 Well, hello. It is January the 20th, 2017 here in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. But it is other times in other parts of the world and we are fortunate to be joined by some international educators today. My name is Wes Friar and I am here to facilitate a panel discussion on design thinking as part of the 2016-17 K-12 online conference and we're hopeful that we'll have a few live viewers join us but fully expect most people to tune into this after the fact. And I'd like to welcome our panel and then we'll start jumping in to do some questions. So let me pass the baton as it were up north first up to Brad to introduce himself. Tell us where he's at and what his school situation is. Well, thanks. It's a treat to be on this panel. I mean, I think all of us in education are wrestling with design thinking one way or the other. Whatever your role is, if you're ahead of school, you're feeling that pressure to deal with it. And if you're a teacher, you're trying to figure out how to make it go. So I work up in Vancouver. I work at Mulgrave School. We're a K-12 independent IB school and I've been here for, I guess, my six years now. And, you know, we approach design thinking. We haven't picked it up as kind of a thing. The IB program has a design course in it and we kind of wrap up in there. But that's not to say we don't pay attention to design thinking. I think one of the key things, and we can talk a little bit about this as the discussion rolls out, but as John Spencer was talking in a little video that's available on the web page that you set up for this, that there are three parts to design thinking. There's mindset, which is, you know, part of it. And then there's the design thinking, which is the process, and then the launch, which is the framework. To our thinking, the mindset is the key part for us. The mindset, you know, design thinking, there are a lot of definition, but I think it has something to do with bringing in the emotional content in a community or whatever it is you're doing and checking in with that human response to things and not looking at whatever the project is, whether you're building a new wing to the school as we did, or you're looking at designing an app for a mobile device or you're designing a piece of furniture. You know, there's the precision we want to bring to the actual object that we're doing, but that's not much good if you haven't invested, you know, some of the emotional content, the reasons why we want, you know, the end game is to make a more desirable product. And I think this focus on the desirability is the key part to it. And as I said, and we'll talk about, we just recently finished a major new addition to the school. And what was fascinating is the whole design process was run on these very soft principles, not what you would normally think about. We were obviously making decisions about number of square meters of space, but all of that was informed by these principles and we'll talk more in a minute. Awesome. All right. Well, let's go across the pond, as it were, to Brian in Copenhagen. Welcome, Brian. I'm been at Copenhagen for about six months. And before that, I was actually working with John Rinker in Nunging, China. And before that, in Japan. And so you can see there's a pattern with us international educators. We seem to just float around the world. And so this is my latest spot. As far as design thinking, I use it as an approach for management. I use it as a systems approach for the majority of international schools that have been IB schools, so that design is part of the curriculum. And that's the case at Copenhagen. But what I'm seeing is that it's within only the design department. I'm not seeing it in other aspects of the school. The same was true with Nunging, about probably six or seven years ago. It was just part of the curriculum. And then from there, at that school, we worked on spreading it out. So it became a systems type of approach. As far as my own background with design, before I got into education, I actually studied industrial design. So a lot of the basis is my philosophy of how design thinking is coming from a design school experience. And it's really interesting to sort of watch the different videos or actually go to sort of education versions of design thinking. So I've done a lot of U.N. Macintosh work drops. And there's certain aspects of it that I get kind of confused, but then it comes back and I understand it. When I was looking at the John Spencer video, I see aspects that are familiar to me. And there's other aspects that are not so familiar with me. So for me, it's one of the things I try to do with design thinking is I try not to use the word design thinking too much. I try to get to know people and learn their version of design thinking. And then relate to them. So if they're English teachers, it's going to be the writing process, science teacher, scientific process. I don't try to introduce new vocabulary. And so for this first year, I actually haven't been mentioning those words, but I'm using design thinking as it's my research phase and that's been empathetic to the environment. So that's where I'm at right now at Copenhagen. Awesome. Well, I'm glad you mentioned John Rinker because he was planning to participate with us from China. And in fact, it was quite challenging to find a time that would allow both North Americans, Europeans, and East Asians to get online and not be up at 3 a.m. But he has come down with the flu and definitely felt that in the cause of self-care, staying up till midnight or whatever would not be great. So we regret that he cannot join us, but we do hope that you'll connect with him and we are going to continue to include in our notes that will accompany this session on our K-12 Online Conference links to him and his Twitter profile. And you both mentioned John Spencer, and we want everyone to know that the K-12 Online Conference, which has been going for 10 years, has shifted a little bit this year to a mini-conference focus and rather than have four strands with keynotes in each strand and about 10 presentations with each in a pre-conference keynote, kicked off this year with a mini-conference approach where Julie Lindsay was focused on global collaboration and had a keynote actually in several parts followed by a panel discussion, and then part two was learning spaces. And so David Jakes had done that keynote and then again followed with a panel discussion. John Spencer wasn't able to join us for this live panel, but did a great job putting together a video that we want to commend to all of you to check out. In fact, he is the co-author of a book launch that focuses on design thinking. And one of our main purposes in doing this is to give us an opportunity to respond to John's video and talk a little bit about the take that he had on design thinking, but really to flesh out how design, what design thinking means in different contexts and to hopefully inspire others to learn more, to get ideas for what their next steps might be if they want to use design thinking for their own projects or own leadership in their classrooms, in their schools and in their contexts. So let me just go ahead and kind of go back to the beginning and we'll start with you, Brad. If you were talking to someone who really had not heard of design thinking, didn't have the background Brian was blessed to have as far as industrial design, as a designer in a formal sense, thinking about architecture or anything and they haven't heard of design thinking in school. How do you kind of give an elevator pitch or a summary of what it is and why it's something that's important for schools? Yeah, as I said just a moment ago, I think the key thing is that design thinking is asking us to check in with the people we're designing for. It's really easy, particularly in the schools that are up and running. You've got your day-to-day tremendous pressure to get things done in limited time that we all have to get an idea and just start building it without taking an appropriate amount of time to check in with the people you're building that thing is, whatever it is. Again, it could be an individual students project for science fair. It could be something that's going on in English class. It could be the building of an entire school or something like that. It's easy in our day-to-day, which is kind of funny when you think about it because we work at schools and schools are all about interactions with people. We kind of forget about those interactions with people. We're so driven to deliver our content, teach the skills and everything to check in with what's the end game here and do the people really need? Do they really want what we think they want? That check is really important because so many times we think this is the problem and then as soon as you start digging, it's not there. In fact, in my experience, the problem is almost never where you're looking for it. When we're dealing with... There's a key difference, I think. There are two sort of fundamental sets of problems. One of them are complicated problems and those are cause-effect problems, linear problems. You turn it and tap and water comes out and if you were to cut that tap in half, you would see the valve and the screw that opened it up and you could understand how turning the tap makes the water complicated problems can get enormously complicated like the space shuttle. Tremendous number of moving parts, but it's fundamentally linear. When you're dealing with human beings, it's a complex problem now and they're notorious, they're messy, they're never really completed, hard to understand, they're hard to control and all the rest of it. We tend to treat a lot of our problems in schools as complicated problems. We write a check and put enough time into them and they're fixed for you. But almost everything we do, whether it's a class or designing a school project or building a building again is a very complex endeavor because human beings are in there and design thinking is the thing, in my experience, that best enables us to get our head around the complexity of the problem. There are a variety of methods, there are a variety of schools, people you can talk to, you and Mackintosh again, I've worked with you and I know them well and you can find this kind of methodology that goes in there, we're working with our people and make sure that the problem we're trying to solve is in fact the problem that's out there. Awesome. Well, how about you, Brian, how did you and John and China working together approach that and how are you taking your experiences with design thinking to explain that and as you've already said, you're not necessarily using the words and the vocabulary, but what are you using as a guiding definition? Well, I mean, I look at design thinking and it's accepting that failure is part of the learning process and so then it's also it's taking that feedback and making it effective so it's working on learning to you know, there's so many times where people are afraid to actually give true feedback, they always just want to say the good things or that was good, that was cool. That doesn't actually help it doesn't help the person working on that project in any way but if it can actually be very specific in that feedback constructive then that's part of that design thinking process. One of the if I look in my history, I was a design teacher then I went into education, but I had this big gap of where I felt like I didn't have my background of that undergrad didn't have a purpose in education but it took some time where it did start to feel a purpose and I think when that happened is when I went to like a maker fair before that I went to what was called a bar camp which is similar to an ed camp bar camp is not about drinking it's about learning and it's more in a non-profit professional environment and one person his name is Mitch Altman and he started these he helped start hacker spaces around the world and if I think about trying to get people to understand sort of design thinking if we take John Spencer's video and he talks about that he talks about making stuff and maker fair, hacker spaces all of that is that making part and the design thinking part is the philosophy behind it so if you're an educator and you want to know that stuff I would go to try to find the closest hacker space in your community and get involved with it and that will start that sort of incubation process well that maybe sets up a question to talk a little bit about space and design thinking the last strand that we had was learning spaces and certainly lots of discussion about how important the space is and maybe this will set you up a little bit Brad to talk about your design of your building how do you all see space affecting or enabling design thinking or perhaps impeding it well I would actually jump off Brian your point about building this idea of accepting failure I think we have to even move beyond that I mean that's kind of the buzz word now but as soon as you move into you can change accepting failure into accepting an iterative process there's actually is no success or failure you just keep building forever almost certainly on key things and this might be partly a function of schools where we're so focused on end product and you know what mark did I get I think that infuses our whole thing so if you think building a kind of space can support that I mean it's difficult to show a kind of a causal relationship but I'm sure that partly space and partly culture and those things are intimately connected helps helps do that if your spaces are open and everything your work is highly visible that starts to pull us back from this you know we've got to get to the finished product and I don't want you to see my work until it's done everything secret we're not sharing we're not collaborating but there are lots of windows lots of light big open space as people are working on big tables small tables and so we can see what everybody is doing that change that starts to change them it doesn't change the mind that it at least allows this new mindset to grow in that space in a much easier way one of the best books I've read about education that's not about education is is David Burns book how music works so David Byrd you know frontman for talking heads and he has this section in there where he says that Mozart could not have composed the work he did the music he did until the invention of the concert hall that we think genius and creativity and clever design are kind of spontaneous and can happen everywhere maybe but they're much more a product of the space so you know if you go to a concert hall the reason you can have a single quiet note on a violin or on a piccolo in the middle of this huge room maybe a thousand or two thousand people in the audience is because the space is designed to carry that music forward you know conversely I mean for example I was at a Dan Nagan concert and I'm a big fan of his music but it happened to be in a proper concert hall and I actually walked out because his music is rock it's heavy it's percussive you just wound up with all this music reverberating around you can't invent rock or jazz or blues or any of those things that that have heavy amplified music if your own space is a concert hall so you know the message there was if it's not causal at least it allows it to happen or it inhibits the growth of this new mindset that we want to have well how about you Brian what do you think about space and design thinking or do you want to respond to it? I could probably respond in the context of probably nudging because what they've done at nudging international school and they've designed a design center and I was part of that process in seeing that develop and what was really interesting was they didn't put any furniture in when they first started it and the whole idea was to live in that space to understand the space and then see what the needs were and allow the design classes or the teachers to design the furniture that fit the learning needs and it was really interesting to see what worked and what didn't work and they experimented and they just tried different things and that whole culture of just prototyping ideas before implementing it right through the whole school was actually started from that design their design center but they had a later on they had a question would it make sense to join take two classrooms and join them and what would that be like so instead of doing it for all the classrooms two classrooms and they experimented and looked at that so that's what I've seen at Nunging here in Denmark is different we have designers designing the spaces for us it's kind of interesting we're the client but I'm still trying to understand the sort of design culture because we're the client but we don't get feedback into the system so that we have to fit ourselves into what the designers feel that this is how education works so it's a very different experience than in China where we were as educators we were the designers so we had more input in that process so it's in some ways it's an interesting lesson to understand and learn because I think if schools are looking into designing a design thinking learning space it's probably best that you don't hire a fancy architecture firm to do it that you actually are the designers and you do it it is good to have architects there but they have to be partners with you in that learning process and then it can be successful what you're both describing is really walking the walk because we've got the ideas of design thinking but in what Brad has talked about with his new building and what you were talking about in Nanjing, Brian is giving a chance at a big scale for students to be in the middle of the design process for adults engaged in the design process and to live it which to me it sounds rather scary because we tend to be pretty authoritarian and directed and very specific in education about here's the curriculum and here's where you're supposed to be and here's when the bell rings and those kinds of things and what you're describing feels like we're going to build the airplane and it's going to take a long time I would guess that it probably takes a special leadership style to facilitate that kind of experiment and I would even say with architects it takes it because architects and designers if you're going to partner with them they're going to be like well we went to school we're the experts we trust us so you've got to find a partner that is willing to really partner in this and then the leaders have to be willing to have that they have to start to have the systems thinking idea of using your staff as a resource to solve the problem so we did a activity with UN where he came in and he said if you had an opportunity to redesign the first three days of school how would you do it and then they broke it up into like teams and they all brainstormed and we talked about then we came back and then we presented all our ideas on whiteboards or things and all that kind of stuff and what was interesting about that project was that the leadership looked at all those ideas and took the ones that they thought were the best ones and implemented it the next year so some of the ideas was before we started the school year on a Monday right after the summer break one of the ideas was to start it on a Wednesday and that's what they did they did that and it made a huge difference in the improvement of school life but a leader has to be willing to sort of give up on having that master control and I think that's and even teachers have to do that with learning so if you can get the leaders to do it then it's easier it's back to that walk to talk kind of philosophy yeah and I think that takes a lot of courage not to say that leaders don't have that, they've got a lot of pressure on them to meet a lot of different kinds of demands one of them is going to be let's say in this case building a new building but they've got a lot else that they have to perform on and being able to have the courage and the strength to hold the space open for those projects to evolve let's say evolve naturally meaning with input from other people and to let people feel like they're genuinely acting on your recommendations so in your case Brian they did open the school on Wednesday instead of Monday which says to people that leadership is listening to you that's really really important it doesn't happen without that as we said at the beginning it's about mindset and culture more than the method and that mindset and culture starts with leadership so we've talked a little bit about project management and as you all are talking about that how is design thinking different from project management we have project management software it seems to me like elements of project management are built in here because that's what one of the things design management or design thinking is to do is to help us solve a problem work through a process and provide a workflow for how we're going to do that do you I'm guessing you don't see them as synonymous would you respond Brian how do you respond to that idea about design thinking versus project management well I'll do is draw parallels to the professional world they have project management software in design companies they have to do that because they need to make a profit so they're going to tell the client that it's going to take this many hours to design something and then they're going to they're going to use a project management software to figure that out the problem with design thinking and problems on it you can go forever and never solve the problem at some point you've got to stop it and come out with a product and I think that project management software could probably provide a bit of that structure to say this is your research phase and this is your this is your design phase what's really hard what I find I do like low design thinking projects on my own and I think I've got about 10 and 5 of them haven't been finished because I haven't got over that hunch phase of coming up with the final solution and there are some projects that have taken me a whole year and a half but I haven't I've had that freedom to just take forever on it and the results have been really good I had a real world example of project management software that was Nunging International School's new website and they used MAVA links for their project management how do you spell that or what is that MAVA links? Basecamp also is similar Basecamp is bit more simpler and MAVA links is a bit more has targets and timelines and whatnot but they used that the company that we were using was using that as project management software and it was interesting was that they seem not to understand the design thinking process even though they were designers because they'd always give me up a design and I'd say it's not right and that's how we have to come back and just you have to be sometimes in the design thinking process if you have a real vision of what you want you have to stick up for it and that's hard with the project management software because if it's not hitting that target you don't really want to be committed to that project management I'm going to stop now because I keep on talking forever I'll let other people turn Go ahead Brad For me the difference is design thinking is what covers the solution the thing you want to build and the project management kicks in once you know what it is you want to build I mean having said that when I look at how we built our new senior school wing here on the project management timeline there is a chunk of time that's given over to the design process what are we actually going to build what is it specifically going to look like and some of that there's an overlap you know you kind of design the envelope with an idea what things are going to look like inside it and you start actually doing the concrete stuff you need to do to start the envelope going like at that point we might be bulldozing the ground and preparing foundations or something like that so there's a bit of overlap and a bit of back and forth as you go along you run into something you might have to tweak part of your design for it but that's the key difference the project management to me is the implementation of something that you've discovered through design thinking and that may involve relatively few steps if it's an essay for a student or it could be enormously complicated as when you're building a new building which has a whole bunch of interlocking systems and you know that's not to say there isn't kind of a process to design thinking itself but if you reduce it and this is always my big worry with design thinking is that you reduce it to a number of discrete steps I mean there's certainly a process but it's not it's a little bit of an art and it's a little bit of a science there's quite a bit of organic work that goes there and at the end of the day we always have a timeline you're right Brian we could be thinking forever about what do we want to have in our new school building but sooner or later we got to open that building which means we've got to start instruction which means design thinking has to be done by a certain time but the design thinking is to me separate from the actual project management part it's a phase of well that's helpful I've as I've worked the past decade and done all kinds of projects you know really thought project management we need you know students to be experienced in that and being able to succeed in a collaborative environment especially where they're distributed you know we're distributed in space right now not in time but it's that's helpful I'm interested in getting you all to focus a little on the classroom in terms of students can you all talk a little bit and whoever wants to start how do you see design thinking impacting students and then maybe even perhaps ideally how would you like to see your school and your teachers and students embrace design thinking and utilize it in different courses or across the curriculum I mean where I'll just step in for a little bit what I like about the design thinking process is if we were let's say we take a paper that you do and instead of getting a final grade and accepting it and then moving on to another paper you actually get feedback you don't get a grade you get feedback on that paper and you have a chance to work on it you keep on working on it and the actual grade is probably given at the end of the semester so and you're just going through just versions and versions and versions of that and the end result is yeah the person will get an A but it's not even it's so it's not even an A it's like it would be an A times 1000 because it's so much better and by doing that the students are learning the benefits of learning are so good and so that's that's the main thing I see with design thinking I also think about project based learning and design thinking working well together but there's challenges I find with traditional school setups and project based learning and design thinking because you can get into this very deep learning experience and then the end of the end of the day our period comes in and it sort of disrupts that student it's really hard for them to come up I saw that at Manjing we would get kids and they're so sucked into that learning experience that one hour just changed of 10 minutes for them a flow experience so that's the challenge I see with some of the things I'll let Bragg talk you know our approach is one of the things we want to develop here at the school is we're a university prep school we're a high performing academic school and one of the things we see is missing is substantial and meaningful real world experience for the kids that may turn kind of an internship or apprenticeship kind of thing but not even going that far I feel very strongly that the kids in their schooling experience need to be solving real problems that fix a problem could be for our media school community it could be for the community that our school sits in it could be for something much larger and that's where the design thinking comes in because one of the key parts of it is finding a problem to begin with we talk about problem solving I think we have to really work on problem finding and then give our kids opportunities to solve those problems if at the end of the day a student feels like she can throw out her notebook thank goodness that course is done I think we've committed a moral error somewhere there's only two times in your life where you're deprived of civil liberty one of them is when you break the law and are caught and convicted and go to jail and the other one is when you go to school you are by law compelled to go to school so that puts a heavy moral burden on us to do meaningful work and throwing out your notes at the end of the day is not meaningful so if we can build in this idea that all the work I do in writing essays is essentially formative work that we think is a summative assignment right now is fundamentally formative getting you ready for solving a real world problem and whether or not you get an A is it as the community pick it up a colleague of mine teaches I was going to say one of my colleagues teaches at the University of British Columbia and we were talking about all his students are graduate students looking to get their PhDs and things we got into this interesting discussion the goal as a doctoral student is to publish your paper and it gets published in a journal and then we said but what is the net effect of that kind of thing because he had a student who was doing some work that the city of Vancouver looked at and changed a bylaw so her work has affected a million people in the Greater Vancouver Regional District whereas her colleagues who write this research has affected nobody at least not directly I don't mean to diminish substantial research into things but are we looking at impact on something and it solves a problem we fixed a problem we have a problem with pick up and drop off like a lot of schools and could we use our students to solve a pick up and drop off problem and if they do that's an A right if somebody adopts what the kid did then we're done or if they buy the product we're done we can't argue with that I like to add I mean thanks for Brad talking about those things because it starts to trigger ideas and at Copenhagen we're also very academically focused and but we're also inclusive school so we have students in our upper levels that we have a separate program for and where I see design thinking and entrepreneurship having a connection and one of the challenges I've seen with design thinking curriculum within the schools is that it's working fine for PYP MYP then DP that's the diploma programs 11th and 12th grade students it's time to get ready for college and design thinking gets sort of put to the side one of the things I'm trying to observe and I'm trying to look in Copenhagen what are our natural resources and each country do that the natural resources here in Copenhagen is design and there's actually quite a lot of entrepreneurial action here and I've had a lot of informal talks with with different people in the community and the whole idea is taking about that incubation spaces that you see in the professional world and bring that into a school if you can do that in a school then the students that don't quite fit the DP program have another avenue and it's I think it's a much more exciting avenue and if it's really really successful even the DP students would want to try to do it because for me a successful outcome is a student starts their own company or they do a joint venture it's sort of similar ideas as a singularity university or you get venture capital it's totally changing the paradigm for how we think about schools and these are some of the ideas that I'm working on or not working on thinking I haven't done anything I've been thinking and talking but this is where I think the power of design thinking can have a profound change for students I think of the Richard Branson's or the Ellen Musk's or the Steve Jobs of the world and we've got them all in our schools so how can we foster that environment so that they don't feel like dropping out of the school that we can foster their learning so that they can change the world that's what I'm looking at man you guys are saying so many things that are resonating you know real world problems giving you know problem finding I just love that right we hear teachers talk about that that it's a lot of what we need students to be doing is not just coming up with answers but coming up with questions and finding the problems and school dismissal we just had a new dismissal system set up at our school but I think it was all done by the adults you know we don't have a culture presently where we would open it up to students to say hey could you guys take a look at this and interview people and find out what the issues are and come up with some proposals I really love that I definitely resonate with the idea that you know successful schools that are helping students propelled propelling students to selective colleges can have difficulty with change of the paradigm and the whole idea about grading and and you know having a flow experience in the maker space but then okay wait a minute what's my grade for this class you know how is this gonna gonna help me get into Stanford can you all and then also I said moral obligations to do meaningful work you know yes I'm gonna rewind the video to get to that point because I think that is that can help us focus because sometimes we are in our mode with what we're teaching or where we're working or the ways that things are set up so thinking about how important it is that we have this moral obligation for engagement and meaningful work so I haven't had anything new to the conversation with that but just to tell you guys that I'm this is resonating deeply with me one of my thoughts I jotted down here is you're talking about a paradigm shift in grading and assessment I think because if you're going to have design thinking and we're going to want to seek you know what is success look like students who were having a flow experience because they're so into their their project and and they impact the world you know whether that's something that happened with a with the law that's changing or a new dismissal policy or something else what have you all seen or are you seeing as successful in bringing about that kind of a paradigm shift particularly with with upper division or high school at you know age learners where it seems like we're most traditional and most kind of set in our ways I actually don't think that conversation is really happening in a substantial way I know of a couple of individual cases where schools have approached universities that traditionally take their students and said listen we're trying to do this stuff are you still going to look at our applicants and so forth but I think that's that's the crux of it you know the the challenge to schools right now is you have to do everything that you're required to do whether you're reporting out to a state or a program like IB where you're running AP courses or whatever it is and you have to do all of this additional work of developing all the things we're talking about in design thinking if we think that or something like that is the way to go this moral obligation to do meaningful work and I think we probably all say that education has kind of been divorced from that you know however noble its intentions that's where that's where we're at so leadership's job is difficult it's a big challenge one you have to motivate your faculty who are already honestly really busy people and probably really successful at getting kids through whatever program you have just say do all of that and we want to deliver something more and I think that's because when we get close to the front line on this when you get to schools and kids in classrooms they're always ahead of whatever state law or policy or practice or curriculum that's probably unavoidable it just takes time to build a provincial curriculum here it takes many years IB refreshes its courses kind of every three or four or five years and these days three or five years is an eternity right in BC here they've just released a new digital literacy framework which is based on work that was done in 2012 and they did their best to anticipate but there are things that are happening now that aren't addressed in that so that's the challenge to leadership to see is leadership it's starting to talk to itself you know getting together with other leaders I understand that leaders are reluctant to stick their neck out nobody wants to be the first test case in some kind of legal dispute about you didn't educate my child or something like that but that's what needs to happen it needs to be a vigorous discussion and I think education leadership has to take the conversation back we surrendered it you know to you know just whatever other authority we're waiting for somebody to tell us what to do and I think we know we're really good at what we do we understand what it is to educate people and we've been doing it well for a long time you know that's not an answer I'm just saying that's maybe that's the problem we've got to kind of define a little bit better I would agree I mean I think I don't have any concrete personal examples and I think but that's the goal and that's what we're that's where I'm trying to go the things that the schools that sort of inspire me are like high tech high in San Diego and there's a video that was made in 2009 where they profiled the school and I just use it as like sort of a reference of I want to be like that it seems really inspiring and it's always been on my bucket list to visit that school and to see how they do things you know I'm curious how they do a schedule you know how do they do things and if I can be there and see how things are done and then I can adapt it to whatever school environment I'm in maybe I can have success I'm not having I'm having a lot of failure in the stuff I talk about are some of the excesses but I've had a lot of failure in the process so it's not easy to sort of dovetail the this philosophy into our schools these days I would say that MIP program is probably really good because that's a familiar program for IB because they have a design they have a design class and that already they speak that language and so in some ways it's very easy to work within that framework and then I'll try to explode it out because you have MIP design and then there's a DP design but not all diploma programs have that and then in the lower grades there's no there's no design course except at Nunging International they have a design but if you have a in the pre-K if you have a Regio-Amelio program that's basically got a lot of philosophy of design thinking in it they don't call it design thinking but if you look at that learning process it is design thinking Can you say that one more time what's the learning process called? No it's a philosophy of learning I think it's called Regio-Amelio it's a little town in Italy but there's a lot of schools all around the world using it for their early years program okay well for folks that are interested we've got about 15 minutes of discussion left people that are interested in design thinking they'd like to move forward you all have mentioned a few different resources you mentioned you and Mackintosh several times as a resource Brad you mentioned how music works by David Burns as a book I know I was surprised when I tweeted this out I guess the hashtag DTK12Chat for design thinking K12Chat probably must be pretty well followed because my tweets don't normally get quite as many likes and retweets what are the specific resources that you recommend people consider looking at whether that's a course a professional development to take or a book and then since you've walked down this road a bit if you're coming into a new school as an administrator or as a parent who's just trying to influence things where do you think schools are going to get the most bang for their buck in terms of is it that design class in the middle division is it to try to tackle the high school upper division or is it to start at the other end of the spectrum and where kids are young and then try to filter that up as they've gotten introduced to design thinking and real world problems and iterative projects at a young age Brad you want to go first you know one of the best resources I've seen is IDEO you know the design company they've got some tremendous resources they've got design thinking for educators for teachers I can't remember the exact name of it a huge amount downloadable courses and some good online ones they also run a program pretty sure it's IDEO called human centered design which is kind of a spin on design thinking both of those are excellent resources and somebody you know if you were a classroom teacher or a department head or something you wanted to try a design thinking approach their materials would let somebody get up and running even if they've had no experience with design thinking and you know you'd still feel like you're fumbling your way through but it's good guidance really good solid work and I guess the second part you know if I was coming into a new situation I'd start in the lower grades I mean Brian you kind of you mentioned you know the middle years program and ID kind of already has its head around the design process and all but if you know to come back in this sense that you know leadership is going to have to get people to do both things for a while until whatever jurisdictions catch up you know I think it's harder to get things to happen in the upper grades that's where the stakes are very high and I'm you know however willing the teachers might be they feel that pressure to get their kids onto university or college or whatever program it is the kids are going to afterwards so I think the younger kids that's where we've got the most opportunity to get it in there and my hunch is by the time those kids move to the upper grades the rest of this will have caught up I would tend to agree with everything you just said even though there's that's a great thing about design thinking is that I make a statement and then I hear someone and I just then I just disagree with what I said and that's part of the process it's never to be so concrete about your opinion be open to change all the time and I would agree with the elementary you know starting with the elementary program one of the things that with Nanjing they started the PYP design four years ago I think and too bad John Rinker is not here because he could tell us exactly but what was amazing was seeing the behavior changes in the students because we had a PYP design class all the kids were and this is what parents were giving us fear they weren't playing computer games at home they were actually making and creating stuff at home and if they had a Lego kit at home they weren't following the instructions they were inventing their own creations and I kept on wondering these students that have gone all the way through that program when they hit grade six for the MYP design class would they be at a much deeper level of understanding of the process so they could get into deeper projects because the challenge in an IB school is when you have a design they usually come fresh and they have no idea what design process is and so there's a lot of base work you've got to do before you can get into some deep projects so the question I always had myself is these students that have gone through this whole thing how is that going to help the school further in their goals with design thinking so that's where I agree with the elementary program. The areas where I would think about I'm always looking at unconventional ways of trying to get people to get their head about training for design thinking I'm into places that aren't really teacher speak education places for learning about so like maker affairs are really good even though you might not see a maker affairs are the end product but you'll see people are very passionate about what they've done but then talk to them and learn about how they got there and you'll see that there's a process which is design thinking and it'll probably help you discover your own passions and through that you'll learn that through your passions you can actually use those same techniques and then maybe next year you can actually show your stuff and then you can take that and apply it to schools there's so many conferences out there and there's so many camps or good ones to go to who there's one in Germany called Chaos Communication Congress and they've got one at the end of December and they've got a summer camp which is it's ridiculously crazy but a lot of fun and what's it called again? Chaos Chaos Communication Congress it's been running for like 35 years it's been running longer than it's chaos it's a German computer club together in Hamburg there's like 6,000 nerds or geeks or whatever but it's you know it is like you've got everyone you've got people that know how to knit LEDs together and they're making sweaters and the drones were invented there before they ever came out into the commercial space so these are like the avant-garde cutting edge places but it's it's absolutely thrilling areas to go to but even Burning Man is a bit in that edge too we might have trouble getting that justified I was wondering if I could get a CD fund to go to Burning Man but that's probably pushing it that's pushing it I would say Southwest by Southeast Southwest yeah that one go to that and then there's another there's a the art center in Pasadena their traditional design school but they have a summer program for teachers on design thinking I would go to that because there you've got traditional design teachers interfacing with teachers and they can take that class but they could also spy into the what the other classes are and that that school is really interesting is because a lot of the stuff like Hollywood stuff that people have been trained for modeling is there all the designers that make the cars for like Toyota and Honda they get their training there and then they go for working so you're seeing the real things when you're making the clay models and you're seeing so you're seeing a bit of that professional practice and then they've got educators there and so that's another example that's sort of unconventional but I think it's a real rich experience I think Brian that's excellent advice that the education just hasn't caught up and I'm not pointing finger at a finger at education and saying they're slower or anything they just it's happening so fast and for me the best professional development I'm getting these days is outside of education whether it's a conference or paying attention to what's happening because it's kind of like looking at education in the future you know so I would say yeah go to it's kind of funny saying this because I said the advisory board for South by Southwest edu you know I would say go to that but stay around for the startup week as well because you learn a ton of stuff from people who are not in education about how are we approaching design I think the education it's too new it's hard to find other educators who are doing a lot of work in anything we might be looking at you know app development design thinking you name it it's really going to be a valuable experience to get our heads up and look at what other industries are doing it's not directly translatable we're in a pretty unique business if you want to call it a business you know the what we work with is a very vulnerable sector of our community we have to be very careful with that but there are a lot of insights to get by going to some crazy maker fair in Berlin or something like that I think that'd be tremendously valuable hard sell yeah that's where that I mean that's where the design thinking is it's very creative it's got a very creative aspect to it and you've drawn Spencer's video talks about it it's that growth mindset and you learn to take experiences that aren't related but making relatable to education so what's interesting is I'll go to these places and I get really enthusiastic I say this is brilliant we need to bring this to schools and all the geeks are like how does that work and I'm like no this is really neat because can you imagine if you took your passion and bring it into schools what you guys are talking about is the juxtaposition of folks who are living in different worlds different bubbles you know but are passionate and and then are intersecting and I reminded of I think it's the story of the invention of radar and Bell Labs which was like over a lunch table in the cafeteria with you know people that were you know or no there was FM radio and it was the radar people that Chris Cross was somebody else anyway they were different departments but you know they had a meal and they broke bread and what are you working on well that's a little bit like this and then out of it came FM which was huge in World War 2 in terms of you know being able to have communications that could penetrate weather but you're talking about getting out of your box and being with passionate people and then I think probably pursuing some answers as far as how they got to where they are and their own process and then maybe using design thinking you know that's a lens but as we started off this panel talking about it means different things to different people it manifests itself in different ways but it is a process and it definitely involves some common denominators as John highlighted in his presentation and that whole idea about iteration and being able to have feedback and being able to you know not just be in a linear okay we're done you know but we're we're looping and we're you know getting feedback and having a way to continue to improve so Peggy George has put into our chat the design thinking virtual crash course which is from the B school at Stanford and there is also a free online course a five-week course with Evo 2015 for design thinking so I do want to let everybody know that the multitude of resources that we have mentioned here in this session are going to not only be archived in the Participate Learning Collection which thank you Peggy George primarily but also Susan Van Gelder and Karen Fossumpar and Carol Van Bruce are helping to curate we'll have that linked here below and if you're seeing this video on YouTube go ahead and take a look at the description and we'll have a link back to our conference blog K-12 online conference in that specific page where you can quickly get to those links so we just have a couple minutes remaining and so I want to just close with really a personal question about next steps in your own journeys of learning you guys have already said some of these kind of things but let's be specific in the next six to twelve months what are your personal learning objectives as they as it relates to design thinking or maybe projects that you're working on at your respective schools you're in different places in different situations but what are you really it's the new year right so you may have had some resolutions about these kind of things what are you all doing in the next six to twelve months that would cross with design thinking well I'll speak I'm with my first year at Copenhagen International School and I made a video post a year ago today around this time stating that I was excited about joining the school and that I was in our approach coming to the school with design thinking philosophy and that first year is about empathy and research and that's what I'm going through right now and in some ways you got a little peek into some of my ideas that the challenge I'm having right now and I think this is true probably for a lot of IT directors in schools is that we get clobbered with operational stuff and we don't get enough time on the educational side and the nice thing about making video blog post is that it teaches you to be honest about the goals that you made and so I have this aspirational goals but I also have these operational goals and I need to have more conversations with my team and saying how are we going to make this possible and it's certainly a challenge and this whole research phase process in my video blog I said it's going to be difficult and it is difficult I try very hard not to change anything absolutely I'm changing things and just can't help that and so far it's actually going really smoothly one of the goals was not to not to take the successes I have from my previous school and apply it to the new school and I haven't done that and I've actually learned a lot from my own team and embraced some of their innovations and just amplified it so that's a lot in a nutshell I guess go ahead Brad for me this itself is an iterative process although I've been involved in quite a number of projects here from working on the team that put together the new school building to my own class work and things for me all of this is pointing to a deeper listening if I was to characterize my work it would be around change management leading a school community into whatever is next and part of that is building it as we fly we sort of have some idea of what is next I don't know if we could articulate the whole thing but what I've learned the turn of each project is finding ways to listen more deeply and more carefully to what people's needs are I mean what I'm struck by is even if you show people very strong evidence that plan B is better than plan A and we have a bunch of those things in school like meditating before exams is a good thing to do listening to music or construction in your classroom facilitates group work or whatever it is you can show people that evidence and they don't move on it and I'm fascinated by that problem it's not a case of if you build it they will come there's something else and I think that gets back to my point about these problems being complex that humans are emotional creatures and how do we path into that as leaders I get caught up on this you start to feel like is it my ego I want to say I think we should be going how do I get you there we have to trust as leadership that our experience has sort of said this is probably where we need to go but that leadership process is deepening that listening to get people there if you're not I just heard something the other day that said being your meeting is the same thing as being wrong and you'll just lose them and you don't get to where you need to go anywhere say that one more time sure now I said being too far ahead of the people you're leading is the same thing as being wrong it's indistinguishable so what is it there what do I need to listen to so I don't lose touch with the people that I'm meeting or the school is leading and so forth and that's hard to do that's probably the hardest challenge actually building things fundraising for things those are comparatively easy I'm not saying they're easy things but compared to really listening carefully not letting your ego get in the way or your own personal agenda get in the way is tough I agree with that absolutely I've had so many experiences with what you're saying Brad where I know there's a better solution but in the end I've done with the one that the teachers wanted because they had buy-in I have not been a better solution but I went with them and in the end it was actually successful because you had that buy-in so that's definitely the challenge lots of wisdom shared by our panelists and so on behalf of our K-12 online conference organizer team I want to formally say thank you so much for giving up an hour of your time you can find the links to follow both Brad and Brian on our website and we also want to just say best wishes for quick recovery for John Rinker we missed him but your influence was certainly felt in our conversation today we want to let everyone know that we will be having our fourth strand of this year's conference which has gone over the year here into 2017 but it's going to focus on creativity and so Alex Ruthman is going to be sharing that keynote in early April and we'll also be having another panel discussion similar to this where we'll have an opportunity for different folks to chime in not only in responding to what Alex has to share but giving their own ideas about creativity and specifically how that can impact student learning in the classroom so thank you so much for tuning in please share this presentation all of the content from the K-12 online conference is licensed under a Creative Commons license for non-attribute for attributed learning non-commercially and we would totally love it if you would share this with others as well so I really will bid you in a do and thanks so much from our guest panelists from Vancouver and from Copenhagen thank you Wes, thanks Brian good to meet you both face to face here thanks so much for inviting us to this this has been, I love talking about this stuff and the more people I talk about it it keeps on changing my perception of design thinking in a good way and I love this and thank you so much and that's a good segue to remind people to please reach out on Twitter, please use our hashtag K-12 online conf or feel free to leave a comment that's kind of a radical thing today leave a comment on the blog but any way you can, if you're thinking about this and this has helped you or inspired you in any way with your own work on design thinking we'd love to know about it and love to make those connections thanks