Designing for Engagement
5 questions to help you create a classroom that fires curiosity, creativity, wonder, and empathy
Within computer science there’s a way of thinking we would be smart to adopt in education. It’s called “user experience” and considers how easy and personally useful something like an app or a desktop is for the person using it.
Our students don’t necessarily want what we want or even what we would like for them to want. However, we can influence their “user experience” the same way that Apple or Walgreens or even Domino’s Pizza does:
Invite input from those we’re trying to “sell” on our content. Ask: What is it like to be a student in this class?
Analyze our processes. You can do this as easily as answering three questions at the end of each day: What worked? What needs work? What do you want to do next?
Commit to continually improving everyone’s experience. This is easier if you enlist the help of a colleague you can trust, using a regularly scheduled time to check in on your answers to these questions.
Clinging to the argument that disengagement is all the students’ fault, and has nothing to do with how we’ve set up our schools, will cause us to miss the chance to transform learning.
A Design Problem
The idea of designing for what we want to see in our classrooms is a shift toward what Rolf Faste, a professor of industrial design and mechanical engineering, termed “design thinking as a method of creative action.”
His thinking centered on a core principle that design isn’t just about making products, but is also a way of designing behaviors of the user.
He made a strong case for viewing everything from a user’s perspective in an effort to not only be sensitive to people and cultures, but to create meaning for them in the design.
To transfer and modify this discipline to school settings, reflect on the following questions and answer them for your individual classes, as part of a teacher team, or even school-wide staff.
Questions For Designing School User Experience
1. How is the design of our class (or school) creating apathy in our students? Disengagement? Lack of motivation?
For example, the truism “the person doing the work is the person doing the learning” applies here. If the teacher is the one doing most of the talking in the class, not only are students more likely to be disengaged, but they are also shut out of practicing discussion, inquiry, and critical thinking.
2. How is our design failing to communicate the value of our content?
If we are presenting our content as “preparation for the test” or “something you will need in the next grade,” we are telling students they will find little long-term worth in what we’re teaching today. Making deliberate choices to find the relevance in our content for our students’ lives as they live them right now communicates a much more compelling reason to learn what we are teaching.
3. How is our design keeping parents from participating?
Many parents are overwhelmed in ways we don’t often think about. Many have a patchwork of part-time jobs and often are the primary caregivers for elderly parents, according to research . Meeting parents where they are by engaging them through social media, texting services, or even visits and activities that take place in their communities help them to be involved.
Other, more direct forms of parental involvement have been created in Houston through “parent super centers” where actual needs like Internet access, help with translation, and literacy training is provided in exchange for time spent volunteering in the school. Another program trades the use of the home ec department’s laundry for school attendance.
4. How is our design undermining kids’ belief in their abilities?
Behavior charts in elementary school, for example, are designed for expedience and control. They can demean and shame students into compliance rather than help them build self-control. It’s worth the extended time to connect with students and discuss behaviors and alternatives rather than rely on a chart that is probably not reflected in any other part of the students’ lives outside the classroom.
Secondary schools also erode self-efficacy with an overemphasis on grades or worse, rewarding behaviors that we want students to develop intrinsically, like reading, with external rewards like “pizza for books.” We want students to embrace effort, welcome challenges, and learn how to recover from setbacks. These resilience skills are what they will truly need to be successful no matter what they want to do.
5. How is our design creating distraction?
Consider the amount of work you are asking students to complete using digital classroom tools, both in and outside of schools. Learning spaces centered on building concentration and focus help students become less distracted.
Discussion around their need for devices is one way to create awareness of why they are turning to them and away from each other. Some schools are using mindfulness exercises or engaging with nature as a way of shifting students into a calmer, more receptive state.
Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels
A Strategy For Helping Distracted Kids Finish Work
In my experience with teenagers, they enjoyed learning techniques like the “20/20,” my alteration of the famous Pomidoro technique. They use a timer to complete 20 minutes of focused, effortful work and then give themselves 20 minutes of unfocused “free time” to do whatever they want, also on a timer.
If they can complete two rounds of the 20/20, they will have completed almost an hour and a half of work. The more we can help students learn concrete methods of managing their attention, the more they can transfer this skill to other classes and their lives outside school.
At its simplest, design thinking calls on us as teachers and administrators to “understand, improve, and apply” solutions to our educational problems. These are the seeds of innovation, that already tired buzzword in education.
Innovation isn’t a one-time thing that we do with the help of an expensive consultant, or by wheeling in carts of the latest hardware, or uploads of the newest software or turnkey programs. And we can’t order, threaten, or guilt people to innovate. However, we can be systematic in creating the conditions and systems for innovation to regularly happen inside the walls of our schools.
