Approximately 400 of those students are in our elementary school,
where about three years ago we built
an Innovation Lab. As an educator
with an interest in technology and
design, Joel took on direction of
the project. We also collaborated
with stakeholders in the school, our
alumni community, and experts in
the fields of technology, education,
and business. What resulted is our
K– 4 Innovation Lab curriculum: a
vertical alignment of STEAM integrations, 21st-century skills, career and
technical education, social-emotional
learning, and interdisciplinary connections across every content area—all of
which lay the foundation for problem-based learning in grades 5–12.
Beginning in kindergarten, the
Innovation Lab programming exposes
students to progressively more sophisticated levels of keyboarding, digital
citizenship, coding and logic, robotics,
and—the pièce de résistance—design
thinking. Students are engaged in
design thinking through a hybrid
model of stand-alone curriculum,
classroom collaborations, enrichment
and extension clubs, and other opportunities (such as exploring a problem
of their own interest).
The Case for Problem Solvers
Humans are natural problem solvers.
This is especially true of young
children, who, presented with a whole
world that is new and infinitely worth
exploring, quickly gain knowledge
and skills. Rather than allowing
young students’ restless curiosity to
atrophy as they get older, we’re trying
to harness and nurture it. We honor
student choice and voice at the earliest
of ages. We encourage and actively
facilitate young students in seeking out
and engaging in topics of their own
interest, both as part of and in addition
to their regular academic work. We
want to give elementary
students opportunities to
explore what they can do
with what they know as
early as possible.
To support this kind
of exploration, we use
the design-thinking
process. As conveyed
by Stanford d.school’s
K– 12 Lab model, design
thinking is a platform for
creative problem solving
and an authentic way to
engage students in applying
content knowledge and skills to rigorous and relevant issues. Students
empathize to understand the user’s
perspective, define their focus and
clarify the problem to solve, ideate by
brainstorming and creating solutions,
design prototypes of one or more ideas,
and test ideas to gather user feedback.
Drawing on user feedback, they repeat
this process to continually improve the
prototype in the next iteration.
In Bringing Innovation to School,
Suzie Boss (2012) describes the switch
to design thinking as a move that
requires teachers to develop strategies
that shift the focus from teacher-driven
instruction with a correct answer to
“open-ended questions for which
there’s not one right answer” (p. 69).
This move can be more difficult for
the teacher than it is for the student
because we often need to step away
from how we’re used to planning a
lesson, such as by planning backward
from the end goal of what we’re
assessing. With design thinking, we
can’t see around the corner to know
what the end product will look like.
Design-thinking projects are open-ended by nature and have multiple
possible solutions (fig. 1 on p. 68).
Instead of assessing only the end
product, we also assess the process and
the application of the content.
Design Thinking in
the Classroom
To get a sense of what design thinking
looks like in action, let’s examine our
2nd grade project, which focused on
the design challenge question, “How
might we keep our baby goats safe?”
In January 2017, our 2nd grade
teachers approached Joel because they
were looking to develop a design-thinking project around the Common
Core mathematical standards on
2–D and 3–D shapes ( CCSS.Math.
Content. 2.G.A. 1-3). Knowing that
elementary students’ interest in anything skyrockets when animals are
involved, Joel and the teachers called
our agricultural and environmental
education department and connected
with Jennifer Wise, our animal center
coordinator. It happened to be kidding
season for the goats in the center, and
Jennifer noted an ongoing problem
she had been encountering with
baby goats.
Baby goats are dastardly little escape
artists that can squeeze out of very
small gaps in their pens. Like human
children, goat kids are natural problem
solvers, so no matter what she tried,
Jennifer often found herself having
to round up wayward, bleating baby
goats separated from their herd. This
