Education Innovation

Teaching In The White Spaces: Leaving The Right Things Out of Your Instruction

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote

“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub,

It is the center hole that makes it useful.

Shape clay into a vessel,

It is the space within that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows for a room,

It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there,

Usefulness from what is not there.”

Consider Lao Tzu's lesson in your classroom and in your instruction. The usefulness might be found in what you take away or what you leave out of your instruction. Like a diamond, great instruction requires that we strip away some things to make the whole brilliant and thus more valuable.

Consider this example. You are teaching a lesson on the geography and history of ancient Egypt. Instead of stating for students that the ancient Egyptian civilization arose around the banks of the Nile River leave something out.

Give your students a map or show them a Google Earth shot of Egypt and ask the students where they think the people of ancient Egypt lived. Next ask them why. Remove the facts and let them use their background knowledge and imagination.

While no means a major revelation, it is strange how often we feel the need to fill in the holes, the empty space for our students.

Leaving out the right ideas, concepts, information in our lessons engages the student’s imagination. This is the “white space” of instruction that I referred in Teaching In The White Space

As Matthew May points out in his fine book, The Pursuit of Elegance: Why The Best Ideas Have Something Missing, “What we normally think of as the easiest thing in the world to do—nothing—is in reality often the hardest.”

Doing nothing during a lesson is hard. We know we should let the students have some think time, or develop their own ideas and theories, but we often feel so pressed for time we simply ignore what we know we should do.

We feel the urge to fill up the time with activity or the silence with our voice. How powerful though, can white space be to engaging our students’ thinking and imagination?

Matthew May points out that the most innovative and creative individuals are, “…creatively engaging people’s imaginations by leaving out the right things.”  

Next time you are planning a lesson, think of what to do, but also think of what not to do. Plan for some “white space.”

Teaching In The White Spaces

According to Wikipedia, “In page layout, illustration and sculpture, white space is often referred to as negative space…. White space should not be considered merely 'blank' space — it is an important element of design which enables the objects in it to exist at all, the balance between positive (or non-white) and the use of negative spaces is key to aesthetic composition."

Wendy Richmond is a visual artist, author, educator and a contributor to Communication Arts. In a recent column she discusses the need for white space in teaching art.

Artists know that designing the void, or the white space is just as important as designing the content that surrounds it. Wendy explains it this way....

"In my teaching, I use the idea of white space as a metaphor. When I develop a syllabus, I also design the activities for which I will not be present. On the first day of class, I tell my students, “By the end of this course, I hope to be the least important person in this room.” I believe that in addition to providing the content, my role is to create an environment that contains an active void. I need to disappear enough for my students to jump in and fill the learning environment with their own excitement and discovery. Again, as in my artwork, it takes confidence to leave that space empty.

I have a friend who teaches memoir writing. In every session, each student reads a short piece of his own writing. In the first two classes, my friend makes notes as she listens, and then delivers a constructive critique. In the next class, she institutes a change. After each reading, instead of delivering her critique first, she waits for the participation of the other students. Inevitably, there is silence; an awkward void where there is no response.

Initially, my friend found it hard to remain quiet. She feels that it is her job to keep the class engaged, to be imparting knowledge. In other words, as she told me, she had to make sure they are getting their money’s worth. It required confidence to not fill the silence with her critique. She had to trust that this emptiness was essential; it allowed the students to develop their own responses. When her students began to talk, there was a new energy that continued not only during the coffee breaks, but between classes as well."

Have you considered the time you are not teaching, not speaking or directing students is just as important as the times you are?

Are you giving your student enough white space to operate in? Reminds me of the idea that the more I am teaching the less I am talking.

When using design thinking to plan your instruction, don’t neglect the white spaces. Find the right balance. It might make all the difference.

It's Never Too Early- Teaching Design Thinking In High School

From the website Good comes this article (Why We Should Teach Design Early) by Rob Stokes,a Senior Interaction Designer at frog design in Austin, Texas, on the need to begin teaching design thinking in high school.

What follows is an excerpt from the article...

 

Designers, through training and experience, develop a different lens through which to see the world. They move through spaces, environments, and systems, making observations and developing insights about what works well and what doesn’t. They then use those observations and insights to create innovative solutions for everyday problems. If design is the crossroads of beauty and purpose, design thinking is the intersection of creative and analytical thinking.

But when do we learn how to think like a designer?

In today’s world of standardized tests and performance-based educational funding, students are not evaluated on the way they approach a problem, but whether or not they come up with the right answer.

What happens when there are many right answers, as is often the case with non-linear design solutions? When can we start teaching students how to creatively evaluate their ideas?

Design education typically begins at the college level, but if we wait until then to teach design thinking we are missing critical points in the growth of young minds, whose ability to think creatively is boundless. Teaching high school students to think like designers would help shape the way they look at the world around them and positively affect their future endeavors.

Inspired by these notions, a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design got together and started an initiative called “TeachDesign.” The objective of this initiative is to expose high school students to design methodologies through immersive, real-world projects that have a lasting positive impact on the participating students, school, and community.

Read more: http://www.good.is/post/why-we-should-teach-design-early/#ixzz0fl4BQciH
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Design Thinking Picture of What The Education Experience Could Be

Design Thinking is about the human experience. David Kelley shared his mind map of what the K-12 education experience could be through the lens of Design Thinking in this article in Fast Company. 

 

Brainstorming at the d.school

This video from the Design School (d-school) at Stanford provides a great look at what Brainstorming is and isn't. Useful for all Professional Learning Communities, Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives, and school leadership teams.

Wicked Problems In Education Need Designed Solutions

During my current foray into Design Thinking I have been reading and enjoying the book The Design of Business by Roger Martin. In it I came across a brief primer by Jennifer Riel on what are known as wicked problems.

After reading it, I was struck by just how wicked the problems we face in education can be.

The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960's by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science.

Churchman describes wicked problems as, " a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing."

Take the issue of technology. How much technology is enough in school? Which technology should we focus on? Who decides? How do we measure it? How do we pay for it?

 Or take the issue of creativity. Do we attempt to teach creativity or let students use their own creativity? Can creativity be taught? If so, who should teach it? How do we measure it? Is there good creativity and bad creativity?

 Or how about the questions of making students go to school longer. They do they go more days or should they go longer each day? What about breaks? Should they go to school on Saturday? How long is too long? Do we pay teachers more for the longer day or just for more days?

 Each one of the problems opens us another can of worms as you dive deeper into it. There are so many factors involved with each. What does the research say? What do the parents think? What is best for the brain? How will it impact the budget? Who makes the final decisions? Who is in charge, what is best for our society? Which will ensure success in the future? Is it scalable? Who should be involved in crafting the solution? As you try to answer these questions more questions arise. It really gets...wicked.

 Jennifer Riel details how to know if you are facing a wicked problem. "The causes of the problem are not just complex but deeply ambiguous; you can't tell why things are happening the way they are and what causes them to do so.The problem doesn't fit neatly into any category you've encountered before; it looks and feels entirely unique, so the problem solving approaches you've used in the past don't seem to apply. Each attempt at devising a solution changes the understanding of the problem; merely attempting to come to a solution changes the problem and how you think about it. There is no clear stopping rule; it is difficult to tell when the problem is "solved" and what that solution may look like when you reach it."

Jennifer says, "With hard problem, your job is to look at the situation, identify a set of definite conditions, and calculate a solution. With wicked problems, the solution can no longer be the only or even the primary focus. Instead, dealing with the wicked problems demands the attention be paid to understanding the nature of the problem itself. Problem understanding is central; the solution, secondary. It's no wonder that so many designers have come to embrace the notion that their role is to work with wicked problems."

If, as Roger Martin warns, "Organizations dominated by analytical thinking are built to operate as they always have; they are structurally resistant to the ideas of designing a and redesigning themselves...over time. They are built to maintain the status quo"

 Education will have to solve its wicked problems by designing solutions. 

 Tim Brown, CEO of the design company IDEO and author of Change By Design says, "By integrating what is desirable from the human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable, designers have been able to create the products we enjoy today. Design thinking takes the next step, which is to put these tools into the hands of people who may have never though of themselves as designers and apply them to a vastly greater range of problems." 

And most importantly, design thinking helps you, "...grasp the needs the of the people you are trying to serve." That means the needs of our students. Solving wicked problems to serve our students is why educational design thinking is a welcome and needed approach in education. Using design thinking to solve the wicked problems of education is Education Innovation.

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