Prototype

The image above is a screenshot taken from the Introduction to Design Thinking Process Guide from Stanford's d.school.

Prototyping as a habit of mind

In the course of this semester-long project, we realized that participants we hoped to engage in design were relatively inexperienced with design processes and curious about them. In the professional learning sessions we lead, we incorporated design activities that highlighted design thinking habits and did not specifically speak to issues of technology or equity. We explained that school stakeholders can be remiss to suspend disbelief about new or innovative ideas because of the complexity of their jobs and the pressures of a school setting on teachers and leaders. In the first design day, participants build with legos in order to experience how collaboration looked and felt during rapid prototyping. The looping video below shows participants building lego frogs without instructions against the clock.

The video below shows participants engaged in a marshmallow tower building challenge. Narrated by Joe Dillon, the video shows how we unpacked the fun prototyping experiment.

Prototyping inquiry projects

Using a very loose inquiry project framework and some paragraph-long inquiry examples from the appendix of Douglas Reeves' book Reframing Teacher Leadership to Improve Your School, we asked participants to make actionable plans for investigating issues of techquity in their contexts. The project descriptions below are excerpted from a grant proposal Remi Holden coordinated at the end of the project. They are important to include here because they show the type of thinking that resulted from the professional learning. 

Project Title: Inquiry project- math instructional coaching and mobile devicesGrade level: Middle School Discipline: MathAbstract: Our school has adopted a policy of allowing students to bring their digital devices from home but math teachers are uncertain about how these devices might support student learning in class. In this project interested teachers will be invited to co-design and test strategies for integrating students personal mobile devices in ways that connect the learning in the classroom with the real world, support student directed learning and increase students’ depth of knowledge in mathematics. We will capture and analyze student work for each strategy, and participating teachers will make observational notes about each approach.

Project Title: Student goal setting/ personalizing the reading blockGrade level: Elementary 3-5Discipline: Literacy blockAbstract: In the beginning of the year the teacher will create a graph projection of student’s reading growth throughout the year. Teachers will confer with individual students, sharing the data to discuss their level compared to grade level proficiency and plot where they fall on the graph. Students will collaborate on an explicit goal with teacher to include: duration of reading, word work, silent reading, oral reading, digital vs. physical text, genre, close reading, annotations, nonfiction, fiction, oral language experiences, pull out intervention services, and small reading group work). Students will choose how they will spend the rest of their reading block and homework, recording the goals. Students will determine the length of their goals and refine and tweak goals based on monitoring and metacognitive work like daily reflections and journaling.

Project Title: Elementary Computer Lab Inquiry ProjectGrade level: K-5Discipline: All Abstract: How do we make connections between the computer lab and the classroom? The model that classroom teachers gravitate toward is a rotation model. This approach includes any course or subject in which students rotate—either on a fixed schedule or at the teacher’s discretion—among learning modalities, at least one of which is online learning. Often students rotate between stations for online learning, small-group instruction, and pencil-and-paper assignments at their desks. This project will seek to develop a structure for communication between classroom teacher and educational technologist in the lab to extend classroom learning into the lab.

Project Title: Leveraging teacher knowledge for professional learningGrade level:Middle School Discipline: Professional learning across disciplinesAbstract: How might we design a framework that leverages and develops teachers’ knowledge and use of technology to support rigorous learning for all students in the classroom? We have been working with the techquity design team in order to develop our understanding of technology and equity within our school. There are teachers that fall along all parts of the spectrum of technology integration. Use and discipline are two obstacles that divide people and their ideas about technology. This project will seek to build in time and opportunity for technology training and conversations to take place school-wide in order to encourage the shifts in thinking and use that will be necessary. A key action step will be to develop professional learning around basic technology usage and allow staff to ‘test out’ so they can move on to more advanced learning of their own choosing.

Project Title: Teacher and student resource siteGrade level: Middle School  Discipline: All disciplinesAbstract: We would like to develop the staff’s understanding of the walls that can be removed through the use of technology.  We are thinking about the way in which technology eases access to resources, information and people, that are available to the staff and then the students.  We think that this is an important step in achieving equity for our students. This project will seek to create a resources site for the students that simplifies the way students can identify resources for any given subject area and that allows them to choose their resources based on their needs.  A key action step will be to create video demonstrations to show staff how these resources support learning in various content settings.