that combines creative and analytical approaches and requires collaboration across disciplines,” according to the d.school: Institute of Design at Stanford University, one of the country’s premier design schools. Because design thinking is focused on creating a solution for a stakeholder, the designer must start by understanding and listening to their audience. Key to doing this is the practice of empathy—a fundamental principle, in that whatever you are making, needs to make the lives of the people who will use it better.
“ ...we have chosen the Linden Tree as a symbol for the essence of design thinking. The Linden Tree has been said to be a symbol of honesty and the seeking of truth. The leaves of the Linden are unique. Asymmetrical and glossy on the inner side, the Linden leaf asks us to look further, dig deeper, and see the underside.
”
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The Five Basic Actions of Design Thinking
These five steps are based on seven guiding mindsets: Show Don’t Tell
Focus on Human Values
Be Mindful Of Process 10 PECK NEWS FALL 2016
Craft Clarity Bias Toward Action
Embrace Experimentation Radical Collaboration
EighthGrade Capstone Lab Although the concepts behind design thinking have been in play for a while in universities, businesses, and think tanks, they are relatively new to the Peck curriculum. While Peck students have long engaged in collaborative activities and project-based learning, this semester a new Capstone Lab class for eighth grade students will introduce them to the five basic actions involved in design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The five steps are based on seven guiding “mindsets”:
Show Don’t Tell
Communicate your vision in an impactful and meaningful way by creating experiences, using illustrative visuals, and telling good stories.
Bias Toward Action
Design thinking is a misnomer; it is more about doing than thinking. Bias toward doing and making over thinking and meeting.
Radical Collaboration
“ Design Thinking: Like going on an expedition
Bring together innovators with varied backgrounds and viewpoints. Enable breakthrough insights and solutions to emerge from the diversity.
without a map or
This may sound very lofty for a K-8 school. However, the beauty of the design thinking process is that it is very accessible. The fundamentals of design thinking can be applied at all levels of learning, and as a method to attain any goal or objective.
end up somewhere
destination, but having the confidence you will really great.
”
Focus on Human Values
Practice empathy for the people you are designing for. Thoughtfully listening to feedback from these users is fundamental to good design.
Craft Clarity
Produce a coherent vision out of messy problems. Frame it in a way to inspire others and to fuel the creation of ideas.
Embrace Experimentation
Prototyping is not simply a way to validate your idea; it is an integral part of your innovation process. We build to think and learn.
Be Mindful Of Process
Know where you are in the design process, what methods to use in that stage, and what your goals are.
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Collaboration, Coding and Intellectual Adventure Apropos to The Peck School’s increasing focus on design thinking and robotics, members of our Technology Integration team and our Art Department Chair attended a week-long course entitled Constructing Modern Knowledge. A progressive learning experience created specifically for teachers, the course gives first-hand experience in what it feels like to work in a fully collaborative student-led learning environment. Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez, authors of Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, organize the annual event. The Ionian philosopher Heracletus declared that, “the only thing that is constant is change.” More than 2500 years later, this statement could easily describe the teaching and learning landscape at The Peck School. With rapidly changing technologies and amazing new teaching resources available, faculty must be in perpetual learning mode themselves in order to keep their subject matter engaging and their courses evolving with the times. Faculty at The Peck School spend a large amount of time outside the school day and beyond the school year in professional development—acquiring new competencies, exploring new options for project-based learning, and maintaining their professional teaching skills at the highest level.* These professional development opportunities are generously funded through the establishment of endowed funds donated by members of the Peck community. This summer, Jen Garvey, Bruce Schwartz, Kevin Grieshaber, and Mark Mortensen joined with teachers from all over the world at the annual Constructing Modern Knowledge program. In self-selected groups, they worked on a variety of individual projects; designing, building, and developing a working prototype of their ideas. They also attended presentations at MIT, hearing from renowned scientific and computational innovators Mitch Resnick and Stephen Wolfram. Jen Garvey and Mark Mortensen’s team set out to create a trash can that would reward people for being green and placing trash in an appropriate receptacle. Through the process, they learned how to use a Hummingbird Robotics Kit to pro-
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gram their trash can’s movement and voices. (The trash can rewarded recyclers in several languages and voices.) Kevin Grieshaber worked with a Technology Integrator from the Meadowbrook School to create a modern day Etch-aSketch for collaborative artistic expression. They used the open source Arduino Microprocessor to control hardware knobs that allowed the artist to select color, shape, transparency, size, and position of a virtual art brush to create collaborative computer aided paintings on a laptop screen. Bruce Schwartz worked on a team project to develop a scale model of an intersection that used sensors and wireless communication to regulate the flow of traffic between two autonomously driven toy cars. Our faculty—like our students—are stretching the bounds of what is possible when ideas and invention meet collaboration, coding, and intellectual adventure. * Our faculty attended an impressive list of professional development events over the summer months. See Faculty Notes on page 34.
Starting Small, Growing Large Although the eighth grade’s Capstone Lab is only in its first trimester, the students are already in the midst of a mini-capstone project incorporating the principles of design thinking. The project involves third and fourth grade students working in groups to agree upon a series of “problems” that they want their eighth grade counterparts to solve. Each eighth grade team will then chose a particular problem and work through the phases of design thinking to develop a prototype that might solve the problem. Once the teams complete the mini-capstone project, they will undertake individual capstone projects to work on during the remainder of the school year. They will use
design-thinking concepts to achieve an individual goal or objective. These projects can fit into one of the following buckets:
A PERSONAL PASSION: Aspire to
do something inspiring that you and others can learn from and grow from
A BETTER COMMUNITY: Develop a project that solves a problem at Peck, the wider community or the world
INDEPENDENT STUDY: Take a
deep dive into a subject you love
AN ENTREPRENEUR: Develop,
innovate, market, and launch
Chris Weaver, Director of Curriculum and Faculty Development and the leader of the Capstone Lab, encourages students to consider the lab as a place for providing opportunity for experimentation, observation,
and practice. Students are asked to consider some essential questions such as, “How do you make a difference? How do you solve a problem? How do you grow?” Tine Seelig in her book What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, writes that, “Most people approach problems as if they can’t be solved and, therefore, don’t see the creative solutions sitting right in front of them.” Design thinking, on the other hand, encourages students to see problems as opportunities. “We want our students to see problems as fun things to solve,” says Mr. Weaver. If The Peck School can inspire students to view problems through the lens of possibility, then we have perhaps given them two of the greatest gifts education can bestow—a growth mindset, and the courage to change the world.
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