Topic 1 - Teachers are Designer

What struck me the most was the definition of design from the site of the Top 10 workforce skills needed by 2020.  Number eight stated the “design mind set” and said it was the “ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.”  This statement along with the article this week of Teachers are designers, said design thinking was a “strategic approach to analyzing and finding solutions to messy real-world problems. 

So I was really thinking about those two statements and seeing how they may have influenced my thinking this week.  My real world problem in my “library world” was the request from the kindergarten teachers to come as an entire class and have the students log into their computers for the first time.  Let me give just a little back ground – it is the second week of school and these new students have only been in school an entire 4 days.  The majority of them to not know their letters or even their names.  Our county about three years ago mandated that each individual student had to log into a computer in order to use it.  We have approached this task in the past few years by setting up time to take about 6-8 students at a time throughout the day, in the third or fourth week of school, and helped them one on one learn to sign onto their computers.  Logging in consists of pressing down on the keys “control-alt-delete” then typing in their username and password.  The does not even address using a mouse!  A skill that is not even there since they all want to swipe the screen.

So, I had a whole weekend to think how this was going to work out with an entire class of 19-21 students and 3 adults.  I feel that my impression of some of the ways teachers design is through an experience.  For teachers, it most likely is an educational experience since that is what school is focusing on.  In my mind I went through some ideas of what process was going to look like.  What were the students going to be doing while they were waiting for their turn with the adult to sign them in and then place them on an ABC game on the computer?  My past experience is that I already knew they would have limited knowledge of their letters and possibly no computer experience – this is not assuming they have not been on an iPad or phone – they have but a computer or laptop is a much different tool and ours do not respond when you touch the screen. 

My design process ended up being that the students would come and sit on the carpet and I would go over how to hold their hands to do the control, alt, delete command.  I then showed them the game they would be playing as the end result of signing into their computers.  While they were waiting for their turn with an adult, they stayed at the tables and had something to color, read or build with blocks.  I am not sure if I now would call this a plan or a design, but this was a very strategic approach to analyzing and finding a solution to the “help me” cries that come from these beginning computer learners. 

 The teachers and their assistants have given me nothing but praise on how well and smoothly this lesson went.  Students were fantastic waiting at the tables, and all were able to get signed in and play a computer game.  One teacher stated, “ this was the best computer intro that they had ever had.  I too am very pleased on how well it went and feel like when I was reading the article I experienced the stages of empathizing with the stakeholders (putting myself in their shoes), defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing.  It went really well and I will put this same type of plan into action when these kindergarten students come later this week to do their first book check out.  This design really helped things go calmly and smoothly which is a huge achievement with new kindergarten students.