What a great time it was to visit the Digital Learning Loft. During this hour, we learned about design terms and concepts and discussed how we might be able to use design language to further our goals in education. Teachers, leaders, aids, involved parents are all designers. We are designers of student spaces, of their learning program, we design how we provide formal and informal … Continue reading IS Luxembourg Design Thinking Conversation
Every classroom in the world has changed in some way during these last six months. Disinfectant wipes, spaced out desks and furniture removed just to name a few of those changes. But those examples aren’t how we change school operations to become COVID compliant. For months now, we have needed to re-evaluate how we operate our schools to be COVID compliant and we will need … Continue reading Your Normal School Structure & Mode of Operating Isn’t COVID-19 Compliant
Critiques Are an Empowering Event That Your Faculty Deserves. It’s posts on Twitter or conversations with teaching peers like this that remind me how skilled we are as teachers at being critical of student work but how rarely we are able to be constructive with criticism about our own work. There is no teacher at fault, it is a systems problem. Critiques are the Objective, … Continue reading Bringing Design Thinking Crit” from Design School to Your School’s Faculty
Design For How Students Think 🤔 I’m teaching at one of the few schools around the world that went to distance learning and returned to on-campus teaching — all in Spring 2020 due to COVID-19. Having done so was a great chance to reflect on the modalities students are using in both learning environments. As it turns out, design language concepts like affordances and signifiers … Continue reading Distance Leaning Changed Affordances and Signifiers that Students use to Navigate Their Learning.
I was lucky enough to continue working with the good folks of ECIS, even in the middle of a pandemic. Below you will find my slideshow from my talk. Soon, I hope to include a series of videos to go along with the actual slideshow. Until then, enjoy the highlight and included video resources that I use most often when consulting and facilitating around the … Continue reading #ECISLeadership 2020 Design Thinking to Maximize Outcomes
I recently had the chance to talk to a colleague in another international school in another country where they have a part-time role with the title Community Experience Architect. What a title and what a statement about that school in their desire to be a forward thinking school. Let’s break down the title for a moment. Architect is sometimes shorthand for someone who has designed … Continue reading Front End and Back End Design Thinking for School Improvement
Sticky post
Ingredients for Design Thinking with Your School: One teacher “spur/cheerleader” One outside “design guru” One teacher “unstoppable force” A pile of middle school kiddos A well-stocked design studio One and only one main goal A pinch of luck This is the story about how ASB Mumbai middle school students were able to make a mobile library in only one week. This is how a principal … Continue reading A Recipe to Exceed your Design Thinking Expectations (a story from Mumbai, India)
This is Part II of the blog post “Asking Why? at you School Can be Dangerous” Daring to do something doesn’t mean knowing what to do Doubt is something real to contend with and feeling uncomfortable is part of knowing you might be onto something important. Still, many of us remain silent in the face of an issue we all know isn’t okay. Take the … Continue reading When to say “Why Not‽” To Be Daring On Your Campus with Design Thinking
Educators and schools are awash in too many good ideas flowing in at all times and it is hard to be in a position to know what good ideas to choose. Not every good idea will work in every classroom or school Too many good ideas being implemented will fragment a school program, a faculty and fragments student participating in a course or school, “a … Continue reading The “Too Many Good Ideas” Problem
This is not another article looking to take down a trend in education. No. This is a statement of how much further a great idea is still to come. Should Design Thinking, in capital letters, manage to survive the great pendulum of time and trends in education, then it needs itself to iterate. See, my call to a new universal design model as one example … Continue reading Design thinking in education has a massive hole in it: the skills designers have.
Skhooldesign with Jim Ellis 