The Power of collaboration

A Teachers job is to inspire their Students and instil in them the love of learning. To do this we have to continually learn ourselves. This is something that I love to do predominantly by connecting with other educators and learning from and sharing with them. Typically, I do this within my own area of expertise; design. However, this week I was part of an amazing learning experience and one that I learnt as much from, as our students did. 

When chatting with a 4th year University student currently doing her practicum in our school, Molly enquired about Design Thinking and the possibility of applying it to a Science unit she had been working on with Year five students. She had been working on how light reflects and travels. I was really keen to help out because this was a great opportunity for me to impart design thinking away from my normal area of teaching as well as helping an enthusiastic pre-service teacher.

As she explained the unit and I explained the framework for Design Thinking, it soon became really clear that there were lots of opportunities to marry this science task within a design thinking framework. In fact, one of our biggest problems was limiting the scope to suit the timeslot we had. We set out with some clear goals. We wanted;

- The students to be hands on and engaged. To learn through doing.

- The task to have a real-world connection.

- The students to learn about how light or sight is reflected

- To develop curiosity in the learning

As one of our goals was to have the students curious about their learning we knew we had a starting point. As the students arrived they noticed tables lying on their sides in a large circle on the grassed area outside the room. Without saying more than we needed, we asked the students to hide behind a table and stay out of sight. If we spotted them, they had to sit out. Before long, the conversations we heard, confirmed that we already had them curious. “What is happening?”… “Why are we doing this?”… “What are they doing?”…

From there we delivered the brief. The scene was, they were in the trenches in WW2. They didn’t know what was going on above them. They didn’t know who was out there. Their challenge was; ‘How might we reflect light or sight to communicate and observe? ‘

An important part of Design Thinking is collaboration. We partnered the students to work together and they set about their task. Again, one of our goals was to learn through doing, so we wanted the kids to make, test and experiment. To learn through failing but keep trying until they came to a solution. They had access to a large range of industrial waste materials that hopefully also sparked curiosity and set their imagination alight with ideas.  

By the end of this lesson we saw very few periscopes that worked. What were finished, looked very ordinary and were just holding together. In hindsight, we really needed more time to complete this task. However, this task was far from a failure in terms of students learning. Things we heard, and saw were;

§  High levels of engagement

§  Amazing curiosity

§  Great collaboration and sharing of ideas

§  Great use of imagination with materials and ideas

In reflecting with this class in the following lesson, Molly asked them what they had learnt from this lesson. Some of the responses were;

§  ‘If you keep trying, you’ll work it out’

§  ‘To listen to other’s ideas’

§  ‘To keep an open mind and not just think your idea is the best’

§  ‘Working as a team you can get more ideas’

We know they learnt about using mirrors to reflect sight or light. We heard the conversation’s and saw them talking and experimenting with angles, materials and mirrors. We know they understood real life uses, because we reflected on this with them after. This task was a valuable lesson and by using Design thinking, allowed the learning process, to be more important than the product.

At the start of this blog I said I learnt as much from this as our students did. Although I use Design Thinking regularly, and talk about things like collaboration, sharing of ideas, failing forward and the other depositions associated with it, this was a valuable experience for me to be part of planning a lesson collaboratively away from my normal teaching area. To listen and combine idea’s and experiences, to create an amazing learning experience for the students.

Regardless of who you are, how experienced you are or think you are, or what your area of expertise is, we can always learn from others. That is something that I have taken away from activity this and something I will be encouraging in my students from here on. For this I thank Molly and hope that this learning experience has been as valuable for her as it was for her students and me.