Thursday, July 22, 2010

At the "wild idea summit" last weekend we spent the afternoon in Stanford's School of Design's new space. Just walking in the building gets your design-mind spinning - rolling furniture, walls that move and that you can write on, big tables to spread out - very energizing and exciting place to be to say the least. This is what their K-12 lab is all about:

"Empowering Kids to Create Their World

K-12 Lab is a new initiative that was started several years ago at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. Our main philosophy rests on the idea of design thinking - an orientation that new, better things are possible and that you and I can make it happen. Engaging students in design thinking means helping them to be aware of the situations around them, to see that they have a role in creating them, and to decide to take action towards a more desirable future.

Four principles we hold to in design thinking:
1) Human-centered. We believe that we achieve innovative solutions by getting out and talking to experts and users both to immerse ourselves in the problem and to test our ideas.
2) Bias towards action. We act and try rather than sit around and debate.
3) Prototype-driven culture. We fail early to succeed sooner. We value a rough and rapid mentality to refine our solutions.
4) Mindfulness of process. We know where we are in the process and the direction our project needs to go next to get better.

Students are more engaged and achieve greater learning when they have ownership over real world projects in areas that they care about. Tackling huge multidisciplinary design challenges brings relevance to discipline material. Rigorously working in heterogeneous groups to create something meaningful gives students the opportunity to be innovative, creative, and collaborative - skills they will need to thrive in the 21st century. "

Check them out for yourself at http://dschool.stanford.edu/k12/

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Wild Idea Summit


This weekend I am at a "Wild Idea Summit" in California where six people from all over the country are meeting to share what they care about in education and to see where our passions and ideas might overlap and what project we might do together. To prepare for the meeting I was asked to consider the following question: What is the single most important change or improvement you would like to see in education? This is a challenging question - how could I boil all that I care and think about down into one single issue? But after working at it for a while, I did focus myself a little and here is what I am going to share today.


The single most important change or improvement that I would like to see in education is that teachers and students are given the chance to engage the capacity of their whole mind more fully to think and learn, and to be afforded the opportunity to approach teaching and learning like a designer or artist approaches his or her work. If stages of thought and learning were states of matter:

  • Gaseous thinking is where elements of ideas/understandings are present, but are still in an abstract, intangible, unseen, not yet visible state.
  • Solid thinking would be when an idea/understanding is in its most visible state – it has a completed product or representation that is visible to others, has shape and form to it, it communicates itself (like a paper, or a presentation or a project of some kind).
  • Liquid thinking is where thought is fluid, flexible, and dynamic; where we play, explore, imagine; it is pattern seeking, connecting, proto-typing, revising and designing compositional integrity through balance and focus; it is adding color and pattern to texturize our knowing; it is taking perspective and trying on multiple points of view to add dimension to our ideas.


In the liquid state we are in the process of what I am referring to in my work as, “finding the design” of an idea (someone else’s like in a text, or creating one’s own design). I believe that many people need to keep thought liquid - see it and hold it and manipulate it - before they can commit to a solid representation of their thinking. To deprive them of that opportunity is to disable their learning and thinking process and lock them out of their own minds. Everyday I see the consequences of forcing students to go from gaseous to solid in their learning process, with no time or opportunity to be "liquid" thinkers. Performance in school declines and their whole self-concept suffers. When students are not learning as they should be, we aught to be asking, “What is dysfunctional about the learning system students are in?" and not just “What is dysfunctional about this student”.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Creativity and Global Leadership

Jason Pugatch writes in the Huffington post:

" 1,500 of America's top CEOs just cited "creativity" as the most necessary quality for leadership (second and third place went to integrity and global thinking, also tools the arts can teach well). Creativity in the United States, especially among K-6th graders, is on the decline (Newsweek, The Creativity Crisis).

Smart man.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-pugatch/arts-and-sciences_b_646306.html

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Overcoming your fear of math through design?

Seek patterns and similarities? Explore new ideas? Seek the essential and understand the issue deeply?" Sounds like what I call finding the design. Ed Burger...this guy is the bomb. Take a look at this link:

http://www.wcsh6.com/life/programming/local/207/story.aspx?storyid=119537&catid=50

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Picturing Writing and Image Making

Beth Olshansky, an educator and researcher, has created two dynamic models, Picturing Writing: Fostering Literacy Through Art, and Image Making Within the Writing Process, that have been validated by the US Department of Education as, "innovative and effective literacy programs”. The genesis of her work began, she says:

“...when I noticed that with paintbrush in hand, my daughter was able to access imaginative ideas and descriptive language that were otherwise not available to her.”

Check our her amazing and work at: http://www.picturingwriting.org/combined.html