story about a city situated in a real place familiar to them, a story that asked them to imagine that city 100 years in the future? What if I had them build a rough model of their imagined City of the Future, shaped by their own Never-Before-Seen, roughly built solutions to subject-related, big topic dilemmas that they identified—before I taught them what others had done?
In the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning, following its 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™, through a progression of big topic Design Challenges, students roughly build a tabletop City or other Never-Before-Seen built environments that represent real places or systems (a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement/Colony, Ancient Civilization, Biome, Biosphere, Business, etc.), based on required curriculum.
Determined by a teacher's pre-set subject matter requirements and Guided Lessons, an ongoing City “story” evolves with students' original thinking displayed by the artifacts they build on individual land parcels to develop an ever-changing, dynamic model. Each big topic Design Challenge, taking place over a week to a month, integrates interdisciplinary studies and meets learning objectives in teacher-taught Guided Lessons related to big and small topics. Students bring their individual land parcels together—as parts to the contextual whole—in a continuing revision process as they review the problems they identify in their City and set out to solve as a classroom community the validity of their solutions. Social responsibility, social justice, civics, and government (division of labor and classroom management) come into play as students adopt government roles in the City through Never-Before-Seen Creatures they build as their Avatars.
The words “design” and “Never-Before-Seen” in the methodology are synonyms for creativity. A designer communicates original ideas, taking into consideration a client's “don't wants and needs” to make them real. In the same way, a teacher pretends to be the client, “hiring” students to be the designers of Never-Before-Seen solutions to Design Challenges, and requiring that they adhere to a “don't wants and needs” Criteria List.
This is not a competition to see who makes the best or prettiest artifact. Materials used for building can be anything, even folded cardboard or crumpled pieces of paper. There are no “wrong” answers as long as students can justify how their Never-Before-Seen built artifacts meet the teacher's criteria. What the artifacts look like doesn't matter. The tangible artifacts that students build, before revising them after Guided Lessons and textbook study, represent their original thinking about subject matter and promote the creative and higher level thinking skills that lead to the transferable application of information across the curriculum and in real life.
As students describe how their built objects meet subject-matter-related criteria, they learn to advocate for their ideas and to discuss and evaluate their solutions and those of their peers. Writing follows oral discussion. Students write about their creations and do required textbook study and related research. They use the information they acquire to revise their own built artifacts through oral and written presentations and/or by physically rebuilding them in the context of their City's simulated government. This process, ongoing over a semester or school year, engages students in learning and gives them confidence and the vocabulary to think deeply about how the factual information they are required to learn applies to real life.
Design-Based Learning re-imagines classroom practice. It is not about stand-alone projects, arts-and-crafts activities, or training future professional designers. Creative thinking is woven into the entire K-12 required curriculum through this methodology, connecting multiple subjects to the student-built student-run City of the Future or other contextual environment.
Teaching at Cal Poly Pomona, California, gave me a university platform for training K–12 teachers through comprehensive course work in my methodology. To establish a Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis on Design-Based Learning, I had to write a course of study and have it approved by the Academic Senate. This happened in 1995 with the crucial support and persistence of School of Education and Integrated Studies Interim Dean, Sheila McCoy.
To date, hundreds of teachers trained in the methodology have documented their practice and the significant standardized test results that their students have achieved.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, I spearheaded an online pilot program in 2020 working with a large group of K–12 Design-Based Learning teachers who were uncertain about how to apply the methodology online, but found that traditional teaching methods left their students disengaged. When technology first surfaced in the classroom, I had tried working with a few computer scientists to find a way to bring my Design-Based Learning methodology to a 2D medium without losing its fundamental reliance on the spatial domain: 3D, hands-on experiences. Those efforts were unsuccessful, but developing a pilot program with so many teachers anxious to apply Design-Based Learning online made the difference. The results were that my methodology translated easily to the building and running of a City in a virtual setting, as long as students at home built physical artifacts for the City. What was learned from this online research will continue beyond the pandemic as a companion to in-person classroom teaching and teacher training. In a hybrid environment, my methodology will connect virtual and in-person teaching and learning by providing a continuum across both venues.
* * *
In the summer of 2019, I walked up the steps to Moore Hall at UCLA and entered the School of Education. My Design-Based Learning methodology had recently become part of the university's Center X teacher-training institution, one of the most prestigious in the country. I was there to oversee the first Center X Design-Based Learning teacher training.
I had gone up those same stairs on my very first day as a student at UCLA in 1955, intending to be a music major, not an education student, on my way to audition as a harpist for the UCLA Symphony. I couldn't help but choke up, thinking, “Oh, my God, I came here so many years ago to play the music of others. And now I'm coming to teach others to play the ‘music' that I developed.” It was a profound experience.
What I thought I would hate all those years ago had turned out to be a lifelong obsession, giving me the sense that I could make a difference in the world, something I've learned many teachers feel. When I was a classroom teacher, I often wondered why I was being paid to have so much fun.
Today, when I teach teachers, I feel the same way.
SECTION ONE Creative Thinking by Design
Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught.
—AI WEI WEI
CHAPTER 1 NOT ARTS AND CRAFTS
Seven-year-old Amilie was inconsolable. She tearfully held up a smooshed piece of paper with one big, puffy, blue pom-pom attached. Her second pom-pom had fallen off and before she could pick it up, another student had stepped on it. To an outsider, the object in Amilie's hand might appear to be just a tangle of paper with a fuzzy ball dangling from it. But to Amilie, this was “Cottie,” shaped by her own hands and imagination. And now Cottie was missing an eye.
Daphne Chase, her 2nd-grade teacher, asked Amilie how she might fix Cottie with the materials available, and Amilie gave it serious thought before deciding that two smaller pom-poms were the solution. “Now she's even better than before,” she said.
This wasn't an arts-and-crafts project. It was the Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ process, reversing the standard teaching method to ignite creative thinking by having students imagine and build original artifacts as they develop and revise a tabletop City of the Future (or other curriculum-related environmental context) for a purpose: to activate Non-Specific Transfer of Learning so that students consciously use and reuse subject matter in multiple settings.
Thirty minutes was all it took for Amilie and Daphne's other students to complete building their Creatures/Avatars, the first of 10 sequential BIG TOPIC Design Challenges that Daphne would present to them monthly over the school year. Each Design Challenge was woven into