Throughout my career in education, I have been challenged by the thought that, perhaps, I was doing ‘to’ my students, rather than ‘with’ them.
Whether it was through my lesson planning, my classroom practice or even my leadership approach I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was deciding on the problems of practice my students needed to solve and was making some pretty huge assumptions about what I thought they needed to learn, and how I thought they might need to learn it. It was this hunch that first inspired me to explore student led-co design through my study in 2017, investigate how to scale these findings as a co-director through the Ed Institute in 2020 and now, how to share these co-design skill sets, mindsets, and toolsets with as many young people as possible through the Education Futures Foundation a not-for-profit launched in 2024.
Education is at the heart of everything we do at the Education Futures Foundation (EdFF). Our mission is to transform complex educational systems to deliver public value, making them more efficient and effective for people, society, and government. At the core of our mission is preparing young people to become ethical leaders, equipped to tackle the greatest challenges facing humanity. We aim to place young voices at the forefront of the design process.
Central to our educational philosophy is a profound respect for the voices of young people. We believe that every young person should feel a true sense of belonging and inclusion within their school environment. This core value drives our mission to foster meaningful connections in their learning.
These values have been reflected in my own research, work that used design thinking as the catalyst for students co-designing their own solutions within a challenge that they identified. A number of key outcomes bubbled up while working with my amazing students and their educators. The basic premise of my doctoral work was to utilise the Australian Curriculum: Technologies (Design and Technologies) to teach design thinking with a group of Year 5 and 6 classes. The students used the process below to develop solutions for problems or opportunities in their worlds that held meaning and value for them.
Some interesting findings fell out of the research, findings that have gone on to influence me greatly in the work that I do with young people and their educators. The first of which was the role that creativity places in the process of design, and, conversely, the way that design can induce authentic creativity in young people. I certainly had my perceptions of human-centred design challenged when I observed how much the prototyping and idea creation stages of the process stimulated genuine creative thought in the students. Perhaps most notable was the way that design thinking got students who maybe didn’t think of themselves as ‘creative types’ doing, making and reflecting on their own personal creations in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. I finished the research thinking that perhaps design thinking, and more specifically student led co-design process could be a useful tool in the arsenal of educators wanting to bring creativity into their classroom settings, regardless of their subject area, experience, or expertise.
Secondly, I was amazed to discover the power of co-design in the stimulating of empathy in young people. Empathy can be one of those ‘secret sauces’ for us as educators, but importantly it also has the tendency to be something that we as educators can find it difficult to teach. By introducing a specific design ‘avatar’ for the students called the ‘explorer’ who was specifically designed to help students strive for genuine empathy we were able to inspire students to deliberately think in an empathetic way. By giving them a tangible way to approach the challenge of designing a solution for someone else I noticed that the participating students were far more likely to engage with an empathetic approach. It was almost as if by attaching authenticity and meaning to the concept the young people were able to tap into their empathetic selves in a far more consistent and individualised way.
And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the way that the design thinking process was embraced by students for whom traditional education had not been successful was incredibly exciting. One of the classes in the research project was labelled as a ‘gifted’ class, and although these young people were able to engage with the ideation cycle and the multiple rounds of ‘structured failure’ that this process requires they did find it a challenge at times, assuming that their first prototype would be fine, and often asking “How did I get an A”. The students within the other classes that were noted as being often disengaged or ‘problematic’ in the classroom tended to thrive when asked to embrace the FAIL (First Attempt In Learning) mentality. It was almost as if their life circumstances had prepared them for the inevitable failures that life throws at us all, and as a result they had no problem in creating multiple prototypes, failing fast, and ruthlessly choosing the best solution for their prospective ‘client’. This area needs further research but it was a compelling narrative nonetheless
How do these findings connect with a future that has artificial intelligence so strongly at its core? Well as Paul Browning linked to in his recent youtube video the world economic forum has recently released its top 10 job skills of tomorrow within the context of a world rapidly changing through the influence of AI and other Megatrends. I was not surprised to see that some of these (creativity, complex problem solving and ideation in particular) featured in my exploration of design thinking in the classroom. Machines can do a lot, and they can do it incredibly well - but there are still some things (for now at least!) that humans can and should be entrusted with. We still want the empathetic touch of a human when we are in distress, we still need creativity to light the way through the world’s intractable problems and, I would argue, we still need to view educating our young people in the very things that make us truly human as among our highest priorities.
My final provocation is this - the vast majority of the leaders, the Nobel laureates, the innovators of 2050 are partaking in our education system RIGHT NOW. Let’s make sure we design an education system that prepares them for this future, and provide them with the skills of design to own it for themselves.
