Design Spotlight

Designing Professional Development Experiences

by Ashley Paschal, Design and Implementation Consultant with Education Elements

As educators, we have been trained to always start with the end goal in mind and plan backwards, but recently I have taken a new approach to creating professional development sessions -- design thinking. Design thinking is a five-step process that aims to eliminate assumptions and elicit creative solutions. The five steps are empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. It is not a linear process and some stages may be more time-consuming or challenging than others, but each step builds upon the previous activity. IDEO, a global design company, has used design thinking to create brilliant products such as advanced medical equipment, the first computer mouse, the mechanical whale in the movie Free Willy and much more. So we know that design thinking is effective in creating physical products but can this process also be applied to human experiences? I put it to the test in a recent workshop!

Last month, our team traveled to Evanston, Wyoming to help educators at Uinta County School District #1 design their vision and school-wide support plans for personalized learning. We kicked off the session, by introducing the teachers to design thinking through a YouTube video highlighting a team designing a new shopping cart. Then I explained to them that personalized learning is the shopping cart! We’re obviously not creating shopping carts or any other physical product, but we are designing new educational experiences for students. Just like each team in the video had different features for their cart design, each school can approach personalized learning differently and that’s okay! Each school has different students with different interests and needs. School teams then jumped into the shoes of other teachers, administrators, students and parents at their site to better understand successes and needs. The trends that surfaced through this empathy activity were then used to define a problem of practice for each school team. Next, team members brainstormed both wild and realistic ways to address their problem of practice. Ideas such as a time machine, an automatic data-scroll on students’ heads, targeted observations, and student focus groups were shared. These experiences illuminated possible solutions that teams considered when creating their own professional development agendas and support plans. This was their prototype to test out at their schools. And it worked! Each school embraced the design thinking steps and left energized about their action plans. One principal commented, “Good work, good examples and great process!” While educators will always need backwards planning, sometimes the best option is to try a new approach to designing student and adult learning experiences.

Want to see how we did it? Check out the session agenda here!

 

 

 

 

 

The Core Four Elements of Personalized Learning

Four elements are critical to success with personalized learning. Learn what they are: