To put it simply, this course taught me more about who I am as a designer and how the creative design process relates to my life and work. Prior to this class, I had never studied the Stanford Model of Design Thinking (Stanford d.school, n.d.). The five phases of empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test as individual units were not new concepts to me but by learning about the processes as a whole and consciously applying these phases as a series to help me solve a problem was a brand new concept and a useful one at that. In this essay, I will first discuss in depth what I have learned about design in education and how it relates to me as an individual and to my school, staff and students as a whole. Then I will explain what I have learned about myself as a designer and how designing reflects my thinking and who I am as a person. Finally, I will talk about the connections that I’ve made about how the different stages of design make an impact on a larger scale and how it is valuable to our lives in the world today.
I am a designer in education. All educators are. I believe that design is a natural process that happens in every teacher’s classrooms. The concepts of education, teaching, learning and design are all correlated. It is like a cycle that repeats itself. Teachers design lesson plans and learning experiences that are intended to teach students something. Students ideally learn the objectives from the lesson plans. If the students do learn the objectives (testing phase), the design was successful and the teacher can move onto the next learning target. If the students do not learn the objectives, the teacher should revise and redesign the original lesson plan and reteach it. This process should be continued until the objectives are understood by all students. I would argue that this cycle proves that design is incredibly valuable in education. However, I would also like to point out that reflection and revision/editing are equally important, as well. Testing would prove whether or not the students learned the objectives but without the revision and reteach stage, the cycle would simply end with testing and any students who didn’t meet the learning objectives would be left behind. I would like to address a concern that I have in regards to the testing phase in education. An important part of the design process is testing your prototype. In teaching, testing can be found in a variety of formats including formative checks, summative tests, listening to student conversations, visual checks and more. There is incredible value in the notion of testing “early and often” (Duverneay, 2013) in education. There was a part in the online article “When to Test: Incorporating User Testing into Product Design” by Jessica Duverneay that I connected with as an educator who is constantly checking for understanding in the classroom: “Smart teams will begin testing immediately to collect data that can inform road mapping for the next product improvements” (2013). I believe this is something that teachers don’t always have time to do as early and often as we might like. In the race to teach all of the standards and curriculum to students by the end of the year, I believe one of two things typically happen: 1. There are times where teachers don’t test for understanding at all and move on anyway or 2. They do test for understanding, possibly notice some students missed the learning target and perhaps try to reteach but end up moving on quickly anyway. I believe both circumstances are due to timelines teachers must follow, expectations that need to be met and deadlines in general. This leads us to a whole new problem of practice but I do believe teachers should be testing early and often and using that data to help guide their decisions without penalty or fear of falling behind. The things that I design for my classroom vary greatly in how they are designed. Sometimes, I make things up off the top of my head or on the spot. Other times, I design lesson plans over the course of days or a curriculum over the course of years. Although I have been designing since day one of my teaching career, this course taught me another method of changing less preferred situations into more desirable ones within my classroom setting. In the past, I did not have the Stanford Model of Design Thinking as a resource in my toolbox. In my opinion, the method of design is quite extensive. During the times that I design more spontaneously or instinctively, I do not think I would have the time for all of the steps that the Stanford Model entails. On the other hand, I can see an in-depth investigation becoming extremely useful with certain problems of my practice. Ultimately, the complete Stanford Design process would not work for all situations in my art room but it is a great way to find best possible solutions to tricky and/or persistent problems and a great addition to my toolbox. There are times in the past where I naturally used parts of the Stanford Design process without realizing it. For example, the first year that I started teaching, I designed a behavior plan for my classes. I was brand new to teaching so I had nothing to base my behavior plan on other than what other teachers had told me and what I experienced in student teaching (which, let’s be honest is good but not close enough to the real thing). Over the years, this behavior plan has been revised and edited depending on what I thought worked and what didn’t. Each year, it’s like a new prototype of my behavioral plan would be released and the testing phase would go on until I saw another problem with it that I thought I could fix. Although I had naturally applied parts of the Stanford Design process in the past, I now realize that I was lacking some critical design stages that potentially could have solved my problems a lot quicker or at least given me a better possible solution. I now have the knowledge to use whatever phases of the design model feel appropriate to help me in problem solving. The ideate phase of this course proved to be challenging and rewarding. I was lucky enough to get together with the elementary art department from my school. I believe this collaboration was absolutely critical to the success of my experience and is necessary for (or at least extremely helpful) anyone else going through a design process, too. In my opinion, being able to build ideas off of colleagues is essential and can not only help generate ideas but also continue to create a chance for people to empathize with one another. After collaborating with others and brainstorming my own ideas, I had come up with my prototype: a video that I would create of me teaching an important concept that I would show my students in class in order to “buy” myself more time for material management. The ideate and prototype assignments highlighted the importance of collaboration with a team and taught me that, when facing different problems of practice, I should explore the option of using different technologies and think outside of the box for my answer. This course taught me more than just ways to apply this design process to the classroom and within education; it taught me more about design in the real world and in my personal life, too. For example, I have gained a deeper understanding of what it means to be empathetic, the importance of it and how I can be more empathetic as an individual. In our empathy unit for this course, I had thought of a problem of practice and simply assumed that all other art teachers were experiencing the same challenges and had similar opinions about that problem. After sending out a survey that asked them for their opinions on this problem, I realized it was quite the opposite. Initially, the survey ended up being more confusing than helpful because I couldn’t understand why others in my same position didn’t feel the same way I did. Well, that was the whole point, wasn’t it? It wasn’t until I took the time to dissect the survey and reflect on it that I found a root to the problem that affected the general population of my users. This unit resonated with me because although I know I want to apply this process to my work life, I have realized that this is something I’d like to be more aware of in my personal life and relationships, too. Of course, this doesn’t mean I’d be sending surveys out to my friends and family but rather actively trying to understand and share their feelings. CEP 817 taught me another valuable lesson about myself as a designer but this was partly because of something that was out of everyone’s control. The coronavirus pandemic had a huge impact on how the semester ended. Some time ago, when we were in the prototype phase of this course, I had everything perfectly planned out. That’s the type of person I am; I like to have a set plan, get things done the way I want them and do it all before the due date so as to relieve pressure and stress. On top of all of this, I thought I had found a reasonable and great solution to my problem and I was so excited to test my prototype in the classroom! However, it was then that school got cancelled for a few days and, eventually, for the rest of the year. Because I had everything planned out exactly how I wanted it, this change was especially tough and caused a lot of stress (not to minimize the huge negative impact this had on other people in much more profound ways). At first, I had no clue what I was going to do. No classroom. No kids. How would I test my prototype in any accurate way? The answer was to get creative and also to do a bit of acting. In order to test my prototype, the furniture in my living room was rearranged, I enlisted the help of my husband to act as my students and I set up strict guidelines that would make the situation as much like the real deal as possible. Because of my hard work, I am proud of how the testing phase went despite the adversity. Although the real classroom setup would have provided extremely beneficial information, I still ended up gaining a lot of insight from the process. This phase, with the uncontrollable events affecting it along the way, demonstrated my dedication and resilience to not only get my work done but to turn in something that I am proud of. Good design is valuable to our thinking because it can help generate new ideas in the world. When creativity, combining existing ideas and the process of design are fused in the right way, we are bound to invent new things and continue to improve upon existing things. Even if a design is not a life-changing invention, it still allows us to be creative and consider how products and ideas can be changed and improved upon which can lead to something profound and significant. The Stanford Model design process makes the act of designing so that it is not just a haphazard manner of creating but rather a well thought out process. Not to say that spontaneous design isn’t important because it certainly is valuable and plays a huge role in creating but, in general, if more people in the world had or were more proficient in the skills of empathizing with others, defining problems appropriately, ideating, prototyping and testing, more of our problems might be solved universally. References Duverneay, J. (2013, March 4). When to Test: Incorporating User Testing into Product Design. Retrieved April 17, 2020, from https://www.usertesting.com/blog/when-to-test-incorporating-usability-testing-into-product-design Stanford d.school. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://dschool.stanford.edu/
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