Classroom Example - Students as Designers

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 really about first creating opportunities for them and second teaching them the process. If we are to treat our students as designers, it requires teachers to take a back seat to the learning. We must re-think our roles as teachers in this case. We need to think about how we can act as experts for our students but ultimately give them the freedom in the class to make their own decisions and work through the problems that arise as they embrace their role as designers.  

Isaac’s class is different from the experience of most teachers, his class is actually a design class where the curriculum is solely focused on design. In a more traditional setting teachers have to find a way to merge design thinking with the curriculum they teach. There are many ways this can be done and Isaacs advice on how to create design teams can be adapted in a more traditional setting. The current pushes within districts like FCPS for more project-based learning and a focus on a student-centered environment all help to contribute toward seeing students in this new role. As these are adopted more and more across the county it will help to shift more and more towards the view of students as designers.