Design Thinking Curriculum Pilot! Yikes.

In Which Erica Gets Very Nervous and 100 Young Designers Get Over-Excited.

Hello,

I had promised myself that I would blog at least once a fortnight, but as I have no idea if you guys read this or not, it becomes a bit challenging to make it a priority! No MATTER! Exciting work continues to spurt forth from TLP's little Ship St hub.

This week - Design Thinking - so you may have read earlier about Kiran and Riverside School. Well, I have been beavering away in the light of this inspiration and have come up with a pilot curriculum teaching Design Thinking Skills to Year 7's and enabling them to apply these to the design of chocolate bars, new machines, social deprivation solutions and much more.

I am always a bit nervous when it comes to the pilot of a new programme - I know, and teach, that one can only learn through mistakes and through trial and error, but nevertheless, the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable as a practitioner can be quite challenging. I so want to give my client organisation the highest quality learning resources, materials, plans, experiences and find it hard to accept that this only comes through the iterative process. Luckily BACA, the partner Academy I am working with on this project, understand this much better than I do and their fabulous teachers have done a GREAT job at helping me and the students adjust to this process!

Last week we ran our first workshop with the whole year group, taking them through the key concepts for design thinking:

FEEL - what is the problem like? How do people feel about it? How can you find out more?
IMAGINE - explore how life could be different, how the design could be improved, come up with ideas
DO - try it out in prototype, explore different ways of doing it
SHARE- celebrate and share your ideas with others.

This week the staff team took the students through the first part of the process - research methods. The kids did a great job of choosing an advert from a magazine and thinking about what research would have been done to produce that product. We looked at different methods of researching and how you could use social media to find out more about what people thought. We also started to develop a scrapbook on the design process, so the students will be able to document and reflect on their journey from research to concept and outcome.

Three things teachers might find useful when introducing research:

1. Investigate how much students know about what research is and what it could be used for. Make sure you contextualise this in their areas of expertise - what research might you do on your favourite football team? If you were designing a new game to sell at Christmas, to find out more about your family history?

2. Use visual cues - all around us are products that are "designed". Invite them to tell the story of how a particular product or tool came into existence.

3. Documentation - in Riverside I saw how very useful it was for students to embed their learning by documenting the process- its sort of like science experiment write up meets storytelling meets journal. Using a scrapbook, or a wall in the classroom helps them to embrace the journey of their work toward a goal or an output and makes fascinating viewing for a school visitor.

Next week is analysis ....I will keep you posted!

Design Thinking in Education Pilot

Hello All!

Well, with the inspiration I received from Riverside school and my passion for life skills based learning, I have been invited to pilot a 6 week design thinking programme for Year 7's at a local academy in Brighton.

We had our first teacher training session this week, exploring the draft curriculum that the core skills teachers will follow. I am very lucky in that BACA, the Academy in question has a 4 hour slot each week for core skills (humanities, PSHE, citizenship) and so we have 6 weeks of 4 hours to focus on design thinking - unheard of in most UK schools!

The six week programme introduces the idea that young people can take a design led approach to thinking through any project, problem or challenge and create their own sustainable solutions to it. The programme will take the students through:

Research methods
Identifying your "user" and their needs
Analysing your information
Coming up with a "user spec" for the innovation
Using thinking skills to innovate
Identifying the ideas you wish to pilot
Planning for a pilot
Piloting and refining and then sharing your ideas.

In this case, the young people will be challenged to find ways to make being at their schoola more fulfilling and positive experience for the new Year 7's. This is crucial as the Academy has taken over a school in one of the most deprived areas of the country with high levels of long term unemployment and low aspiration. The Year 7's are the first children who will spend the next 7 years in this environment - and they need to take responsibility for shaping how it feels and operates.

The first workshops for students take place on the 3rd May. I will be introducing the idea of creating a culture and the whole process of design thinking. The whole team is both nervous and excited - this is a pilot for us too!

Please keep an eye out for more information about the pilot. If you'd like us to come to your school and help create a really engaging curriculum, please do get in touch - our specialist areas: personal development, careers, enterprise and life skills.