As more and more manufacturing is being done overseas in countries whose costs of labor are a fraction of Western labor pricing, and the world’s consumption is markedly shifting eastward as China and India’s middle class emerges, America’s competitive advantage no longer rests on being the world’s largest consumer of goods nor its most efficient manufacturer. Hyper-fast replication cycles and supply chains that span an integrated globe suggest that innovation is a competitive advantage but one short-lived absent constant reinvention. Our competitive advantages today lie not in our natural resources, our cost structure or purchasing power. Our competitive advantage across industries lies in our ability to continuously innovate.
Design thinking as a practice transforms organizations in how they innovate. The mission of design thinking is to translate observations into insights and insights into products and services that will improve lives according to IDEO CEO, Tim Brown in his book “Change by Design”. Brown says that design thinkers observe how people behave, encourage experimentation through prototyping, spend considerable face-to-face time with “extreme users” to gain inspirational insights, and finally observe the ordinary, recording their observations as visually as possible.
We can visualize how design thinking can be and is deployed in say a technology company like Apple, but how does it apply to your industry? How does it apply to a structured, scheduled and regimented environment found say in a typical school?
Matchbook Learning is trying to embrace a design thinking approach to turning around public schools. Yes, we do embrace technology in our blended schools but technology is neither necessary nor sufficient for our model to embrace design thinking.
We start with “extreme users” – bottom 5% public schools and their students – and spend an incredible amount of time observing the ordinary routines, practices and process of teaching and learning that occurs daily in classrooms. Our teachers are observed daily, capturing data via visual dashboards and processes via web-based templates on the ordinary rhythms of classroom activity. These observations are then shared in face-to-face, one-on-one meetings with teachers every two weeks. During these bi-weekly sessions, we encourage a fair amount of in-classroom prototyping to experiment how students are grouped within the classroom, how those groups vary in digital content, teacher facilitation and learning experience. This enables instructional strategy deployment and experimentation with built-in feedback cycles every two weeks.
As a result of this design, our teachers receive a classroom observation once every couple of days and a formal coaching session at least once every two weeks. In a give 200-day school year, this results in observing, coaching and mentoring our teachers almost 120 times a year! You would have to be a professional athlete or Hollywood actor/actress to receive an equivalent amount of coaching in your profession. However, that’s the power of design thinking to elevate the profession of teaching to become an engine and catalyst of innovation.
