Designing for Thinking

As the summer winds down and we get ready to return to teaching in the fall I have been reflecting more and more on how I might use the information I learned from Creative Intelligence in my practice this fall. I found myself agreeing with a lot of the ideas Nussbaum shared in his book and I think that if you re-frame his ideas within the context of the classroom it can have some very interesting and powerful implications. 1)       Everyone can be creative. This is probably the biggest take-away from the book. The idea that creativity can be developed in everyone and that we need to challenge what we typically think of as being ‘creative’. When I consider how I will adopt this in my own practice I start thinking about ways in which I can foster the growth of that creativity in my own students. For me this means that I will try and keep learning as open-ended as possible and to try and create opportunities for my students where they can create their own outcomes for the ...

3 Steps to Creating Student Design Teams – example from Steve Isaac’s 8 th grade classroom The example of students as designers that I found was in an article that also focused on how you can build your own design teams in your classroom. To do this the article talked about Steve Isaac’s class and how he enables his students as designers on a daily basis. The article outlines how Isaacs leads his design class by building learning experiences for his students that all center around design. One of the parts of the article that I found most compelling was Isaacs talking about the steps of the design process he has his students work through and how the cycle helps them evolve and grow as students. In this example you can tell that Isaac’s focus is on process over product. He acknowledges that things will sometimes fail but that his students get to do “real problem-solving stuff”. The biggest takeaways I got from reading about Mr. Isaacs example is that seeing students as designers is ...

As I have dug more and more into the idea of students as designers I have discovered there is definitely evidence out there that this idea is gaining traction. You can find several articles about design in the classroom and teaching design thinking to students. There has also been a movement towards makers spaces and using making in the classroom embodies this idea. Especially as you see schools moving toward more student-centered learning environments and schools pushing teachers to adopt project-based learning as a way to instruct students this idea of students as designers is beginning to be more and more widespread in the classroom. The research I have done shows that when this is done well in the classroom it can gain very powerful and promising results for students. It allows them to have more agency over what they’re doing, teaches them skills that they find valuable, and overall increase their engagement in the learning they’re doing. Furthermore it can provide them with oppo...