“Don’t Talk to Strangers”
Anyone alive today was probably told, “Don’t talk to strangers!” as a child. Today’s students are no exception. Yet who among us hasn’t asked a stranger for a ride on Uber or Lyft, stayed in a stranger’s house through AirBNB or VRBO, or even dated strangers on a never-ending list of dating apps?
On the surface, these innovations are indicative of our ever-changing world, but they also represent a greater shift in how fast technology is changing us on a personal, social, and professional level.
Many lessons these students learn in the average school setting may not be useful five, ten, or fifty years down the road. While educators are aware this fact means a complete restructuring of our schools, many are at a loss as to how to implement a plan with longevity and applicability to today’s youth.
Part of the problem is that we’re still practicing the outdated don’t-talk-to-strangers mentality. In fact, the opposite is the solution. Collaboration, community building, and open sharing of information and resources are key to developing lasting lessons to our students.
Today, I’m here to practice what I preach, by talking about a solution that the CLI has found most effective in shaping life-ready students for the future.
The Power of Design Challenges in an Educational Setting
Despite what some cynics believe, students are ready to make an impact on the world around them. However, as students grow and understand the world they live in, they can become apathetic towards school when subjects don’t address the big picture. By the time they’re reaching the fourth or fifth grade, “So what?” is on the lips of every unengaged student. They stop caring about lessons that make no effort to relate to their actual lives, or they feel like nothing matters because they’re unable to fix larger problems.
As I’ve discussed in this article already, it can be challenging to relate a lesson to the real world because the world is changing so rapidly. Therefore, one of the most effective ways to inspire students through teaching is to empower them to be curious, proactive, and adaptable to the changing world around them.
Empowering students means giving them:
- The context to see how their time and brainpower will impact them and the world in the future
- The tools they need to achieve real solutions and change
- The space to try, fail, and succeed with their ideas
As we will see as we dive more deeply into the way Design Challenges work, this facilitation allows schools to succeed in making students life-ready where other plans have failed. The result? Activating each student’s curiosity and passion for learning.
For instance, one common science lesson for the average middle school student is learning about water quality, water contamination, and water purification. Your lesson plan may include:
- Direct instruction on water quality
- Having students look at contaminated water
- Showing them the difference between pure and contaminated water under a microscope
- Going across the street to your local pond to check if the water is contaminated
These are all good practices in experimental learning, but they still lack the greater world impact of the topic in question.
By partnering with educators, the CLI can help teachers ask more critical thinking and big-picture questions that make learners more invested in the subject matter. Some examples may be:
- What are some issues with water contamination that we can point to in our community?
- Are there significant water contamination issues in the greater United States? (Ever heard of Flint, Michigan?)
- What targets are the United Nations looking at for their 6th Sustainable Development Goal, “Clean Water and Sanitation”? Are they addressing pollution? How about developing countries?
These questions turn a scientific issue into a social issue. They also bring students from an individual interest to a local—and eventually global—context.
As I mentioned earlier, simply shedding a light on these big problems isn’t enough to empower our students. In fact, leaving the lesson plan here may have the opposite effect: a feeling of helplessness in the face of larger-than-life issues. This hurdle is why designing challenges for children to grapple with is the final essential step in activating their curiosity.
In the case of a water contamination lesson, the CLI may design a challenge to get clean water to a family in a Rwandan village.
If you’re new to this level of big-picture application, this particular design challenge may seem like stretching students and educators beyond their means. I assure you that once a class has access to the resources the CLI provides, the exact opposite is true.
Using the design thinking model, we can break this and other design challenges into 5 steps:
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
Let’s explore the Rwandan village challenge with these five steps.
Empathize: Learning about the people who are affected by water contamination.While developing countries are the number one sufferers of water contamination, we can’t exactly take our students to Rwanda to learn about the problem on an average school day. However, the CLI can facilitate:
- Field trips to the Gates Discover Center’s exhibit “Design with the 90%: Improving Lives Around the World” to learn about the issues of clean water in Rwanda
- Skype sessions with social innovators developing sanitation systems for schools in Kenya
- Individual research opportunities, led by our school librarians and humanities teachers
By learning about and speaking with people who have real-life experience in the issue they’re studying, students will better grasp the implications of the work they’re about to do.
In addition, the skills they develop in the “empathize” stage of a Design Challenge will teach them how to assess the societal impact of their actions. This ability has been cited as one of the driving forces to students succeeding in life, regardless of how the world will change in the future.
Define: Specifying the problem to solve.
Adults and children alike are prone to feel overwhelmed by a large goal. However, breaking a big goal into smaller, solvable problems is an essential step to being a productive member of society.
In addition to understanding the goal (i.e. get clean water to a family in a Rwandan village), you must also understand the problem. One goal often needs to address multiple problems. For this challenge, the students may define the problem as, “How do we develop an easier, but cost-efficient way for people to transport water to their village?” or “How might we design a filtration system for the lake water next to their village?”
Each problem will imply different solutions. But once you understand the specific problem you’re tackling, students can better brainstorm what can be done to fix it. When students are able to identify the problems standing in the way of their goals, they will be more equipped to take steps to succeed in whatever job they pursue.
Ideate: Plan a solution to the problem.
Our students will be asked to change professions more than any other generation before them. In addition, technology, climate change, and world power shifts mean that being a leader will require creative solutions to new problems. Teaching adaptability requires students to develop elastic thinking skills such as brainstorming before they attempt to enact a plan.
Rather than flying blindly into a possible solution, the Design Challenge approach teaches students to:
- Brainstorm a myriad of possible solutions
- Choose the solution they think will work the best using the tools at their disposal
- Plan out the specifics of their solution through group discussion, drawing out a plan on paper, or writing down the steps they’d like to take
Prototype: Create a working model of a proposed solution
Putting a plan into action can be the most exciting—and scary—step for students to take. Therefore, Design Challenges ease students into creating fully functioning prototypes. First, students use craft supplies, like cardboard and glue. Often, ideas that seem great on paper fall apart in the real world. By providing students with malleable, rebuildable, and easily replaceable materials, they can feel free to fail, adjust, and try again.
Many of us remember building structures from marshmallows and Q-Tips, and even today many lessons will stop at prototypes built from basic supplies. While this approach allows students to grapple with the frustration of putting a perfect plan into imperfect action, it can end up leaving them feeling nothing but frustrated, or at the very least like their hard work didn’t actually accomplish anything worthwhile.
To combat this, we believe that students should have the opportunity to create more sophisticated prototypes, the kind that innovators use to put their social and scientific work into action. After experimenting with their simple prototypes, the CLI provides higher quality materials and guidance on more complex prototype development, such as designing for 3D printed models.
Whether any one student is passionate about water in Africa does not affect the outcome the prototype stage has on the average student’s experience. This stage provides the opportunity to practice taking action on their ideas and having a positive impact on the lives of others. They see their idea translate into the real world. Students will learn that thoughts and ideas are important, but without action we can’t proactively affect the world around us. In addition, the skills they learn at each step of the prototype stage can be transferred in the future to whatever they are passionate about.
Test: Determining if their prototype accomplishes the original goal.
Testing if something works the way it’s supposed to work can be exhilarating and rewarding, regardless of whether a prototype succeeds or fails. Students are asked to test their prototypes in front of their classmates, as well as experts that are currently trying to solve the water contamination crisis. Sharing their final products allows for better collaboration and sharing of ideas for how to improve the world. This process teaches students that no person is an island, and they must be comfortable sharing their work with others in their community.
The Result: Activating curiosity
Ideally the learning doesn’t stop there. Our goal is that after the Rwandan water contamination project, a student will approach their teacher to talk about the park across the street from their school. “I want to talk about how to keep dogs safe at the park,” they may explain. “I know that three dogs died last year from contaminated water in the pond.”
This is the perfect example of how design challenges empower students to take action for the things they care about. In the case of the student who wants to learn about keeping the pond safe for dogs, we will say, “Okay, let’s talk. Who can you talk to for answers to your questions? Which of your classmates want to join you?” From there, the student will feel prepared to take action and change their environment.
What Do You Need to Create a Long-Lasting Education for Today’s Students?
Regardless of how effective a lesson plan is in theory, it can never come into fruition without the proper resources. Something as involved as a design challenge will likely cause disbelief in an experienced teacher. Many an educator has burned out or failed to carry out an ambitious lesson plan due to a lack of structural support. But it’s our children who suffer in the long term. Without an education that prepares them for their future, students are less likely to succeed in their life after school. CLI will offer that support and those resources so that long-lasting education can take place for our teachers and students. No teacher or student is (or should be) an island.