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Objectives:
Evaluate roles in education where teachers become activators and co-learners who model "learning to learn"
Assess the impact of real world design on student learning and motivation
Interview Notes and Resulting Lesson
One area I am passionate about is equal opportunities for girls and young women to explore engineering. My college, Olin College of Engineering, is one of very few engineering programs to achieve equal numbers of men and women in admission and graduation. I want to reduce barriers for and actively encourage girls in Byron to join Robotics, take technical courses, and fully engage with engineering. In particular, I wanted to create a clear pathway for females to sign up for, and do well in, my Grand Challenge Design (GCD) course. However, I didn't even pretend to have an understanding of my audience.
Before planning the second iteration of GCD, I wanted to better understand Byron's 10th and 11th-grade girls. To do so, I selected five students to interview. The interviews gave me a window to learn more about their extra-curricular interests and how they experienced technology-heavy coursework in school. The results of the conversations were very insightful. This led to a synthesizing activity where I identified common trends, key ideas, and areas for further opportunity (2nd item below). Given the timing of the year, the synthesis led to the planning of an exploratory lesson open to all students. This lesson recruited 12 girls and 12 boys to tuse Arduino microcontrollers to make LED art (3rd artifact). All three are created by Andy Pethan.
Interview notes (late September 2016):
Synthesis ("Say Think Do Feel" empathy map, early October 2016):
Arduino Art Lesson (early October 2016):
Reflection
An empathy-centered process stops asking what students want (more time to do their existing work, better resources, etc.) and observes what students do, say, and think. From there, I made inferences and connected the commonalities to create a picture of who these students are. One of the more powerful insights I gained from this process is that the students I interviewed were open to creating and the engineering process. Food and art were common places to make and invent. However, content and peer groups mattered. Nearly all of the young women I talked to had clear passions and career interests that developed in middle school, directing their decisions on courses and extra-curricular activities. They were also aware of which courses were likely to be mostly guys, and most of them avoided these. A surprising theme was the belief that they would fall behind in a technical course. This is especially curious because the majority of them said that they did well in their 8th grade STEM course and never fell behind (where is this belief coming from?!).
After this research, I designed my first prototype solution: a two-hour course called "LED Art" on our school's exploratory lesson day (twice per year). I described it as a chance to design your own art project on foam board and bring it to life with custom-programmed LED lights. The description worked! I recruited a class of 13 gals and 12 guys. Though I was working with a lighter supply of materials than I was hoping for, I had enough to run the class. On game day, it was a total disaster. Students managed to mostly have fun and learn a thing or two, but the logistics of helping everyone get a basic circuit running proved just a hair too much for only two hours with my planning. After running the course, I have a few dozen specific changes that I plan to make that will allow everyone to be up and running significantly faster, allowing more time for explorations, programming, and actual art design.
The most fascinating observation of the whole course was what happened when I asked students if they wanted to buy a $10 kit of parts to take home: 8/12 guys signed up, 1/13 of the ladies did. While working, there were only a few people that appeared to know what they were doing, and yet the guys were the ones who seemed either confident enough or interested enough to want to take it home and keep learning. I'm curious is this is an inherent fact about this group, or if there would be different results on taking a kit home if I provided more structured handouts and guides from the start. I wonder if the outcome would have changed if I took the time to learn more names during the session and encouraged each person as they worked.
In the end, the whole experience was incredibly worthwhile. More than any specific insights, of which there were many, I am fully re-convinced that the Design Thinking process needs to guide any important decisions that I am making. I can guess what students want or need based on my past experience, and I can read a lot of relevant research that gives me insight, but direct, targeted observation and iterative design with student feedback leads to solutions that really nail the important details. Beyond my role as a teacher, if I want to be an innovative instructional leader in my school, I need to be able to facilitate a team working through this process together. With a partner or team, the process involves a lot of discussion and skimming of insights at every stage of engaging with users. By leading the design process, I can expand the number of people who are empathizing effectively with students at our school and be directly supported in improving the design work I do for my own classroom.
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