Prototyping: The Marshmallow Challenge
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Examples of immersion and working walls at Rosendale Primary School
Prototyping
Prototyping and refining
A prototype is a working model of a solution. Prototyping is a great way of quickly showing the people you involved in the immersion and empathy stage that you've done something with their hard effort. It's also a great way to test ideas. In the classroom, it's one of the principal places formative, peer-to-peer and self-assessment is illustrated in totally concrete (or post-it, or papier maché) terms.
The prototype is not the final version, and ideally this whole process would lead to several prototypes aiming to solve the same problem. Small groups might siphon off into pairs or individuals developing prototypes, and then coming together to share their work before then all developing the best prototype into a full working product.
This is also the part of the process that begins to allow the educator to retrospectively see which areas of curriculum have been 'covered' by each learner, a process best done hand in hand with the learner him or herself if time and staffing allows. In fact, given a copy of the curriculum, can a learner work out for him or herself what they've covered off?
Critical Conversations: child-centeredness
Who is at the centre of child-centeredness?
Much has been written in recent years around personalisation and student-centeredness, but what does it really mean, or more importantly, what does it look like in a technology-rich learning environment?
Ideation Strategy: Best and Worst Ideas
These are examples of ideas generated by the Scottish Borders Council in an ideation session using the Best and Worst Ideas technique.
How do we empower the community to organise and implement the 150th anniversary in 2012?
Identify community members who could organise it
Get pupils to drive it home
Former pupils
Parent council
Teachers planning it
Don't set up a committee
Set up a committee
Ask for ideas for consideration from whole community
Speak to other HTs
Do an awards for all application
Council Community SUpport Fund
Get WRFC to organise community sports
Former pupils
Former pupil achievements
Get old photos
Burning issues
Former teachers
Increase Co-location of services
Libraries and schools
Joint campus for emergency services
Librarie, museums and TI
NHS/Social work
Build a primary school that satisfies everyone
Steven consults with all stakeholders
Steven builds it - stuff everyone else ;-)
Copy best practice
Scandinavian schools
Money no object
Don't do it - Technology or home tuition
Get volunteers to do it
Advice from one selected stakeholder
Hybrid of every stakeholder's best idea
Just do what everyone wants
Get them to pay for it through subscriptions or council tax
Why can't we buy from anywhere - improving procurement services
Give every member of staff a credit card
Use technology to find cheapest deals at that moment.
How we communicate our message to the public
To engage start off a dialogue with the local people
Establish networks
Make it local, direct and relevant
How do we implement Total Place?
GIS plans
Ownership
Degine what services people want with a consultation
Provide a local solution
Devolve services to community
Enforce community volunteering
Remove conflicting legislation
Tsar deals with community
What people want isn't always the best thing
Accessibility for community involvement
FGive community the money and let them sort out everything they want done
People need to know what's happening through better communication
How do we do more with less in our primary school?
Use volunteers
Technology (Skype etc for lessons)
Stop doing certain things
Delegate better
Resources from other places
Share stuff
Share major tasks
Share planning
Don't reinvent the wheel
Minimise bureaucracy
Don't use email
Central site to share info
More efficient commas
Give all teacher access to SBC corporate
1 IT systems for all
Joint thinking time
Handover area of improvement plan to DHT / HT
Engaging people to review and redesign services
Require cross services groups
Leaders do not have all the answers
Survey users and stakeholders
Prioritisation mechanism
Establish current costs of systems
Consider purpose and outcomes
How will we maintain and develop a community education service
Research
Survey
Share the problem
Develop super schools
Make schools a hub and close everything else
Do you need teachers for everything?
Use virtual teaching
Do you need schools?
Businessses working out of schools?
Market schools as venues
Use schools' down time for holiday lets etc
Who designs a community - is it us or the community itself?
Connect up secondary schools
Teachers also work part time in industry
Move the teachers, not the children
How do we empower/enable individuals to take responsibility for a share in the delivery of our service?
Less teachers, more support stuff
Driven skilled volunteers
Virtual learning
Home learning
Community learning
Home working
Succession training
NQTs without work used as volunteers
Not clear what the goal was on this one
Redesign services around client not the organisation
Cost effective access to opportunities in rural areas
Buy a bus or shared bus across a community
Is there a bus in the community that's not being used?
Volunteer bus driver
Garage business / sponsorship
Link into public service buses
Mobile phone recycling to generate £s
Volunteers to escort
Bring experience to the community virtually
Volunteers link seiners into service support
Grouping activities around learning / locality
Volunteer transport in cars
Use technology
Flexibility outwith normal service provision hours
Ask the clients
Have we all interested parties involved?
Involving communities in the delivery of services
Volunteering policy
Things that don't need done list
Community list of things they want done
Ask people what we do that they don't like
Volunteering expenses budget for each community
Empower volunteering policies (volunteering)
Discounts off council tax - link to contracts
Volunteering code of conduct
Rewards and awards
Average council tax payment by street
Voluntary transport data bank
Encourage empowerment
Increase delegation
Distribute leadership
Outcome driven
Clarify remits
Trust and respect to do the task
Avoid blame culture
Realistic tolerances (Balance quality with outcome)(
Flatter structure
Acknowledge good work
Driving down costs
Involve citizens more
Remove duplication
Think prevention in health, families, education
Engage citizens actively
Out of area care - start your own
How do we build effective teams to deliver change?
Self evaluation of team members
Shared understanding, vision and goals
Open communications
Have an atmosphere/ethos where people can confidently share ideas
How do we empower all staff to take ownership of budget change
Involve more and engage them in the process
More delegated responsibility
Give control and flexibility
Allocate creative tasks to staff workshops
Define success - ask what it is
Offices without walls - part of the community.
Ideation - an overview
When the problem has been well defined and understood, the process can move up in pace. There are numerous ways to stimulate ideas to solve the problem(s) the group has come up with from the initial process. Provided the immersion and empathy process has been wide and deep, there is plenty of fodder to feed ideas.
The main ingredient in coming up with a great idea is quite simple: research hard in the immersion phase to find great problems to solve and come up with lots of ideas in the ideation phase to solve them.
This is also the stage in the process where we move from divergent thinking to convergent solutions-based thinking - and it's normally where the traditional process of learning and teaching begins. The teacher's done the hard part of seeking out the key resources and subject areas that students will study, has found the problem and presents it in a synthesised manner so that students can come up with (now only pseudo-)ideas to solve it.
Design thinking, by its highly personalised nature means that the teacher can offer fairly generalist structures for developing ideas and still be assured of a highly individualised experience for each learner.
Try these ideation techniques for starters:
- Give each project team an ideas quota: x ideas per month, y ideas per term.
- 100 Ideas Now: Give the room 15 minutes to come up with at least 100 ideas. Some of them will always be good, and it's a great lesson in what 'failure' means - of the really poor ideas, are there any that can be resurrected (see "Best or Worst", below)
- Play "everyone's a consultant": each person writes their initial idea for solving the problem at the top of a sheet of A4 paper and then, every minute, the paper gets passed to the next person in the group who adds their own development of the idea with the magic phrase "Yes, and…". This is a high order task for learners as it obliges them to build on each other's ideas, rather than simply ploughing on with their own. It's often termed "brainwriting" rather than "brainstorming", as it allows individual reflection time on a collaborative exercise.
- Best ideas, worst ideas: where people come up with their "best" ideas, they often come up with staid, boring ideas that are designed to please "them upstairs". Try instead to encourage people to come up with their worst possible ideas for solving a problem, and then play the game of "everyone's a consultant" to see how those ideas get developed - they're often the best ones in the end.
- Idea Ticket: forbid colleagues entry to observe your classroom, or to your department's meeting, without having first brought an idea ticket to gain entry. The idea ticket should be an idea for solving an issue they have found that week.
- Reduce, Raise, Eliminate, Create: What features of your existing curriculum or way of working can be reduced or eliminated altogether? And what elements could see their importance raised, and is there anything fresh to create? This is a way of differentiating ideas that appear samey.
Scrutiny ideas and tips
Some advice on the scrutiny phase during or at the end of immersion and/or synthesis, from the Learning Futures project:
- A teacher (or small group of teachers) presents a plan for a project, including essential questions, learning goals, process, final presentation, etc., and gives the group their 'burning questions' - that is, the things they most want answers for from this session.
- The other participants then ask 'clarifying questions' for ten minutes (these should be simple enough to answer with a 'yes' or a very brief response).
- Then they ask ten minutes of 'probing questions' to the presenter.
- After that, the presenter 'steps out of the circle' and the rest of the group discusses the project. The presenter then responds to this, the rest of the group comments on the response, and (time permitting) you close with a debrief about the process itself.
A Critical Conversation for the end of your week: A Passion for Learning, or a Learner's Passion?
Over the past couple of years there has been a lot of discussion around identifying and developing talent around a learner’s passion. Ken Robinson spoke about it in his recent book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670020478?ie=UTF8&tag=not066-20&creativeASIN=0670020478">The Element</a>, but little of what seems like an obvious idea translates into scalable, purposeful action.
- What models can we construct around existing structures that would allow kids to embrace their passions?
- What models will we create for 2011-12 that would allow kids to embrace their passions?
- What actual steps will we take to make sure that teachers and parents embrace their passions and share them in the schooling environment?
What, when and how to do you assess in the Immersion stage?
Immersion is really the first bathe in content, and shouldn't really be assessed by you at all. However, some good self assessing by students would work well. Here are some ideas:
// Traffic lights:
Students have to say which content they feel really comfortable with (green), tricky and needing to dive deeper into (amber) and totally lost in (red). Working in pairs, they should discuss why each is the case. It might sound a bit pointless, going around the houses, but it's vital. Think about the time you've practiced a piece of music and hit a hard part. A young learner tends to muddy through it until they get to the part they're more comfortable with (the chorus, normally) while a musician will practice those four measures for days, until they're perfect. This is because they know what the hard parts are, and they practice them until they move from red to amber to green.
Try to make it that every learning session, particularly in immersion, marks a movement from Red To Amber, Amber to Green, Green to a...
// Done Wall
Why not start the process of synthesis by inviting youngsters to put what they feel is 'green' in a new immersion wall. The goal is for the class, in a limited period of time, to work collaboratively to move everything onto the 'Green' wall. As they do this, as every item is moved over, the whole class stops for a mini conference, a minute or two long, as the kiddo explains how they've discovered what they've discovered - how they moved from red to amber, amber to green.
The notion of a "Done Wall" like this is hugely satisfying for anyone, not just kids, and it's stolen straight from the creative industries. My colleague Tom wrote this about them:
Taken from 13 Rules for Realising Your Creative Vision (http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665527/infographic-of-the-day-13-rules-for-realizing-your-creative-vision) my favourite being that:
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
"These maxims are really a super concise and clear way of restating one of the founding tenets of so-called design thinking: The idea of creating prototypes as soon as you can, and failing as fast as possible so you can evolve your way to something great. "
There you go - two ideas that you could try out tomorrow. Can you let us know how you get on with it? Ideally this moves you swiftly onto synthesis, pulling all those understood concepts together into related clusters.
Synthesis: making sense of challenges in our learning
If you've done the observation and empathy work in enough depth, you should have scores of post-it notes and resources to bring together on a project corner wall. It's important to have one place where everyone can see the evidence in front of them, and that the language used in post-it notes makes sense on its own, without prior knowledge of the situation or offline discussions of the group working out a problem.
Synthesis is also the part of the process where the problem(s) we want to solve come to light the clearest. It can be a relatively swift process.
Synthesis: finding combinations of observations, opposites,
Defining the problem frees up the mind for solutions. This second stage of the design process is about becoming clear about the problem. The main challenge in this phase is focusing on just the problem – without trying to come up with solutions at the same time.
Simply put, synthesis means the grouping together of the problem statements in order to bring out themes. This is an iterative process – it is started once problems have begun to be gathered, and continues as the empathy work changes the understanding of the problems. As the members of the project team will see things differently, the synthesis process is not only grouping together the problem statements into common themes, but also coming to a consensus in the project itself.
There are two contrasting outcomes of this process: First is the rational expectation: Identification of the quick wins, and low hanging fruit that can be prioritised. But outliers such as problem statements that cannot be grouped with others can also lead to “genius moments” – unexpected ways of seeing things that lead to a whole new solution.
Likewise, it's easy to pull together observations that are soulmates, easy combinations. It's harder to pull a bunch off the wall and place them against apparent opposites to see if any interesting problem to solve emerges from that.
The goal of synthesis is to come to some agreement amongst a group of the problem or problems that they are going to solve within a given timeframe. It's where thinking, while still relatively divergent, begins to converge on a few key themes. It's where we go from creating choices to making choices. In a classroom environment it's wise at this point to run these problems through the mill of a whole class scrutiny:
Is this a genuine problem?
Is it a problem worth solving?
Does it build on a problem that's already being solved?
Can you as educator spot the curricular areas that are going to make this a rich problem to solve?
Can the students spot the richness of solving this in terms of who it might help?
Does the group know who their problem's solving will most affect?
At Matthew Moss School, part of the Learning Futures project that David Price led on, this process of scrutiny is seen as a vital part of moving initial moments of passion into something that is educationally worthwhile and rich: "learning about cars" becomes "deconstructing and reconstructing a car engine without any instructions". (see the document, below)
