You don’t have to get into Stanford to qualify for the d.school’s brand of educational adventure. The right kindergarten might do.
“Having creative confidence is as important as literacy,” says d.school founder David Kelley; hence the wide range of initiatives to bring design thinking techniques to K-12 classrooms. “There’s a chance,” Kelley adds, to “turn on a whole group of children who are usually turned off” at one grade or another.
The hope is to engage as many teachers and administrators as possible and help them translate the d.school’s approach into relevant lessons for students of all ages. Last summer the d.school hosted workshops for more than 100 administrators from 11 California school districts, as well as some charter schools, and welcomed staffers from Henry Ford Learning Institutes around the country.
Melissa Pelochino, academic dean at Phoenix Academy, a charter school in East Palo Alto, refers to the d.school methodology as a mindset and says she has seen it produce “exponential” change in elementary school pupils. She participated in a two-day primer on applying design thinking in the classroom when she was a reading specialist at Stanford’s East Palo Alto Academy charter school, then adapted the process for her work with seventh and eighth graders reading far below standard level. She spun off assignments based on the experiences of characters in books, such as asking her students to design solutions for bullying. Their interest in schoolwork soared.
“That hooked me,” says Pelochino, who now advocates for the d.school approach in several charter schools operated by Aspire. “These kids were always considered failures. Design thinking unlocked something magical, because it led to them always succeeding.”
Rich Crandall, MBA ’07, director of the d.school’s K-12 initiative, expects upcoming workshop participants to spread the message even more widely: He has applicants from Africa, Asia and South America.
Repost from Stanford Magazine http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2011/marapr/features/k12.html