IDEO is a global recognized design company. Doubtless you have heard of their books The Ten Faces of Innovation and The Art of Innovation. They have put their creative thinking towards education. Their approach to making "Social Impact" is to use their powerful design thinking and focus it on our world's social problems. "We believe in the power of design thinking to create significant social change."
by Vermin Inc
MetropolicMag.com conducted an interview with IDEO on their Social Impact approach to education. The article titled "IDEO's Ten Tips For Creating a 21st-Century Classroom Experience" is quoted in its entirety below.
"In recent years, IDEO has spent a lot of time and effort thinking
about education. The firm’s work with Ormondale Elementary School, in
Portola Valley, California, helped pioneer a special
“investigative-learning” curriculum that inspires students to be
seekers of knowledge. We spoke to Sandy Speicher, who heads the Design
for Learning efforts at IDEO. Her insights provide powerful lessons for
architects and designers creating the schools of tomorrow:
1. Pull, don’t push.
Create an environment that raises a lot of questions from each of your
students, and help them translate that into insight and understanding.
Education is too often seen as the transmission of knowledge. Real
learning happens when the student feels the need to reconcile a
question he or she is facing—and can’t help but seek out an answer.
2. Create from relevance.
Engage kids in ways that have relevance to them, and you’ll capture
their attention and imagination. Allow them to experience the concepts
you’re teaching firsthand, and then discuss them (or, better yet, work
to address them!) instead of relying on explanation alone.
3. Stop calling them “soft” skills.
Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and
adaptability are not just nice to have; they’re the core capabilities
of a 21st-century global economy facing complex challenges.
4. Allow for variation.
Evolve past a one- size-fits-all mentality and permit mass
customization, both in the system and the classroom. Too often,
equality in education is treated as sameness. The truth is that
everyone is starting from a different place and going to a different
place.
5. No more sage onstage.
Engaged learning can’t always happen in neat rows. People need to get
their hands dirty. They need to feel, experience, and build. In this
interactive environment, the role of the teacher is transformed from
the expert telling people the answer to an enabler of learning. Step
away from the front of the room and find a place to engage with your
learners as the “guide on the side.”
6. Teachers are designers.
Let them create. Build an environment where your teachers are actively
engaged in learning by doing. Shift the conversation from prescriptive
rules to permissive guidance. Even though the resulting environment may
be more complicated to manage, the teachers will produce amazing
results.
7. Build a learning community.
Learning doesn’t happen in the child’s mind alone. It happens through
the social interactions with other kids and teachers, parents, the
community, and the world at large. It really does take a village.
Schools should find new ways to engage parents and build local and
national partnerships. This doesn’t just benefit the child—it brings
new resources and knowledge to your institution.
8. Be an anthropologist, not an archaeologist.
An archaeologist seeks to understand the past by investigating its
relics and digging for the truth of what was. An anthropologist studies
people to understand their values, needs, and desires. If you want to
design new solutions for the future, you have to understand what people
care about and design for that. Don’t dig for the answer—connect.
9. Incubate the future.
What if our K–12 schools took on the big challenges that we’re facing
today? Allow children to see their role in creating this world by
studying and creating for topics like global warming, transportation,
waste management, health care, poverty, and even education. It’s not
about finding the right answer. It’s about being in a place where we
learn ambition, involvement, responsibility, not to mention science,
math, and literature.
10. Change the discourse.
If you want to drive new behavior, you have to measure new things.
Skills such as creativity and collaboration can’t be measured on a
bubble chart. We need to create new assessments that help us understand
and talk about the developmental progress of 21st-century skills. This
is not just about measuring outcomes, but also measuring process. We
need formative assessments that are just as important as numeric ones.
And here’s the trick: we can’t just have the measures. We actually have
to value them.
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