Meredith Williams - Principal, NRHS
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The recent change at North Rowan High School has been dramatic.  In less than 18 months we have shifted from strictly traditional instruction to challenge based learning as a main instructional driver for nurturing our students’ development of their own True North.  
 
Visitors often compliment the amount and extent of change in daily operations, student behavior, and overall buy-in on instructional strategies saying “I just don’t know how you did it.”  
 
Interestingly enough, how we “did it” was quite counter to the way typical change in education happens. We didn’t roll out full scale programs that required every teacher to participate, we didn’t overhaul the main core contents, and we didn’t mandate that every stakeholder be fully invested into the new ideas.  Instead, we simply started small.  
 
Our design thinking mindset reminds us that prototypes allow for fast innovation.  Prototypes are cheap, quick, and often incomplete representations of what the designer is envisioning.  But prototypes are real enough that they allow one to play with the outcomes and make modifications easily as opportunities and challenges present themselves.  

This year has been full of prototypes at North Rowan High.  In fact, we consider rapid prototyping our secret for successful and widespread, self-sustaining change.  
 
Take for example our interest in engaging students in design thinking.  We created elective classes for students that would meet at three-week intervals to implement this curriculum.  Only two teachers in each grade level needed to lead this change, and every three weeks they had the opportunity to start again with a new design challenge and new group of students.  Although these classes came to be seen as strong support for core content and the coteaching model became the envy of our lower school teachers, it was at first simply an elective class. Now, it’s becoming a model for smaller challenges in core classes, and coteaching is taking off as a standard practice across the school.
 
When we wanted to see how clubs might work as an addition to our advisory time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a student prototyped with three sample clubs that met once weekly for a month. She is now reporting her findings and suggestions to our Teacher Led Design Team (TLDT) as a part of her honors work.    The TLDT plans to couple her findings with student and staff surveys to create a more extensive plan for next year.
 
The lower school (9th and 10th) grade teachers wanted to innovate new ways to support students who had fallen behind in classes leveraging their grade-level collaborative design.  The 10th grade teachers created a daily remediation period with flexible grouping and the 9th grade teachers focused on parent involvement and strategic, mastery-focused instruction.   Both found some successes and some opportunities for redesign in their processes, which will be leveraged school-wide next year.   
 
Teachers have begun rapid prototyping in the instructional design.  For one, a small project led to a larger effort and a more extensive challenge. For another, a toe in the water with visible thinking led to an all-out leadership role.  Yet another teacher tried flipping instruction with a few Khan lessons leading to a new pace of learning and guided instruction in their classroom. 
 
Rapid prototyping has allowed our teachers to become designers, which means they are leading, learning, and thinking about their practice on a deeper, more constructive level. It has led to empowerment and productive, positive creativity.  The more prototypes – the more rapid our pace of change as teachers discover for themselves what works best for our specific subset of students.
 
If all this sounds great and you too, would like to nurture a design thinking mentality around rapid prototyping in your organization, consider these points to make your own prototyping successful:

1. Not all prototypes work, and failure can often be more constructive than success.  As Ed Catmull explains in Creativity Inc, you must sometimes “protect your ugly baby” because ugly babies (prototypes) grow up to be beautiful adults (outcomes). 
2. The most bizarre prototypes usually lead to the best answers.  The system of education loves modifications around the edges.  Rarely do we do something dramatically different. Consequently, we continue to get similar results.  Supporting the really out-there prototypes will move your organization the furthest the most quickly.
3. Leaders must support the adventurous innovators and leverage any and all resources they need to be successful.  Sometimes the requests are small, sometimes weird, sometimes last minute, but leaders that empower innovative thinking must be willing to fully invest in those who are innovating.  The confidence given by the leader to the innovators makes them willing to keep going.  
4. Timing is key.  You shouldn’t wait for a prototype to be perfected before implementing, as this limits your ability to make just-in-time changes that better fit the prototype to the needs of your users. 
5. Not all individuals have the nerve for prototyping and some will prefer to wait until the “kinks” are worked out to jump on board.  Starting small allows these folks to maintain their comfort zone, while your more adventurous individuals pave a new path. 
6. Innovators become leaders.  When the prototype becomes strong enough to roll out to others, the innovators become in-house trainers and can help others see the value and process of implementation.  

 
Years of full-scale implementation of bulky, one-size-fits-all programs have left educators with a “this too will pass” mentality around change.  Yet, educators are the ones who best know how to “fix” any issues we have in schools.  Rapid prototyping is the way to reignite the passions of educators and engage them in the solution building.  Starting small and nurturing innovation through prototypes can lead to big change that is self-sustaining and generates more positive buy-in.  

Looking back, we should have been able to predict it.  But, at the time, it came as a complete surprise.  When every teacher at North Rowan High School was asked in an Instructional Design Team meeting to state the most important thing they taught, the answers were consistent and clear.  No teacher shared a content-specific fact or skill.  No teacher referenced their standards or end-of-course assessment.  Rather, each teacher identified a thinking or life skill.  
 
Some of the most frequently shared skills were: 

• critical or independent thinking
• organization
• communication
• respect for others
• self-respect or self-esteem
• responsibility

 
In the debrief, teachers identified how a love of learning and the skills to learn were some of the most important concepts they needed to equip students with for their future. They recognized how the content skills needed in careers are ever changing, but the soft skills are enduring. Our teachers also feared that all too often we fail to directly teach these most important life skills in deference to content. 
 
Viewing the documentary Most Likely to Succeed confirmed our fears.  We were not explicitly teaching students the skills they would most need for the rapidly changing world they would enter after graduation. That world would require mastery of the very things being neglected in the classroom.
 
We began to explore processes that would support critical and creative thinking as students explored content knowledge.  In the book Designing Your Life by Burnette and Evans, our staff was introduced to the process of design thinking.  
 
Design thinking is a way to approach a problem with no known solution.  It builds on a humanistic approach of developing empathy for the intended user or audience, and then prototyping to move through an iterative creation process.  The d.school at Stanford offered many resources on their website such as their design thinking bootleg and virtual crash course.  Exploring these resources allowed us to imagine how design thinking could become the engine by which we drove change towards a more critical and creative approach to student learning.  
 
Our design labs are now the home to our design thinking instruction.  Design teachers, along with Career & Technical Education and Exceptional Children’s teachers, work collaboratively to engage students in Challenge Based Learning.  Their pedagogy is based on the d.school design thinking process.  Students work to develop empathy, define the problem, brainstorm creative solutions for their intended user, prototype, and test their solutions.  
 
Through the process students apply their core content learning to real-world challenges.  They work in teams and begin to see themselves as designers.  They work through mistakes and missteps, collaborate with peers, communicate through through writing, speaking, and visual exhibits, and discover their own power to create solutions.  Although most of the final products are impressive, design students are graded on agency and the 4 C’s – collaboration, communication, creative and critical thinking throughout the entire design process.
 
For North High, design thinking is a method for assuring our graduates are fully prepared for the world they will enter after their senior year.  It is how we equip students with skills that allow them to design their best possible life, overcome obstacles, and make learning their own.  
 
See our Design Lab course description here.