Free Writers' Mindsets with Design Thinking

When I was a kid there was no bigger buzzkill to my writing joy...and ego than the red pen of one Mrs. Pamela Runner at Cottonwood Elementary School in Casa Grande, Arizona. This was before the days of "writers workshop" and having kids make multiple revisions. Nope, wrong was just wrong and I took her grading pretty hard. Despite all of that I still get enjoyment from putting words together, but it would take me 35 years to really find what works for me. 

 In the early 2000s, I wrote a novel. It was a long process and nobody wanted to publish it, but I still had fun accomplishing a goal I had set somewhere in junior high or high school. You can even read Potter's Wheel for free at Amazon. Starting in 2011, I would go on to write another book, this time a biography of NFL offensive tackle Jared Veldheer. Stay in the Game was a joint venture with Jared's parents. They wanted to share their son's journey from brainy and awkward middle schooler to a 3rd round draft pick of the Oakland Raiders. They also wanted to give other parents of potential draft picks a bit of a roadmap. As an elementary teacher, I wanted it accessible to kids as well as general sports fans. Combining all of these "wants" was no easy task. 

Right about the time we were trying to get Stay in the Game going, I began learning more and more about design thinking and looking at ways to teach it in the classroom. Instead of getting really caught up in the minutia of pure design thinking, I simplified it for my students. 

• Ask: What are we trying to solve or what are we trying to create? Who are we creating this solution or thing for? What already exists that is similar? 
• Imagine: What is possible? What's our dream result?
• Plan: What's it going to take to accomplish the goal? Create a road map and a to-do list.
• Create: Jump in and get putting together your best effort. Don't be afraid to guess at ways to do things. 
• Test: How does that first attempt's "prototype" perform? Look for little things to improve.
• Fix: Re-engineer the failure-points or make changes to the solution or project that you feel makes it better. 
• Repeat: Fix and test. Test and fix until each little imperfection is polished away. 

I can't tell you when it all "clicked" for me, but when I realized that if I approached this book project through a design thinking mindset, even the simplified version from the classroom, that I could write with a lot more clarity and a lot less self-imposed anxiousness over picking the write words on the first draft. Even though the book took way too long to complete, mainly because Jared kept achieving new things in his career, it really came together. Like EnVogue taught us back in the day, "Free your mind and the rest will follow".

This new approach to writing got me thinking about how we teach writing. Admittedly as a "specials teacher" I am pretty ill-informed when it comes to the specifics of how writing is being instructed in the classrooms around me. I hear things like "Lucy Calkins", "Teachers College", and "units of study" but I am not quite sure what any of those means. What I do know is that my colleagues teach their tails off and that our kids continue to improve, writing at impressive levels. I also know that regardless of the individual techniques, just about any writing instruction can benefit from a design thinking mindset. It just relieves so much pressure and it decreases the sensitivity to feedback. Kids will relate it to other fun activities that involve design thinking. 

If you have never done any "D-thinking" with your students, it's easy. Seriously, just run a piece of fishline across your classroom and declare it a zip line and give them some parameters of what materials they can use to create a vehicle for it. We use Technic Legos but you can get inventive with any loose parts in your classroom. On a piece of paper have students write out their thoughts for the ask and imagine steps. Have them sketch a plan and then turn them loose to create. On the back of the paper have them make a log of all of the improvements. Pretty soon you will see a constant cycle of fix and test, fix and test. All you have to do next is show them that revising their writing is no different than revising whatever creation they sent down the zip line. 

I just wish Mrs. Runner had known about design thinking back in 1981...or at least had strung a zip line across her classroom. 

The Anatomy of a Collaborative Endeavor

Today Melinda Bronkhorst, Brian Lancaster (both 4th grade teachers at Bentheim Elementary) and I laid out three collaborative projects in under a half an hour. Here is how it all came together so quickly.

Melinda initiated the planning session by signing up for some collaboration time. She basically just wanted some ideas on how she could engage her students a little more deeply with technology. We came up with an idea where students would connect the iPhoto use skills I had planned for Infotech with their beginning studies of the United States regions. The plan is to have me bring down the mobile lab on Thursdays and ask students to begin exploring the tourist sites of states in their assigned region. They will find pictures that show examples of physical characteristics, save those to iPhoto, add bibliographical information to each photo, and organize them into albums. We will continue the work each Friday when the students visit me for Infotech. The three week project will culminate in some type of production where students share their photos to show the uniqueness of their regions.

I love planning like this. I am able to share my technology knowledge and the classroom teachers share their content and curriculum knowledge. Jointly we can put together an endeavor that is solid in all aspects of learning.

We weren't quite done though. We started to then think about what the next step might be and what other grade level objectives we might be able to address. I shared that sixteen years ago I used to have my fourth graders practice business letters by writing the game and fish office of different states. Every student was tickled to get a packet of information in the mail that featured all kinds of posters, pamphlets, brochures, and stickers. We decided we would resurrect the project and work together to do some business letter writing with Google Docs. Students will find the natural resources office for one of the states in their region and ask for some information on the wildlife that call it home.

That second project led to a third one that involved meeting briefly with Brian. Every year he does animal reports with fourth graders in Science. In the past we have worked together to give students links to research sites, and published them with the computers. This year we are going to try to connect the animal investigations all of the way back to the original regions investigation. The animal that will be the subject of the science report will one that students learned about through material solicited from the business letters. This is designed to build a little extra connection between the student and the subject they will research.

All of this planning and brainstorming took about 25 minutes. In that time we were able to tie together Social Studies, Writing, and Science...all of which were infused with educational technology. These are just examples of the types of projects we can do together. We took Melinda's general initial idea and quickly generated three very specific projects designed to engage learners in new and different ways.