As I have worked with educators in schools and districts to design a day or a week or an entirely new model for learning that will last through Covid 19 and beyond, we always find better ways to more effectively meet the needs of diverse populations. We start by discussing specific students, not general patterns or averages, and empathize with what they feel and think, and also reflect on what they do and say to give us insight. Creating an empathy map can help think about students as individuals rather than the population as a whole.

When you empathize with students for whom the pace of school was moving too slow. Students who were behind because school was moving too fast and they couldn’t catch up so they quit. Students who primarily spoke a different language and needed different access and opportunities to learn the content and skills. Students with social-emotional challenges who were overstimulated and preferred fewer interactions with people but still wanted to be connected. When you identify students on the margins who aren’t always successful with a school-centered model, you can design new and better ways to meet the needs of each and every learner. With this framing, we can abandon one size fits all models and be obsessively focused on learners and their needs and design opportunities for these learners to meet their goals. 

Here is an example of how you can use design thinking to embrace a more learner-centered approach.

Notice

Pick students who you currently work with or who are struggling to meet their needs such as students who were disengaged because they weren’t being challenged, students who were struggling socially and emotionally, students who aren’t motivated, and who seemed to just check out. Take time to notice and reflect on what was working and what wasn’t. Think about which students are successful in your schools or classes and why? Examine your role, your bias, your beliefs, and your impact. 

Empathize

By empathizing with students and what they are experiencing, identify what students are saying, what they are thinking, what they are doing (or not) and what they are feeling.  This exercise will allow you to better consider what students are dealing with and their circumstances so that they could think about and design a better system that would support them as an individual, not how to fit each one of these students into a pre-existing system. To gather insight about how to better design their lessons and empathize with the learners, you can do empathy  interviews with students. Take thirty-minute interviews, and ask questions like:

• What is school like for you? 
• Do you feel valued? By Whom? 
• When do you feel successful inside the classroom? 
• When have you felt unsuccessful? How might you improve this school? 

Define

The next step in the process is to define a need, which can be done with a simple sentence frame: Who needs what because why. Here are some examples of what might come up: 

• Students need clear goals and pathways because they are overwhelmed. 
• Students need smaller class sizes and fewer interactions because they become easily overstimulated. 
• Students need more opportunities to apply learning through authentic projects and explore passions to be challenged at an appropriate level. 

Ideate

Based on these problem statements, think about how to address these challenges. Ideation is a central strategy in design thinking and as Linus Pauling says, The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” To generate a lot of ideas you have to spend time ideating with a “yes and” stance, which builds on ideas instead of shutting them down. This helps everyone share as many ideas as possible to allow students to be more successful and create new and better opportunities for them to learn and reach their full potential. The goal should not necessarily be to have the best idea but to really think about generating a lot of ideas to create new and better systems to evolve what currently exists. 

Prototype

Once all of the ideas are on the table, teams can start to design. You might come up with a new strategy, a new schedule, mentoring programs, or school choice options. Think about what structures are designed and what you can redesign by answering the following questions: 

• What are the desired skills, knowledge and dispositions for students to learn?
• How will students learn?
• Where will students learn?
• When will students learn?
• Who will support their learning journey?
• How will students track progress and work towards mastery?

Although the student’s needs will vary, you can design personalized learning experiences by starting with the learners– who they are and what they need, clear learning goals and priorities, pathways for each learner, and flexible learning environments.

Test

This process can be done to reimagine an assignment for a student or a whole class or even a new model for your school or district. Or all of these. The goal is to do something and test out your ideas. Start small and keep testing as you learn and see the impact. The smallest steps can lead to the biggest impact but you will never know unless you try.

Reflect

Margaret Wheatley reminds us that, “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” Even with the best of intentions, we can miss the mark if we don’t stop and pause to reflect. This was made clear to me as I was talking to a teacher who had just been in a 3-hour workshop learning a lot of new content and he shared, “I really like these ideas and I’m totally invested but after 3 hours of new information I am so overwhelmed.” And then he stopped and wondered aloud, “is this what our students feel like?” YES!

If we just keep adding more without time to process what fits together, what can be taken out, what is repetitive, what is missing, what “it” means, teachers will burn out, and fail to have the impact that we want to have on our students. As the pressure increases it is common to push harder and faster while instead, we should slow down and notice what is working and what isn’t. Now more than ever we seem to be living lives where we’re busy and overworked and if we’d take some time out for reflection, we might be better off. Busy has become a badge of honor,  but it should not be confused with productive or effective learning. 

The constant is the learning, the variable is the location, time, and place.

Educators have come up with mentoring programs, varied schedules, leadership opportunities, personal schedules, and redesigned their class schedules and use of time to name just a few ideas that come out of designing for learners and learning rather than designing for school. The “right” answers will vary based on the context and the learners. But I have no doubt that caring and talented educators can create new and better opportunities to meet the needs of those in their schools and classrooms by reframing the challenges and considering multiple perspectives. Looking at the challenges and the purpose of education differently can help us think about better solutions. A.J. Juliani, author, educator and entrepreneur points out that, “Our job is not to prepare kids for something; our job is to help kids prepare themselves for anything.” If we use this goal as a starting point, reframing the problems we face might help us come up with novel solutions that better meet the needs of learners in a continually changing world.

What I know is that when we begin with what we want for learners and design from there, we can create new and better learner-centered models. You don’t have to transform the system to make an impact, you can start with your class, your assignments, schedule, or your beliefs. Start small and make tweaks and assess the impact. As you learn and make mistakes, you will grow and keep evolving to meet the needs of your learners.