Design Thinking And Student Lead Curriculum

After my introduction to both the design thinking and HA framework, I have spent hours of planning and wrapping my mind over how I’m going to make these two frameworks applicable to my class, and to my students. Through brainstorming and my execution of these two work process application and framework, I found a lot of struggles with project based, and student lead curriculum. However, the end results were rewarding to both myself, the teacher, and the students. I must say that this journey was hard, uncomfortable, yet very exciting and rewarding. When I first introduced the design thinking to my two study skills classes, they were very excited to hear that they were to creating a classroom and the ultimate learning experience. However,

I to had to go through the design thinking process just by planning these project based lessons, and think what do I want my students to learn for this experience, and how do I make it meaningful, but yet very regiours and rewarding. Once the students finished their ultimate learning experience, we decided that we would incorporate more projects. As a class we decided to support people experiencing homelessness and made this into a project. We used the design thinking process throughout the project. We first planed what was our goal, and that was to feed the homeless and elderly in our community. We made a deadline, and students made a prioritizing checklist with dates, and most important to not as important. Students took on different task to complete. Therefore, some worked individually, and others worked in a group, and sometimes all students did both. Student brainstormed how they were going to complete the project. My students conducted research through readings and videos concerning the people experiencing homelessness and what types of problems elderly encounter. Also, in this process the students did a self-reflection sheet on every friday that was based on the GLOʻs. Through this part of the homeless project students were only in the define process. This process alone took one whole quarter to

I had to ask questions, and had to support their thoughts, and in reality I really had no guidance in this. My best approach to this was to approach as a critical friend that gave possible ideas, and or to build conversations. By trying to figure out the best way to support my students, I also found most of the students took on accountability, because they noticed that this was indeed a team effort. They knew just by this type of project that if one fail we all fail. Therefore, their accountability level went higher, and pride for work went higher. Accountability and pride are very important skill or value that I want my students to learn to have and to obtain. I also found that I was no longer was the teacher that had a cookie cutter end result or process, and this made it hard for me to ensure what I was doing project based learning in the correct way of process. With that, I had to be on my toes to make sure that I was correctly and appropriately supporting my students in the best possible way. I feel that the discomfort of not knowing if my students are headed the right direction or if I am supporting them effectively might subside over more project based