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
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
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
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
“Society’s institutions change at a slow pace.” Bud Selig – “For the Good of the Game” Cows, deer, and other large animals carve a path in grass and earth from one point to another though repeated use. Should an obstacle appear along that path such as a tree falling across it, the cows will carve a bend in the path around the tree. This is … Continue reading The “Cow Paths” of School Improvement & Maintenance – Design Thinking
A student raising their hand to request permission to use the bathroom or to get a drink of water is so common practice, most of us who teach haven’t thought to challenge it’s wisdom or utility. I am lucky that I teach in a private international school, so challenging that wisdom should be easy. Except, it wasn’t. Well, it wasn’t until the challenge to that … Continue reading Design For: Student Privacy
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.
Curb cuts are the gentle sloping edges to sidewalks that are now ubiquitous across the country and all over the world. Yet, there was a day when curb cuts just didn’t exist. The tenacious activist Ed Roberts led a movement in Berkley, California to demand that the city make curb cuts (99PI podcast episode) to increase access for the disabled who wished for mobility around … Continue reading Design Curb Cuts to Help All of Your Students
In the schools I’ve worked and have been given real agency to make decisions, only a few meetings are usually set aside for the work of choosing a course of action and always the conclusion of this set of meetings has resulted a final decision to be implemented. The stakes are high as everyone in the room knows one final answer will come out of … Continue reading Step 4 of The Design Process: Develop Solutions (Prototyping)
Universal Means “For All” To understand what Universal Design is and where it comes from is to realize how limited the scope it has on education, even with Design Thinking being so trendy. While the last 30 years or so has seen the transformation of our school’s physical spaces accommodate physical needs more universally, our practices as educational professionals has often gone the opposite way, … Continue reading A New Universal Design in Education
Skhooldesign with Jim Ellis 