Musing about the American Education system

There's been a huge boom on social media about #edchat and #designthinking and redesigning classrooms so that they better adhere to students' needs.

And that's frickin awesome.

If you're not completely up-to-date with these developments, check out books like Awakening Genius in the Classroom by Thomas Armstrong, Change by Design by Tim Brown, and Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft. They're all fantastic reads - easy to get through but impactful. And they're only a tiny fraction of the growing number of texts on these topics.

BUT even though we have a bunch of people recognizing the flaws in our current education system and discussing creative solutions to those flaws, it's difficult for teachers to actually apply those design thinking ideas in their classroom.

That's because our education system is a wicked problem by nature.

There isn't just one root cause that is to blame; there are dozens of overlapping issues that as a whole create one huge mess.

A lot of it has to do with power and control: who gets to say what students are supposed to learn and how they're supposed to learn it? That power is usually placed in the hands of administrators, but those administrators have to meet certain educational requirements that are set up by the state and federal governments, who ultimately benefit from large universities and companies like College Board raking in cash from students. So high schools end up being incredibly competitive environments in which kids take more and more AP classes to show "competence", with the hopes that those AP test scores will get them into a good college.

To me, that system seems really messed up. What happened to the excitement of learning, to the curiosity and wonder and creativity and hands-on learning that is proven to be the best teacher? It's all been placed on the sidelines, as the system favors efficiency and teaching students how to get good grades on tests rather than effectiveness and teaching students to be curious about the world and driven to cause positive change. The learning should almost come as a side-effect to the curiosity and drive students should have to explore and figure things out.

On top of all that, it's also hard for teachers to give each student a personalized experience, since there are tons of students in just one class AND the teacher has to grade countless tests, essays, and assignments for each student. There's just no possible way to give each student an individual experience with the current system we have in place. The teacher would have to go gradeless, or not give tests, or do something drastic like that, actions which the school district might not exactly agree with (Check out my independent study teachers' blog; he's gone gradeless and has long since done away with formal standardized assessments.

Anyway, back to my main point: even though many educators and leaders are talking about human-centered learning and the benefits of integrating the design thinking process into classrooms, I've noticed that it's very difficult for teachers to introduce those ideas into their curriculum and create a collaborative, creative learning environment. Whether it be because they haven't been a part of these discussions or they're restricted by district requirements and a huge course workload (especially with AP classes), the idea of a collaborative, discussion and inquiry-based classroom has been put on the back burner and forgotten.

I recently read Thomas Armstrong's Awakening Genius in the Classroom, and it inspired me to design something that would make design thinking ideas and the twelve qualities of genius (curiosity, joy, wonder, inventiveness, sensitivity, creativity, flexibility, and so on) that Armstrong enummerates more accessible to teachers.

The design that I came up with is a set of twelve tarot-style illustrated cards, one for each of the twelve qualities of genius.

Some inspiration for card illustrations that I found online:

I want my illustrations to be very whimsical and inspirational, with tons of vivid colors.

That's very representative of my art style in general; bubbly and excited, with paints thrown into a chaotic splash of color.

Each card will have a creative and inspirational design centered around its quality, as well as a QR code that directs users to a webpage for that quality. Each webpage would describe its designated quality and explain how it can be integrated into the classroom. If the quality was 'creativity', for example, there would be links to videos, articles, and other resources that show how creativity can be incorporated into daily classroom activities.

The twelve genius quality pages would be part of a website called Daily Dose of Genius.

This is the design I came up with for the website's logo. Probably going to alter the color scheme and structural design, but the wording will be the same.

This would all be, of course, done for the Cooper Hewitt 2018 Design Challenge (check out my previous post for the deets).

I'll post a little progress update on where I'm planning to take this project and how far I've gotten into my material.

#Education #questions #designchallenge #humancenteredlearning #challenge