Closing reflection for d.school class

Closing reflection for d.school class What is the most important thing you learned about designing for student learning + reflection and/or the broader context of schooling in your DP3 project?

This is very obvious, but I was reminded of how profoundly different each of our experiences is. During prototyping, I had a chance to think about how each user/learner brings so many different interpretations, purposes, skillsets, and emotional landscapes to a context; these have a huge impact on how he or she experiences and responds to the situation. 

This realization has pedagogical consequences as well; we pay lip service to the idea that every student in a classroom constructs knowledge in her own way, and that each student has his own experience of the class, but when I reflect on the difference in user experience I saw during prototyping, I think the experience from one learner to the next cannot even be considered to have similar structures or pertain to similar categories. Each is its own thing.

What is the most important thing you learned about the design process in your DP3 project?

Again, obvious, but I experienced firsthand the importance of iterative design cycles. I had to work to shut myself up, and to not rush to interpretation, as we generated ideas, consolidated them into points of view, and then tested prototypes with users. I’d like to take this attitude back to my research–I think in the world of research, we are too precious about ideas. We sometimes put so much work into elaborating and defending ideas, and comparatively little into openmindedly prototyping them to see if they work.

In DP3, we had several different moments of clarity as a group, hunches that “this is it!” I was proud of us as a group that we kept going and didn’t short-circuit the process at these moments; from each moment of clarity, the previous ones looked shallow and naive. In my work as a teacher and as a designer of learning environments and tools, I think I too often come up with my solution without engaging in a thorough design process, and attach too much ego to my initial concept.

What is your strongest take-away from the course over all?

My strongest take-away from the course is a reminder that it is possible to make change in education. It was deeply inspiring to spend so much time visiting new school models, to see the tangible evidence that ideas can be instantiated as living schools. I have helped start several intentional communities, but starting a school has felt out of reach.

Design thinking will be for me a valuable counterpart to education research; trying to grasp the complexity of an educational context as a researcher is overwhelming, and sometimes leaves me feeling like it is impossible to take any action in a responsible manner. It is powerful to realize that you will never fully understand a system, and that to some extent it’s foolish to think you could–the way users understand the system is more important than your understanding anyway. Design thinking informed by research can be a way of iterating toward new forms of education.

What additional feedback on the class do you have for the teaching team?

I wish the course had incorporated more connection points to research. I’ve been grappling with how the two fit together–I have a sense that our theories of how education works and what it’s for form the frame in which we ideate; without clarifying this frame, we risk constraining ourselves to an irrelevant search space. If we are too rigid about the theoretical frame, we risk missing out on possibilities. Certainly, the schools we visited this quarter were the result of prototyping; they are also clearly grounded in theories about the purpose of education and how they expect to function toward these goals.