Design Thinking Through An Arts Inquiry

Source:http://dschool.stanford.edu/redesigningtheater/the-design-thinking-process/

As part of my post-graduate studies this year I studied design thinking deeply, and I could see that the beauty of design thinking lay in its ability to be applied to many different learning contexts in very dynamic ways. I have been curious to try it out so this term I've used it to plan a short arts inquiry. I have seen it work in other disciplines but was curious to see how it would transfer to the arts. The flexible iterative nature of design thinking is applicable to so many different learning situations, so why not the arts?

A background on inquiry learning. Our school is highly committed to inquiry learning and I've been fortunate to learn with Kath Murdoch for almost a decade. We have our own inquiry framework that we use to guide the learning process, and although we may plan a curriculum overview as a syndicate, every teacher or group of teachers has the freedom to let their learners decide which path to take as long as the focus is always on the Deep Understanding (see planning below).  Some inquiries may be more guided than others depending on how each teacher implements them.

When I use inquiry for learning, I use a shared inquiry or sometimes personal inquiry approach (this particular inquiry is shared).

1. I co-construct learning with students. By this I mean I have a conceptual framework of learning (the Why) but the students drive the content (the What) as much as possible. Together we design and create the How. We inquire together as part of the shared process. During a personal inquiry (passion inquiries) we will also learn alongside but contexts will vary.
2. Most times I have no idea how the inquiry will end. Success and planning are negotiated and re-evaluated as we go. I trust my learners and myself to get there as we learn what works or doesn't work alongside each other.
3. There will be some communication item: something to design, create or perform at the end that drives the purpose for learning. This is sometimes pre-determined but not always, and if pre-determined (in this instance a show) it can serve as a 'hook' or motivator. This has to be real and meaningful for students, though. They have to live it and own it.
4. I integrate the more formal curriculum strands of literacy and numeracy as much as possible. This will be my teaching as inquiry mission for next year as I'd like to increase the percentage of integration. Luckily I will be team-teaching with a wonderful teacher who has exactly the same goal.

By incorporating the design thinking process, it has helped me to highlight the design component in the arts curriculum. I feel we often see design as robotics or building or making, but creating a message through the arts is a wonderful way to explore the elements of design in a multidisciplinary fashion by integrating other curriculum areas (see planning).

My class has chosen to use dance from the Empathise interviews. This may seem strange; why ask an audience what they like? The difference here is that we are inquiring into the elements of a production and growing empathy skills. We are going from the known (at first, the kids wanted to reproduce what they had seen in shows before) into the unknown (create, design, produce while learning new dance skills).

John Holt's Four Worlds Model

For me, inquiry learning is about stretching learning skills and dispositions alongside curriculum content to take the learners from their first and second worlds into the third and fourth worlds. It's a time when we can really stretch our thinking muscles while developing content knowledge at the same time.

By combining learning competencies, skills and content, inquiry thinking and learning expands the capacity to learn as explained by Guy Glaxton in this video link. In this instance, dance has become the vehicle for us to learn explicitly about learning (creating and making meaning), and about the elements of dance and performance. If it sounds like a thinking marathon, sometimes it is and I haven't come up with a reason why that is too high an expectation.

Yes, having other times to just learn about stuff is important, but this type of inquiry is the time when learning skills are honed that make that 'passion time' learning more worthwhile and successful.

Deep learning is, well, deep.

This is the planning for our class (at the time of posting this, it's week 4 and I've only just finished the overview for the next two weeks). The learning progression is pretty fluid and when we began I had only planned week 1. The hook was a dance item but I was quite open for anything to happen and our survey sealed the deal funnily enough. As we are still co-contructing the learning journey this is by now means a finished document.



The Split Screen Curriculum is the framework for the structure of learning for the inquiry sessions. It comes from Guy Glaxton's work as explained by Kath Murdoch in this blog post. Here is a picture of how the split curriculum looked on week 3 during our sessions as we began to explore creating using dance elements in small groups.

I find that it's a great way to come back and reflect on the sessions, the learning and can be built on in more than one session. Making 'learning about learning' visible, and gets added to our inquiry journey wall display.

Here is our digital learning book. In the book are the resources I use and where I collect our ideas. Alongside our inquiry wall, it's the record of our learning journey and also a working document.

Reflections so far:

So how is design thinking working alongside inquiry so far? I've only briefly shared the process with the students (they're 6-7 year olds) as the main challenge for us is the dispositions and content. At this stage I also wanted it to be my own learning but I plan to be more explicit in the future (we could inquire into the design thinking process itself through the dispositions side of the split screen). 

I am also thinking that simply following the design thinking process is not enough for growing learning skills and dispositions. It's a wonderful framework, but by itself, it isn't enough to produce the learning attributes that inquiry learning can deliver. I'm seeing it as a great scaffolding for creating a structure of learning but it's not the materials nor the structure itself.

from Guy Glaxton (well, not always the point; there has to be some challenge- my comment)