82 Future Forwards: Exploring Frontiers in Education

PBL AND DESIGN THINKING IN FIRST GRADE

Beth Lopez, Glenda Forgie, Freny Dastur, and Scot Hoffman

“Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them (Manifesto, n. d.)”.

Starting with Interest

In August after several conversations about Project-Based Learning (PBL) we decided to form a professional learning community or PLC on project based learning at ASB. In October we opted to volunteer to prototype the PBL Model developed by the R&D PBL Task Force. As often happens, our interest led us on a worthwhile learning journey we couldn’t have scripted beforehand.

Fast forward to a Friday afternoon in November and one last meeting with Suzie Boss, author of Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World (http://bit.ly/bringinginnovationtoschool) and Thinking Through Project-Based Learning: Guiding Deeper Inquiry (http://bit.ly/guidingdeeperinquiry). Suzie had just helped us grow and develop a project sketch for a project we called Powerful Communities. We envisioned a Social Studies based unit where students would use critical thinking, communication, and collaboration to explore, understand, and solve a tide of conflicts that were affecting the day-to-day friendships and therefore learning in our first grade community. After consulting with Suzie, we decided to pursue a Project-Based Learning approach that incorporated a design thinking process to meet the standards and benchmarks for our units as well as equip and empower students to make a difference in our community.

Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning is like any other instructional approach with its focus on teaching important concepts, content and skills. Where PBL differs, is its emphasis or bias toward learning through authentic real-world projects. In PBL, teachers architect the foundation and the constraints of the unit and develop a compelling driving question that provides the form, focus and impetus for students to construct their own understandings and drive their own learning through collaborating, planning, gathering feedback, reflecting, and revising their inquiries as they strive to produce meaningful work and answer the driving question.

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Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a process that is used in a variety of fields to address and solve problems. The process can vary from model to model but often includes the following stages.

*Image: Henry Ford Learning Foundation

Empathy or Understanding – a process for uncovering or understanding the problem beyond

surface appearances by studying those who are affected by the problem. Learners uncover the problem

by interviewing and observing the people who they will design solutions for.

Defining – a process for narrowing down the problem to a clear and simple definition that allows accurate and shared understanding of the problem designers will design for in order to solve.

Ideating – a process for generating ideas that lead to solutions. A hallmark of this process is a diversity of thinking, building on the ideas of others, and looking for themes of thinking in order to build a prototype.

ASB R&D Prototype Model (adapted from BIE)

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Prototyping – a process for creating something and using it in order to learn from how the prototype interacts with the environment, how it affects the problem it was designed to solve, and how the prototype may need to be adjusted or reconceptualized in order to realize an intended outcome.

Feedback – The process of gathering information from key sources to make design improvements to adjust, tune, or create new prototypes.

Reflection – The process of thinking back about the process of designing for new insights and understandings of the learning process.

The focus on learning through action in order to solve real world problems runs deep through both Project-Based Learning and Design Thinking making them complementary partners for learning through addressing real-world problems such as designing solutions for conflict in one first grade community.

Designing the Project

Driving Question

We started our unit by creating a driving question that we thought would frame the inquiry and require students to learn the key content, concepts and skills while creating practical solutions to our problem. This is the driving question we created. “How might we design a more peaceful community?”

Next, we planned how we would lead students through a design thinking process that would provide structure for students to drive their inquiries. We planned for each stage of the design thinking process. Here are some of the initial thoughts, ideas, and wonderings that we captured together as a team during our planning process.

Beginning to capture planning ideas and thoughts

Our plans and thoughts taking shape

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Understand/Observe Invite expert/s in to launch the unit

Children create a survey or questionnaire to find out types of problems that exist and where

and how the problems occur

Children interview experts to find out how they manage conflicts or problems

What do first graders have control over? What can they change?

What are the children’s different perspectives of a problem?

Observe events and experiences to design provocations?

What do first graders think about the concept of peace and community?

What do they think is obstructing this?

Define

What is the concise problem we will design to solve?

Who is this design for? I, they, we

Who is the community? Class, grade, floor, recess, transitions, whole school?

How might we …ideation…

Ideate

How might we meet solve the problem? (create a concept map/web of their ideas)

Children will have lots of good ideas to select from

Use post-its to record solutions and sort similar ideas

A challenge is the diversity of ideas

Prototype

Make a practice, product, or system

Does it work or not? Is it effective? Feedback, reflection

Anticipated prototypes….Flow chart for solutions, powerful print-making signs, photographs

and signs with processes for games and using play structures

Mix students from 1A, 1B, 1C work on prototypes, by need or solution ideas

Feedback and Revise Who will give them feedback? second graders, classmates

Re-survey students

How have you helped your friend?

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Once we had captured our thoughts and ideas, we thought we had the makings of a unit that would engage and empower our students to uncover, understand, and change our community.

The Project

After months of reading, several conversations, and time spent planning our PBL unit, it was time to teach. First, we needed our first graders to gain awareness of the conflicts that had been affecting our community. We provided post-it notes and chart paper to our students and asked them to write down and share the conflicts they were experiencing at school. They noted an array of conflicts and locations where those conflicts were taking place. After raising awareness of conflict in our first grade community, we asked our principal, Mr. Smithies to speak with our students about the importance of resolving conflicts at school.

Framing the Driving Question

Mr. Smithies highlighted that finding solutions to conflicts was important in order to keep students safe and create a positive learning environment. After leading a discussion on the conflicts students were noticing, Mr. Smithies invited the first grade students to take up the task of creating a more peaceful first grade community. Then we shared our driving question: How might we design a more peaceful community? Now, the first graders had an authentic purpose for learning about communities, and a driving question to guide them.

Thinking and planning for the phases of the students’ design thinking process

Mr. Smithies helping us frame our driving question for the students

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During our shared reading, we shared texts that allowed us to examine conflicts that were happening in the stories we read. During one read-aloud session in Mrs. Dastur’s class, the students began thinking about conflicts and sorting them by their size, noting that some problems were small enough for students to solve, while other problems probably needed to be solved by adults.

Understanding/Observing/Empathy

Next, it was time for students to uncover the conflicts that they had captured. Armed with clipboards, graph paper and pencils, our students went on location to find out what was really happening.

First graders observed their peers playing on the playground, eating in the cafeteria, and walking up and down the stairways. With those observations in hand, students gathered and described their findings using their graphs, and post it notes. In Ms. Forgie’s class, students sorted problems into location and began to describe what they were noticing about the conflicts in those locations.

Capturing a discussion on problems and conflicts during a class read-aloud session

Gathering data to uncover problems and conflicts affecting first grade

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Students organized their observations on conflict into these areas:

Big problems Little problems Types of conflicts Students not following rules Location

Two students in Mrs. Lopez’s class responded to a classroom visit from hearing impaired students from Save The Children India. (http://www.savethechildren.in/). The day after the visit, Veer arrived in class with a box that he had made for collecting donations and Sam arrived in class with his piggy bank. Their idea was to share their effort and their piggy banks to address the problem, by applying a community problem-solving approach.

The increased critical thinking and student initiated actions

that go beyond the scope of our project was exciting and

encouraging to witness. Our next challenge would be

creating a process where all of the students in the class had

the opportunity to discover and define specific meaningful

needs, ideate to create solutions and begin prototyping.

Like our students, we were going through a process of our own that required us to define problems, and

ideate solutions that met the needs of our students.

Students analyze the data

These two students demonstrating the bias for action inherent in PBL and design thinking

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Ideating and Prototyping

We knew we needed a way to help students have a concrete understanding of the process for ideating and choosing a solution to prototype. We developed the graphic organizer below to support our students through the process.

A graphic organizer students used to define problems and ideate & prototype solutions

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Once we modeled how to use the graphic organizers, this created a clear path for students to define their problems, generate multiple solutions, and select and develop a solution into a prototype. These student-generated solutions ranged from posters designed to ensure a conflict-free boys bathroom, signed community agreements for playground behavior, and specific solutions to interpersonal problems.

Diana’s Rickshaw Project

Real learning doesn’t stop in the classroom. It moves into the world where it can be applied in students’ lives. Several weeks after our unit an email and several pictures from Diana and her parents provided us with an illustration of how PBL engages learners to take initiative, make plans, and act. Below are some excerpts from their note.

Dear all,

We saw a clear difference in our children's mindset since living in India and since they have begun studying at ASB. As we drove on our way to school these past months, Diana showed a lot of concern watching people driving around without helmets, no seatbelts etc. She wondered why they were risking their life and what she could do... So one day she announced: "I know whom I want to be when I grow up - a scientist. And I already have my first invention - a pink rickshaw with the seatbelts!" We laughed, praised her and thought it was cute. But then we realised how amazing that this little mind came out with her own idea, willing to help, and change the world for the better. So we sponsored a little pink rickshaw with a seatbelt and the important message Diana wanted to share, to raise awareness of traffic safety. With this email, we wanted to thank the school, and particularly Diana's teachers, for inspiring and promoting creativity and social responsibility in such young children. We thought you would be proud to see (one of) the fruit of your daily work.

Warmly,

Lisa & Fulco

A student created and posted this sign to solve conflicts that were happening in the boys bathroom

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Partnering for safer rickshaw ride

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Reflections

During our conferences just after teaching this unit, all of us heard a lot of feedback from parents reporting that their children were becoming more active in solving problems at home. This matched what we were seeing and still see at the end of the school year. Students who take ownership and find proactive and constructive approaches to solving problems that emerge in our classroom community. We were also thrilled by the high level of student engagement and ownership in learning that we observed in this unit.

Insights

Here are a few insights we think we’ve gained from prototyping this PBL unit and using a design thinking process.

You can read about PBL and talk about PBL and plan a PBL unit, but there’s nothing like teaching a unit to gain understanding about how it’s different for students and different for teachers.

Mutual interest and excitement between teachers and students during a PBL unit increases the ownership and engagement for students and teachers.

We felt that creating and framing the driving question was crucial to the success of the unit.

We think the skill of improvisation was an important skill for us to have while teaching and planning a PBL unit. We had to react and respond creatively to best to support students’ different projects as we shifted from just thinking of ideas to implementing their different action plans.

Using children’s literature was powerful. It resulted in many productive class conversations about conflict and conflict resolution.

Connecting with other groups and experts in our building allowed our students to see lots of models of thinking and action that our students learned from.

We also felt that having a context that was meaningful to all of us helped us develop shared understanding.

References

Manifesto. (n.d.). Manifesto Project. Retrieved June 4, 2014, from (http://www.manifestoproject.it/bruce-mau/)