Teach
Your Student to Fail Better with Design Thinking
In
Long’s article, “Teach Your Student to Fail Better with Design Thinking”, he
promotes a new approach to teaching students that combines modern day (and
potential future) technologies with “real word” questions and problems to
solve. Through his many years of teaching, Long was often frustrated with the
typical teaching approach of posing specific questions or problems that had
specific gradable answers and solutions. He felt that this sort of textbook
learning left students at a disadvantage to use their education in the real
world—post high school graduation. He insists that there are plenty of real
world challenges that can be posed within the classroom environment to teach
students the skills and knowledge that we as teachers are trying to impart. One
way that Long feels we can do this is through Design Thinking which “combines
collaboration systems thinking and a balance of creative and analytical habits…
The process essentially comes down to a continuously evolving feedback loop
with four elements: empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing”. Long points
out that using this type of teaching and learning enables all of us to think
outside of the box, become more creative in how we approach problems and search
for solutions, and most of all enables us to create solutions that work in real
life experiences.
I
found Long’s article both interesting and agreeable to my own perspective on
teaching. As I make my journey to become a teacher I am finding it difficult to
accept the bureaucracy with the school system—the No Child Left Behind Act
requires so much teaching to pass reading, writing and math tests that it seems
to leave students very lacking in the rest of the skills required to become a
successful adult and good citizen. I enjoyed Long’s perspective on how as
teachers we can pose real world problems to students to better prepare them for
life’s requirements of creative thinking, flexibility and the ever changing
need to find new solutions as problems themselves change. One of Long’s points
in the article is that failure can lead to solutions and in failure itself we
learn. I believe that by providing textbook answers—where there is always a
concrete and specific solution—we are not teaching our future generations how
to tackle life because life itself does not have concrete answers or solutions
the majority of the time. Life can be messy and change quickly, so requires
quick and creative thinking.
I
think this article embodies characteristics of both NETS-S standards 1: Creativity
and Innovation and 4: Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making.
In 1: Creativity and Innovation students “apply existing knowledge to generate
new ideas, products, or processes” and also, “create original works as a means
of personal or group expression”. In Long’s article he tells of how he brought
together a diverse group of high schoolers and posed to them the challenge to
create “their own classroom of the future”. The students collaborated in
smaller groups, used various means of technology to communicate with experts
around the world, regrouped into a larger group to determine what the “classroom
of the future” would encompass, then put it all together to actually create the
classroom at a convention. In the process of completing the project the
students also exhibited characteristics from NETS-S 4: Critical Thinking,
Problem Solving and Decision Making. The students encompassed every aspect of
this standard, “students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct
research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using
appropriate digital tools and resources”. In conclusion, this was a wonderful article to
read because it presented a new approach to teaching along with real world
examples of its application and also because this article clearly demonstrated
at least two of the NETS-S standards for students.
Long, C. (2012). Teach Your Student to Fail Better
with Design Thinking. Learning & Leading with Technology, 39(5), 16-20. Retrieved from http://www.learningandleading-digital.com/learning_leading/201202#pg18
I agree that the "no child left behind" program sort of pushes some students through and that we should focus more on flexibility in learning. Every one of us learns differently, and if we stick to a strict curriculum, we might not focus on one area as much as we should with a certain student.
ReplyDelete