Meredith Williams - Principal, NRHS
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:
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.
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AuthorMeredith Williams is the principal at NRHS. A graduate of NRHS and an community member, Mrs. Williams is invested in the success of the NRHS student population. ArchivesCategories |