The recent events in our nation have occupied most of my intellectual and emotional energy. Mired in attempts to find sense in the senseless, I simply had nothing that seemed worth sharing.  Added to this, I felt constrained by advice I frequently heard a kid as (and apparently internalized)… “Never talk about religion or politics” if you want maintain relationships.

Watching our national “dialog” spiral downwards, I began to recognize that as really bad advice. I began to realize that it is precisely our inability to discuss such emotion-laden topics from a perspective of understanding rather than one of winning that is causal in our current disconnected and increasingly tribal response to “the other”.  And perhaps more importantly, it is precisely we as educators who have the opportunity to turn this around.  Certainly not by ourselves and certainly not overnight, but we have the opportunity.  I believe we also have the responsibility.

But I was struggling to express this. And then I received a posting of a piece piece on the Modern Learners site entitled “Designing for Learning” that broke the logjam.  It’s a fascinating piece about the implications of design thinking and references an even more fascinating video clip about schooling.  I urge you to read the post and to take time to view the clip.  I’ll buy you a beer if you think it was a waste of your time.

Design Thinking… What Is It?

The concept of Design Thinking has achieved educational jargon status.  Google reports that a search on the term “design thinking” yielded about 1,350,000,000 results.  Here’s a definition from Interaction Design. Interaction-Design 

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.

What stands out to you in this definition? For me, key terms here are seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and alternative strategies.  Hence, in exploring the notion of ‘designing for learning’, key pieces would be

• understanding the learner,
• challenging assumptions about schooling and learning, and
• exploring alternative strategiesfor where and how learning can occur.

So what would this look like? 

First of all, it would look different. I want to tackle just a couple of differences here.They’re big and scary.

As I have shared here in previous posts and as is reported in numerous studies, the design of our schools and the schooling process is inconsistent with what we know about user learning.  In Will’s post, he notes

If we were really intent on improving learning inside the school walls, we would pay a lot more attention to how learning happens outside the school walls in the natural world and then build our practice based on that. So, at the risk of being repetitive, we know that outside of school kids learn with other kids and adults of all different ages. We know that they don’t learn in 45-minute chunks. We know that learning occurs without any contrived tests.

But what would happen if we didn’t think of schools as the point of delivery for learning?  Why, when we consider looking at how kids (and adults) learn in the world outside of school, would we not feel the need to change schools to reflect this?  Why wouldn’t we re-design schools into places where “real world” learning could be coordinated rather than delivered?  Why wouldn’t we promote the conversion of schools to centers for community learning?… places where learning could be supported, not controlled… places where resources for learning, both human and material, could be housed to supplement those found outside/beyond the walls of the school?

I know all of the practical, adult centered, logistical reasons why this can’t happen (OMG, what about the child care, custodial function, what would I do with 50 “You Tubers”? What if they didn’t want to learn Algebra?, etc. ). I see such thinking as simply an extension of a system that supports chunking learning into 45 minutes segments for the sake of efficiency and adult convenience.

Just as the Industrial Revolution spawned the creation of schools (and schooling as we have experienced it), is it not possible for the Technological Revolution to redefine that model to reflect not only the availability of learning resources and learning experiences, but also the places in which learning can take place and be recognized?

We have the beginnings of such user-designed places in urban community schools… places where the intellectual, social-emotional, and health needs of the learners can be coordinated and extended. Why not elsewhere?  If we are going to “design for learning” why would we continue to use an industrial model for the spaces and ways in which learning can take place?

And speaking of learning… Learn what?

Will continues his piece with the question about what our kids should learn, “What Do We Want Our Children to Be?”  What would happen if we asked the question “HOW would we like our kids to be?” instead of “WHAT would we like them to be?” I suspect that, from the extended description in the piece, the intent may well have been to mean “how” while using the term “what”; however, I think that precision in language is critical to help us avoid multiple definitions and multiple directions/solutions.

Remember back at the beginning I shared that one of the lessons learned in our previous story was to avoid topics of politics and religion.  This advice was based on experiences where such discussions went poorly.  So avoiding them became to be the favored response.  But there was and is another response… a response that forges connections rather than separation.

It’s empathy.

Empathy is the path beyond separation and is directly related to my reasoning for suggesting a focus on how we want our kids to be, rather than what they should be.  Does anyone else notice that we, uniquely, among rich, industrialized countries, have embraced a language of violence?  We fight “wars” on drugs, “wars” on illiteracy, “wars” on poverty and tragically ironically, “wars” on violence.  We define money raised by politicians for their campaign a “war chest”. We see such words as “American” as proud, strong, powerful and words such as “empathy” as soft, weak, and, in a patriarchal society, an even worse adjective… “feminine”.

It appears that suggesting how they should be as empathetic is seen by many as a rejection of the American story of competition, toughness, and hard work. There is a growing sense that this story should be rejected.  The acceptance of that story has created a culture of needing more, and needing more too frequently comes at the expense of others.  It creates and reinforces a sense of scarcity… a sense that whatever someone else gets is reducing what’s available for me. It results is sum-zero thinking.  I must win.  A natural consequence of winners is the reciprocal, losers. We have become a win-lose culture, not only in the acquisition of material wealth but also in the course discussion.  Prized are the winners, losers not so much.

We cannot continue to avoid the topics which divide us.  We cannot continue to “discuss” such issues while focusing more on winning the “debate” than on understanding what it is like to be the other person and how being that person has led them to conclusions/beliefs that differ from our own.

How does this change?  It changes with us as educators, as school leaders, as teachers, as members of our education community.  It changes with parents.  It changes with a generation of young people we are charged with preparing for what appears to be an increasingly precarious time. It changes by helping our kids encounter the world around them as it really exists, not as it exists inside the walls of a school building, not as it exists in programs that were designed for another time and a very different set of needs, not in programs designed by large publishing houses seeking their share of a lucrative education market place.  It changes with creating the habit of civil, empathetic discourse and discussion.  It continues with the creation and nurturing of a culture that rejects violence as the response to differences in thinking. It changes with the rejection of demonizing and vilifying those whose skin color or beliefs differ from our own.  It begins with a discussion that illuminates how empathy can be intentionally nurtured and developed in young people as a part of learning how to be. It doesn’t change by doing more of the same.

As always, be well.