We have a new course at our high school titled “Innovative Design and Progressive Manufacturing” and it is based on young people learning and applying the Design Thinking Process to a problem of their choosing. I have visited the class a few times, but this week one of the teachers of the course shared a quick overview of what the young people were doing in class. In particular, the young people were struggling with the first step of the design thinking process which is empathy. Empathy, in this case, is defined as developing an understanding of the needs, thoughts, and motivations of the person for which you are designing a solution or product. Apparently, the young people in class are struggling with slowing down to understand the problem. They want to jump right into producing a product to “solve” the problem. As a result, they end up spending a lot of time on the wrong problem because they didn't have an understanding of the need. This didn’t come as too much of a surprise as these young people have spent years in schools which are designed to optimize on product over process and efficiency over empathy. However, an unforeseen connection I did make was the similarities between the design thinking process and “Plan B” from Dr. Ross Greene’s “Lost at School”.
Lost at School is a great read which I highly recommend. It addresses the fact that young people who struggle in school with behavioral issues are not intentionally trying to be a burden or cause issues. Greene believes the first step in working with young people struggling with behavioral issues in school is to “achieve the best possible understanding of a kid’s concern or perspective related to a given problem” (Greene, 2014, p.79). In other words, the first step to Plan B is Empathy. (Plan A, by the way. is basically “my way or the highway” and it usually doesn’t work in these situations.) Like the young people in the Design Learning class, many adults have a tendency to rush through or even skip this first important step in the process. Empathy as the first step in Plan B and the Design Thinking Process is not the only similarity between these two approaches.
Neither the Design Thinking Process stages or Plan B steps are necessarily linear. Of course certain steps must not be skipped over when first designing a solution in either process but there are many opportunities to revisit ideas, adapt based on testing, and revise. They key for being successfull in both of these processes is to slow down and put a lot of time into the first two stages. That is to say, we need to be sure we don’t skip straight to trying to solve the problem, but instead slow down in order to understand needs, thoughts, and motivations (empathy) and define the problem (not the symptoms of the problem). Albert Einstein in his well known quote about the importance of slowing down to understand and define a problem stated, "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask...for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minute."
I have often said, in education time is currency. How we spend it demonstrates what we value. Too often we, all educators, spend time racing to cover material in order to get answers (produce a product) and we rush right past developing an understanding of the young person’s needs (where they are) and what the next steps should be to help them to build off their current understanding (defining the problem). In other words we skip the first two steps of the aforementioned effective problem solving methods. I wonder how much more effective educators could be if we designed our lessons with these two methods in mind? Skipping these steps often means we are spending time and energy on the wrong question to solve. Like Einstein, if we take the time to understand the problem our limited time will be better spent. Certainly many teachers are shifting the classroom focus from product to process, but do the keys to this shift include slowing down to consider empathy and defining the problem? I also suspect we would find that although on the surface a course of study (COS) for a subject area looks linear the most effective COS documents are non-linear in nature. That is to say, the most effective plans are developed through the lens of empathy and understanding and are designed to be implemented with flexibility to include revisiting, refining, and redesigning. This is a shift in thinking, but one that would positively affect the young people in our classrooms much like Plan B or the Design Thinking Process. If we can make this shift, I strongly believe we would begin to look at our profession less as delivers of information and more as designers for learning.
References
Greene, Ross. (2014). Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are
Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. New York, NY: Scribner.
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