Earlier this week I was invited to visit the Henry Ford Academy Elementary School in Detroit. This site visit appealed to me because they are one of the few elementary schools that fosters Design Thinking. Design Thinking is different from problem-based or project-based learning, and really gets to the perseverance and iterative nature that is authentic learning…two of the behaviors tragically low among young learners these days.
When I walked into the first-grade “innovation lab”, there appeared to be four groups of about five kids each doing arts and crafts. I sat at one table after another, trying to fit in and figure out how this was different. Finally, I asked one of the students to explain to me what was going on and how did they get there. Here’s how he explained it, walking me through his notebook…a first-grader:
Discovery: “We went to the playground and watched kids play so we could find a problem. We saw lots of shoes were untied.”
Interpretation: “We talked about why there were so many shoes untied. We made lists, then we wrote a sentence about it.” The child showed me a list of nine questions and statements he had written exploring why so many shoes might be untied and how they could help. I noted that I couldn’t read these things because his letter-sense was still underdeveloped to create legible writing, but he knew the thought process he’d been through with his team and he knew that capturing his ideas on paper was part of it. His teacher swung by and explained that the final sentence, legible because the team wrote it together, was their point-of-view statement like a
Ideation: “Then we drew a prototype for a superhero that can help tie shoes.” Yes, he said “prototype” because this language is intentionally taught and used by first-graders!
Experimentation: “Now we are building our superhero by looking at our drawing.” This was the arts and crafts I walked into, but now I realized how much more it was and how these teams were each building their design to tie shoes…solving an authentic problem for themselves. Imagination was alive and well and the prototypes did not have to work in actuality for the kids to learn the process of design thinking. One group made the superhero, one was a jetpack that you put your foot into, another was a shoebox with arms that would tie the shoe for you with a remote control. J
Evolution: “We are going to share our prototype with users so they can tell us how to make them better next time.” The “users” this six-year old referenced, another term intentionally taught to him, would be other kids with the same problem of untied shoes who could perceive his prototype from the end-user perspective and give feedback on what might work better or what changes he could make. Then, of course, he would go deeper into the process.
While this design thinking is not integrated throughout their curriculum, it is an intentional process that could easily be woven into many curricular areas. While I was cautiously curious about this method with young kids, it was an inner-city boy of only six, in his first year of this environment who explained the application of design thinking better than any web site or dissertation I could have read.