This week I really found Stanford's Design Thinking Bootleg to be really interesting an inspiring. I especially found the seven different design mindsets described on the second page to be really insightful in terms of embracing a design mindset in the classroom. The two mindsets that seemed most relevant and impactful to me were the fourth and fifth mindsets, embrace experimentation and be mindful of process.
Embrace Experimentation I know that personally I have had a hard time experimenting in my classroom. My students are generally below grade level and I always feel the time crunch of moving through all of the curriculum by the end of the year. Because of these factors I often get a slightly panicked feeling when I think about experimenting in the classroom. This does not mean that I never try new strategies or tools in the classroom, but it does mean that I try plan them to a T beforehand and dismiss them quickly if they don't work exactly the way I want them to. I want to become more patient in this regard. Intellectually I know that things rarely work perfectly the first time, and that experimentation is a process of trial and error. If I stop using new strategies or tools at the first error, then I am not giving those strategies or techniques the opportunity to be successful. Be Mindful of Process This mindset encouraged designers to understand where they are in the design process and to be aware of the best methods to use in that particular stage. This not only applies the design process, but the learning process as well. It is always important for teachers, parents, and students to understand that learning is a process. We are all often stressed when it seems like students "aren't learning," but we need to remember that failure is always part of the learning process. I think if I could create a pictorial which described the learning process in a similar way to the design process, it would help students to understand that struggling is a normal and necessary part of the learning process that will not last forever. Overall I have really enjoyed thinking about the design process in education and am excited to learn more about it!
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When I first sat down to read the Dervin article, I picked it up, read the first two pages, laughed about how the article about sense-making didn’t make any sense, put it down, and walked away. But the next day I remembered a strategy I used in college to finish all of my readings. I majored in political science and history so there was a lot of reading! I have always been an auditory learner and in high school I read Shakespeare out loud to help make sense of it. So I decided to read my college assignments out loud as well. Not only did reading out loud help me to stay focused and awake, but it also helped me to better comprehend what I was reading. So I decided to apply the same method to reading the Dervin article. And again I found that reading it out loud helped me to make sense of the dense, but fascinating writing.
I would like to use my own experience reading this article as an explanation of Dervin’s main points in the article. At the beginning of the article Dervin discusses how people interact with the world in unique ways because every person is unique. This means that data doesn't tell us about humans or what is real to them. So we should focus on how humans interact with the world, and the decisions they make when faced with challenges. Darvin proposes that humans, while unique, benefit from similar strategies when faced with similar problems. She then describes the experience of facing a challenge by explaining that experience in three parts. The first part of the experience is the event which is the situation that presents a challenge. In my circumstance the event was that the article was difficult to read. The next part of the experience is the gap. The gap is the strategy that a person uses to help them overcome the event. Reading the article out loud to myself was my gap. Finally there is the use, which is the reason why a person needed to overcome the event. For me the use was needing to be able to summarize and reflect on the article. The main takeaway I have from Dervin’s article is that we, as educators need to focus on providing our students with a variety of strategies for them to overcome their challenges. In order to teach this lesson to a group of high schoolers I would first show them different short video clips demonstrating how similar hand gestures have very different meanings in different cultures. This would demonstrate how we all perceive information differently and according to our backgrounds. I would then show them an image of a woman next to a wall. The wall has a rope attached to the top of it , and there is an ice cream cone on the other side of the wall. I would explain to the students that this woman loves ice cream. The wall is the event because it is the challenge she faces in order to get what she wants. The rope is the gap because it's the strategy she can use to overcome the event. And finally the ice cream is the use, because it is the reason she wants to get over the wall. And finally I would explain to the students that no matter what background a person came from , they would all use the rope to get over the wall. So we are united when we are placed in similar situations or are facing similar challenges. |
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May 2018
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Photo used under Creative Commons from Wajahat Mahmood