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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Give your students a leg up and improve learning outcomes with this revolutionary, hands-on approach to teaching In Cultivating Curiosity: Teaching and Learning Reimagined, distinguished educator and author Doreen Gehry Nelson inspires anyone yearning to break away from formulaic teaching. Told from dozens of powerful and personal perspectives, the effectiveness and versatility of the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning described in the book is backed by years of quantitative and qualitative data. You'll learn how applying this cross-curricular methodology can transform your K-12 teaching practice, regardless of changes in content standards. The book includes: * Discussions about how to launch creative and critical thinking in your students * Explanations of the methodology's 6 ½ Steps of Backward Thinking(TM) that invigorate the teaching experience and dramatically improve learning * The inception of the methodology and the experiences of K-12 teachers who practice it in their classrooms. Perfect for K-12 educators seeking a methodology that consistently engages students in applying what they learn, Cultivating Curiosity is also an ideal resource for teachers-in-training, administrators, and post-secondary educators.
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Seitenzahl: 400
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
SECTION ONE: Creative Thinking by Design
CHAPTER 1: NOT ARTS AND CRAFTS
CHAPTER 2: SHAPING THE METHODOLOGY
THE CONCEPT OF CHANGE AND NON-SPECIFIC TRANSFER OF LEARNING
JARED'S STORY
THE GENESIS OF THE STUDENT-BUILT CITY
PARALLEL WORLDS
LESSONS ALONG THE WAY
THE SMITHSONIAN
CHAPTER 3: THE CITY
THE VERSATILITY OF THE CITY
IN THE CLASSROOM
IN THE VIRTUAL CLASSROOM
CHAPTER 4: THE METHODOLOGY
AN ON-RAMP TO CREATIVE THINKING
TAPPING INTO TEACHERS' INNATE CREATIVITY
THE 6½ STEPS OF BACKWARDS THINKING™
KICK-STARTING THE MAKING OF AN INTEGRATED CURRICULUM
3D RED TRIANGLES: A POWERFUL TOOL FOR MEMORY RETENTION
CURRICULUM INTEGRATION CHARTS
LONG-RANGE PLANNING BOARDS
ESSENTIALS OF THE DOREEN NELSON METHOD OF DESIGN-BASED LEARNING
CHAPTER 5: OWNING AND REUSING INFORMATION
APPLE COMPUTER AND THE VIVARIUM PROJECT
EXPANDING THE VOCABULARY FOR INVENTION
THE HEART OF THE MATTER: THE WEIZMANN INSTITUTE, ISRAEL
CHAPTER 6: IN A NUTSHELL
THE DOREEN NELSON METHOD OF DESIGN-BASED LEARNING IS NOT ABOUT …
THE DOREEN NELSON METHOD OF DESIGN-BASED LEARNING HAS RIGOR. IT IS NOT ABOUT …
SECTION TWO: Goodbye to Formulaic Teaching
CHAPTER 7: “I'M NOT CREATIVE”
CHAPTER 8: A RETURN TO THE SANDBOX
CHAPTER 9: BREAKING OUT OF THE COMFORT ZONE
CHAPTER 10: IT TAKES COURAGE
CHAPTER 11: WHEN ADMINISTRATORS GET IT
CHAPTER 12: TRY A LITTLE TRICKERY (IT WORKS)
CHAPTER 13: “BUT I ALREADY DO THIS”
CHAPTER 14: A LEARNING COMMUNITY OF TEACHERS (COHORT GROUPS … FOOD MATTERS)
CHAPTER 15: THE IMPORTANCE OF “WHY”
CHAPTER 16: TRUST
SECTION THREE: Developing a Design-Based Learning Classroom
CHAPTER 17: ORGANIC CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE
ROLE-PLAYING
MOVING THE FURNITURE
CLASSROOM-IN-A-BAG
A STUDENT-CENTERED CLASSROOM
CHAPTER 18: MAKING CURRICULUM PHYSICAL
LONG-RANGE PLANNING BOARDS IN DEPTH
THE EVOLUTION OF THE PLANNING PROCESS
ACTIVATING A YEARLONG, STORY-DRIVEN CURRICULUM
CHAPTER 19: THE HISTORY WALL
THE HISTORY WALL IN THE CLASSROOM
IN CLOSING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Guide
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BEGIN READING
IN CLOSING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Praise for Cultivating Curiosity
Curiosity is the most important word in education today. Teachers the world over long for ways to cultivate this elusive yet essential path to engagement and authentic learning. After a dreadful year of heroic efforts to engage students in remote learning, Cultivating Curiosity offers a much-needed blueprint for the journey back to face-to-face, hands-on, problem-based teaching and learning. Over a brilliant, pathbreaking career, Doreen Nelson has developed and refined an innovative methodology that nourishes curiosity, stimulates creativity, and scaffolds critical thinking. This is the first important education book of the after-pandemic era that every teacher, every parent, every policy maker and concerned citizen alike should read with gusto and to much profit.
—Marcelo Orozco, Chancellor, University of Massachusetts Boston
In the end, Design-Based Learning is all about creating a vehicle for students to connect abstract academic concepts to concrete ideas, and to imagine creative solutions to challenges that they confront along the way. It provides a context for students to “perform” their thinking and discoveries. Ideas that they learn in one application may well turn out to serve another field or situation equally well. Hence the learning becomes integrated in an important way and, as opposed to a building of requirements, can serve as a frame of curricular design.
—Lorne Buchman, President, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California
I frequently look back with gratitude to my experience in Design-Based Learning-focused classrooms during my three years at Walnut High School. Now, I am studying to become a teacher with the hope to pass along the innovative education I am thankful to have received.
—Madeleine Skinner, alumna, Walnut(Calif.) High School
Since 1994, I have been championing the Design-Based Learning methodology in classrooms in Japan and in an exchange program we had with Finland. Doreen's methodology was a crucial part of guiding our students to come to terms with the devastating events of the earthquake that hit Japan in 2011. For five years, in cooperation with the Japan UNICEF Association, we used the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning at the Sendai City Shichigo Elementary School as a comprehensive learning template for reconstruction. We have continued implementing the methodology thereafter, and more than 1,200 children have experienced its power. This book will significantly impact many of our teachers and their students.
—Dr. Shinya Sato, Professor, Yamagata University, Yamagata, Japan
Doreen Nelson has put pen to paper to share her innovative instructional method of Design-Based Learning, in this brilliantly written and engaging book. Nelson has given us the gift of understanding how education can inspire students to learn and teachers to teach by igniting the curiosity in both. In the spirit of John Dewey and through a hands-on, contextualized approach, students taught using Design-Based Learning acquire knowledge across multiple subjects and develop higher-order thinking while being challenged to consider the milieu of society's most pressing issues and to develop strategies to address them with creativity and care. I can think of no more relevant or important methodology for teaching today.
—Christina (Tina) Christie, Wasserman Dean & Professor, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies
…it has been astounding what you were able to accomplish in preparing so many students for creative thinking, I tell my granddaughter about how we were exposed to a variety of experiences that helped shape who I am. No doubt my experience in the 5th grade, having you as my teacher, has had a very long-lasting impact on my life.
—Portia Stots, student in the first Design-Based Learning class
I want to thank you for your innovative and creative use of the “City” in your methodology, because it turned me into an urban planner… . I became curious about how cities are designed, how decisions are made in cities; so much so that I obtained a master in urban planning (UC Irvine) and a doctorate in geography (USC). And now I teach at CSULB using cities as a framework for understanding policy development.
—Rigo Rodriguez Ph.D., Board President, Santa Ana Unified School District; Associate Professor of Latina/o Public Policy, Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, California State University Long Beach
Design-Based Learning started as a grassroots movement in the San Gabriel Unified School District and now has become one of the major initiatives for developing 21st Century Learning Skills in our students. We have seen students flourish in our Design-Based Learning classes, engaged with their learning and excited about creating and collaboratively solving problems. Our teachers have embraced the methodology and have found it to be a refreshing alternative for integrating the core curricular areas into a meaningful and exciting learning experience. We utilized the Design-Based Learning methodology as a district during the pandemic, collaborating as an organization to successfully create “Never-Before-Seen-Solutions” to problems new to us in public education. Design-Based Learning continues to expand in our district as the benefit of this type of authentic learning takes hold.
—Jim Symonds, Superintendent, San Gabriel Valley Unified School District
It's been such an honor and so exciting to be on this never-before-seen journey with Doreen and the Design-Based Learning family she has built. Now, with this book, her methodology can be shared more broadly with teachers, students and the entire educational system. Cultivating Curiosity will have enormous impact.
—Jessica Heim, Director of the Design-Based Learning Project, Center X, UCLA
Doreen Gehry Nelson's methodology has changed me fundamentally, and I cannot wait for more people to know about the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning. Doreen is a true inspiration for so many, and her vision is what pushes me and others to become better educators.
—Stephanie Na, AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), Advanced Composition, and Special Education English 2 teacher, Workman High School, City of Industry, California
Doreen Gehry Nelson believed in us, and in doing so, she guided us through to a wonderful dream come true.
—Angela Gurrola, Spanish teacher, Gabrielino High School, San Gabriel, California
The Design-Based Learning Method has changed my life, and most of the lives of our children.
—Natalie Bezdjian, kindergarten teacher, Rose & Alex Pilibos Armenian School, Montebello, California
Doreen has been a true inspiration to me and to so many. She has shown us all how to persevere even when life sends us never-before-seen-challenges. Her words of encouragement and wisdom have stayed with me and now they serve to inspire many others.
—Araceli Garcia, English Department Chair, Workman High School, City of Industry, California
Congrats to Doreen on the realization of her dream. Design-Based Learning has been a source of inspiration and joy for me and for my classroom. I know this book will be a new beginning to share her vision with the world.
—Georgia Singleton, 4thgrade teacher, Roosevelt Elementary School, San Gabriel, California
Doreen's method has revolutionized my way of teaching. It is the base of creativity and analytical thinking for future generations.
—Anna Cruz, 5thgrade teacher, Roosevelt Elementary School, San Gabriel, California
Many years of hard work are inside this book. And it inspires. In all seriousness, Doreen's Design-Based Learning method frees teachers. It has changed my view about the role of education for all who participate. And, it has opened my eyes to how fun, serious, and exciting education will find those that ask ‘why.’
—Dave Cameron, science teacher, Gabrielino High School, San Gabriel, California
The work of Doreen Gehry Nelson will bring innovation to classrooms for years to come. Thank you to being so devoted to raising our profession to the next level.
—Daphne Chase, 2ndgrade teacher, Wilson Elementary School, San Gabriel, California
Expanding on the work of John Dewey, Doreen Nelson has made the nuances of constructivist pedagogy concrete, relatable, and engaging. She provides a comprehensive guide that works as a catalyst for creativity, collective consciousness, and civics in any classroom. It is an antidote to prescriptive programs that unwittingly restrain and disengage students and teachers from higher-order thinking. Cultivating Curiosity: Teaching and Learning Reimagined offers hope to anyone interested in the connections between our fragile democracy and schooling. Educators at any grade level, parents and policy-makers alike, will find this design-based learning methodology a tool to integrate disciplines and reflect on governance structures in thoughtful and fun-filled ways.
—Georgia Ann Lazo, Ed.D, Principal, UCLA Lab School, Los Angeles
cultivating curiosity
teaching and learning reimagined
DOREEN GEHRY NELSON
The Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning
Copyright © 2022 Doreen Gehry Nelson. All rights reserved.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo: Carl Bower.
DOREEN GEHRY NELSON is Professor Emerita of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, School of Education and Integrative Studies; Adjunct Professor in the Cal Poly College of Environmental Design; was a Professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, from 2002 to 2019; and in 2019, was named Founding Director of Design-Based Learning by the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies–Center X for the UCLA Design-Based Learning Project.
An award-winning, 50-year veteran educator and published author in the field of education, Nelson began developing her Design-Based Learning methodology (formerly called City Building Education) in the late 1960s to ignite creativity, promote high-level transfer of learning, and foster cross-curricular critical thinking skills among K–12 students using the spatial domain. She was named one of 30 top American innovators in education by the New York Times in 1991, and is the recipient of both the American Institute of Architecture's prestigious Lifetime Honorary Membership (the highest honor for a nonarchitect) and the California State University's statewide, 2006 Wang Award for Excellence in Education.
Nelson has served as lecturer, teacher, consultant, and scholar-in-residence for institutions as diverse as MIT, Harvard, Apple Inc., Stanford University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, London's Royal College of Art, Japan's Sendai Science Museum, the American Bar Association, Walt Disney Imagineering, and the Smithsonian Institution. Nelson contributed to the original Maxis SimCity simulation and wrote teacher guides for the product. From 1994 through 2004, she led a Japan–USA Cultural and Educational Exchange program to develop Design-Based Learning as part of the Japanese national curriculum. The program included international video conferences and a satellite school in Finland.
Nelson has taught her methodology to thousands of educators worldwide—and to architects and lawyers, researchers, computer scientists, marine biologists, medical doctors, theater artists, musicians, and dancers.
Encompassing four decades of evaluative data, Nelson's research confirms that students experiencing her Design-Based Learning methodology develop creative and critical thinking skills, and score higher than average on standardized tests in language, reading, math, and other subjects. English Language Learners and students with learning disabilities, too, show measurable improvement. Students in these classrooms graduate and enter college in significant numbers.
Nelson established a two-year master's degree program for K–12 teachers at Cal Poly in 1995, with an emphasis in Design-Based Learning; and a one-year certificate program in 2010. Three graduates of the MA program received a Doreen Gehry Nelson Design-Based Learning Scholarship in Cal Poly's doctorate program in Educational Leadership.
ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, hosted the annual, five-day Design-Based Learning Summer Institute for K–12 Teachers from 2001 through 2019, providing scholarships for participants, many of whom went into the MA program at Cal Poly.
In Southern California, Nelson's Design-Based Learning methodology is practiced in individual public and private schools; it has been introduced at the UCLA Lab School and is featured in the San Gabriel Unified School District as part of its mission, and in the Los Angeles Unified School District in South Gate. The Walnut Valley Unified School District constructed a building dedicated solely to the Nelson's Design-Based Learning program at Chaparral Middle School, and established an Academic Design Program for 10th–12th graders at Walnut High School, applying the methodology to an integrated Math, U.S. History, World History, and Language Arts curriculum.
The UCLA Library Special Collections houses Nelson's archive with an oral history, and featured her life and work in an exhibition in 2017, the first time an educator has been so honored.
In 2019, Center X at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies established the UCLA Design-Based Learning Project, led by a full-time director holding a master's degree in Nelson's methodology. In 2020, a gift of $2 million was given by the Frank O. Gehry Foundation to endow the Doreen Gehry Nelson Director of Design-Based Learning position for UCLA Center X, now the permanent home of the Design-Based Learning Project.
Doreen Nelson has done us all a service by deepening our ideas about pedagogy. Her method of Design-Based Learning is not so much a formula for teaching, as it is an all-encompassing approach to how we as teachers can guide our students to think creatively and make sense of what we are trying to teach them.
Students can't reuse information they don't understand. It is indeed odd how little official attention has been paid to the actual process and significance of teaching creative thinking. This book will be an exception.
I do not wish to summarize what Doreen Nelson is telling us. She presents her point of view with clarity and grace. But it is a privilege to introduce the evolution of her ideas. Teachers will benefit from her account. Her book will be a wonderful example of consciousness-raising in our field.
JEROME BRUNER
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
New York University
December 2015
With admiration and appreciation, I dedicate this book to teachers who have taken my Design-Based Learning methodology and run with it, and to those teachers who will be inspired to do the same.
Lynne Heffley, my editor and teacher, and a highly-gifted writer, was at my side as I wrote this book, opening the door for me to find my voice and think of myself as a writer. She is one of the kindest, most patient people I know. Working with her on this book has been a life-changing experience.
FOREWORD
I have watched in wonderment as my kid sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, has explored the world of K–12 education.
She has worked in the California school system and beyond for years and, along the way, she discovered that opening the floodgates of curiosity leads to all sorts of educational benefits. She experimented over the years with various teaching models that she developed and became quite practiced in the search for a better way.
Doreen has always understood that sparking people's curiosity opens doors to beneficial thinking. Over the years, based on this guiding principle, she has developed her Design-Based Learning methodology, which has proven its value time and time again. It engages individuals with their own feelings and their own ideas as they pursue the inventive experiences that unfold in the classroom under Doreen's methodology.
She has guided teachers to ignite their own imagination, develop their own intuition, and harness their own humanity in order that they can cultivate the same in their students. The power to imagine is the path to a better and richer and more equitable society for all. This is the power of the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning.
I have participated in some of those events and have been personally inspired by Doreen's vision and her work. She is building a network of hope for kids, helping teachers light the fire of curiosity and possibility in their students. She is providing light at the end of the tunnel. I'm very proud to endorse her work.
—FRANK GEHRY, ARCHITECT
FOREWORD
I first met Doreen Nelson in the early 1970s. She had made an appointment to tell me about what was then called City Building Education (now called the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning). She asked for my support in introducing her methodology in the small elementary school district in north Los Angeles County where I was the new superintendent of schools. Like Ms. Nelson, my beliefs about teaching and learning were influenced by the teachings of John Dewey and the Progressive Education movement, and the education that my three children received at the University Elementary School at UCLA (now called the UCLA Lab School). I was pleased with the notion of bringing her work to my middle-class, blue-collar community, where I thought the children would benefit from a cross-curricular methodology rooted in the teaching of creative thinking skills.
I told Ms. Nelson that if one of my school principals and one or more teachers at that school were willing to try out her methodology, she would have my support. After listening to Ms. Nelson's presentation, one principal brought the methodology to her school where two teachers agreed to learn to apply it in their combined upper-grade classrooms. Although I didn't pay much attention to what was transpiring, I did visit the classroom several times. The principal and the teachers appeared to be satisfied with the response of the children.
When I accepted a superintendent position in a considerably larger school district several years later, Ms. Nelson contacted me about implementing Design-Based Learning in my new district. Two principals agreed to try the methodology in several classes. Satisfaction appeared to be high until I received a call from one of the principals. She said, “We love the program, everything is wonderful, but get Doreen out of my hair.” Like an overanxious mother, Ms. Nelson was much too intense as she worked to assure fidelity in her methodology's implementation. She later told me that the incident led her to better teach and support teachers.
Although I believed that Design-Based Learning had great potential for improving student learning outcomes, educators were under pressure to improve achievement test results and were loath to risk trying new pedagogies, especially those that were unfamiliar. Making changes in the way teachers teach, even in the most favorable conditions, is difficult. After all, the grammar of schooling has not changed significantly since the mid-nineteenth century. Doreen Nelson was not deterred—discouraged perhaps, from time to time, but never one to give up on her vision of finding a more effective way to teach creative and critical thinking skills that will last a lifetime.
After a 40-year career as a K–12 educator, 23 as a superintendent of four California school districts, I accepted a full-time position as an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I kept in touch with Ms. Nelson. I watched how the presentation of her pedagogy, first introduced 50 years earlier, matured and how successful her approach to training teachers became. Doreen has taught her methodology to cadres of teacher leaders in a master's degree program at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, and in summer institutes at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. I am delighted that Design-Based Learning has been adopted as an instructional method by several school districts. I am especially pleased to have introduced her Design-Based Learning methodology to Center X, the teacher education program that I was part of at UCLA.
There is now an Endowed Design-Based Learning Directorship in Doreen's name at Center X, a position currently held by one of Doreen's former master's degree students.
I am now retired from my second career as an adjunct professor and I am confident that the responsibility for carrying on Doreen's lifetime work is in good hands at UCLA, where it will grow the Design-Based Learning pedagogy to benefit future generations of learners.
—EUGENE TUCKER, EdD
INTRODUCTION
As a rebellious teenager, I would have laughed if anyone had told me that I would one day become a teacher and a teacher of teachers—and that I would love it.
I wrote this book imagining new teachers and seasoned teachers, who, like me, still aspire to make a difference in society through education. Most of us want to do more than just deliver dry subject matter to students. We want to prepare them for problem seeking and problem-solving around questions that are essential to society. We want the subject matter that our students need to learn to be put into a contextual setting that ensures their long-term memory retention so that they are able to apply what they learn to a wide array of situations. We know that teaching critical and creative thinking is the best preparation for an unknown future.
As a classroom teacher, it seemed to take me forever to understand where to look for answers to how to make learning stick, and how to teach in a way that would bring who I am, and my deepest family values, into my classroom.
In the late 1950s, my tough-minded, well-read mother, born in 1904, had just completed her high school degree, attending night classes at my high school. She had graduated with honors and was planning to go to college. At age 16, I had just graduated with a C+ average, and I agreed with my high school counselor that college wasn't for me. My mother disagreed in no uncertain terms. My entrepreneurial, endlessly creative, curiosity-driven dad (my role model) wasn't buying it, either. He had only finished the 4th grade and wanted both of his children to be well educated. My brother Frank (who would become the noted architect Frank Gehry), almost nine years my senior, my only sibling and lifelong hero, was excelling in his studies of architecture at USC. He told me that I was capable of doing something like that. I felt I had no choice but to go when my mother enrolled us both at Los Angeles City College (me during the day, her at night).
We had moved to Los Angeles from Canada after my dad's heart attack at age 47. In Los Angeles, with my dad too ill to work, the burden of supporting the four of us was on my mother's shoulders. She would come home at the end of the day from her job as a clerk at the Broadway Department Store in Hollywood, we would make dinner together, and after she tended to my dad, she would sit down with me and together we wrote essays for our classes and articles for the school newspaper, and studied for the sociology class we were both taking. My grades soared. I liked the teachers, the students, and the social activities so much that I decided to apply to UCLA.
As a student at UCLA, I went back to playing the harp, something I had studied seriously in middle school (with a harp my dad bought by working the night shift at a liquor store). I played in the UCLA Symphony for four years, and off and on in the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony. I changed my major a half dozen times, starting with Education, switching to Music, Anthropology, back to Education, then Sociology, then Art.
My brother Frank, meanwhile, had graduated from the School of Architecture at USC and with my family just scraping by, I had to be able to support myself. A UCLA counselor told me that if I took a few more Education courses and did supervised teaching, I could get a teaching credential in just one year, so I signed up—after balking at first because my mother had so often urged me to get a teaching credential to “have something to fall back on when you get married.” (Perhaps she was recalling that when I was in grade school, while my brother built model airplanes and made sketches of everything, I had corralled neighborhood kids who were having trouble in school, had them draw pictures that told a story, and taught them to read.)
My family's belief in the inherent value of creativity, perseverance, doing things for others, and community activism is the bedrock for my life's work. In Canada, where I grew up, my dad, who was an American citizen, was politically vocal. While I was at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, my favorite teacher was accused of being a Communist because she was against the supposed temporary relocation of residents in Chavez Ravine near downtown Los Angeles, where a new public housing project was to be built. (The city of Los Angeles had bought up that property through the power of eminent domain. The residents lost their community when the housing project never happened and the land eventually went to Dodger Stadium.) I joined protests against the city with my brother, and after that, during election times, he would take me to underserved neighborhoods to register voters and promote candidates.
When I became a teacher, I wanted to realize my strongly held belief that to equalize society, acknowledge cultural differences, and to prepare students to participate in a world of serious societal, political, economic, and environmental challenges, all kids needed to be taught to become courageous, original thinkers, capable of working together to make and evaluate proposals for change.
After 10 years of classroom teaching, I went back to school for a master's degree. I began developing my John Dewey-, Benjamin Bloom-, Jerome Bruner-inspired Design-Based Learning methodology. I zeroed in on two of the things that Bruner described as central to becoming an educated person: (1) creative thinking, the ability to imagine solutions to what would later be termed Essential Questions—the underlying powerful ideas, universal concepts, principles, values, and morals associated with high-level thinking—and (2) the ability to gather information from multiple areas of the curriculum to revise and refine what is imagined.
(I met Jerry Bruner in New York in the early 1980s when I looked up his name in the phone book and had the chutzpah to call him. To my surprise, he answered. After I explained that I had developed my methodology based in part on what he had written, he invited me to lunch. Jerry became a friend and supporter of my work, and I was honored and deeply touched by his offer [at age 100] to write the introduction to this book, in progress at the time.)
I eventually understood that during all my years of teaching, I had not been cultivating original thinking. I had long believed that building physical artifacts and role-playing within a contextual, cross-curricular “story” were vital for learning to become reusable. (Maybe it was my dad's passion for seeing how one thing could become something else that influenced me. As the owner of a furniture factory in Canada, he would explore how unique materials could transform the everyday products he designed and produced.) What I was missing was a way to unleash creative thinking in my students. That wasn't happening when the artifacts they made replicated what already existed and their “dramatic play” using those artifacts simply imitated others.
I wrestled with the meaning of Bloom's Taxonomy that pointed to creative thinking as the highest goal of education. Convinced that creative thinking is innate in all students, disenfranchised and privileged alike, and could be taught without sacrificing academic rigor, I began conceiving what would become the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning (formerly called City Building Education) to put creative thinking skills first.
I had been successful at teaching the drill and practice of basic facts for Specific Transfer of Learning (2 plus 2 equals 4; 2 apples plus 2 oranges equals 4 pieces of fruit). I needed to find a systematic way to teach for Non-Specific Transfer of Learning that would open the door to creative thinking and enable students at any grade level to use and reuse information, think independently, and advocate for themselves and others. Accomplishing this, I thought, would build community and cultivate equality.
To discourage students from engaging in replicative thinking, I wondered what would happen if I had them “back in” to learning what I was required to teach them. After trying out numerous ideas in my classroom, I thought about how a city's character is reflected in its location, its architecture, and the values of the people who live and work there. I thought about how the parts of the city could be a metaphor for creative thinking and for all subject matter. What if I gave students a curriculum-based 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 ONECreative Thinking by Design
Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught.
—AI WEI WEI
CHAPTER 1NOT 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 a story based on the 2nd-grade curriculum and played out in the tabletop City her students were building. The “story” that Daphne told her students was that their City (built on a 30 × 60-inch table) was a magical place where their Never-Before-Seen Creatures/Avatars would be coming to live together as a community 100 years in the future.
Daphne's BIG TOPIC for her first Design Challenge was LIVING THINGS. To meet the state-mandated requirements for learning about animal life, and to prepare her 2nd graders to read about mammals, reptiles, and birds, Daphne had them create their Never-Before-Seen Creatures/Avatars out of found materials as they referred to her Criteria List naming the basic attributes of living things.
(The beauty of a Criteria List is that it, in a sense, becomes a surrogate for the teacher. When students say, “I don't know what to do,” the teacher responds, “Check the Criteria List.” Instead of asking, “Did I do it right?” students are taught to self-assess by using a Criteria List as their guide.)
Daphne asked her students to think like their Creatures, imagine what they ate, who the Creatures' friends and relatives were, where they slept, how they moved, what they were afraid of, what they dreamed of, their likes and their dislikes, and even when they would die! As the Creatures took on personal meaning for her students, Daphne referred to them to teach her BIG TOPIC–related, required Guided Lessons and to invest students in the evolution of the City they were building and would be revising.
Concurrently, Daphne introduced her students to ways to become a supportive community of learners. Over the course of a month, she taught them to give presentations about how and why their Creatures were Never-Before-Seen. They practiced being good listeners and how to politely question each other about how their Creatures were similar to, or different from, real animals they read about and why. The 2nd graders couldn't wait to explain how their Creatures' basic needs for survival compared and contrasted to those of all living things. They willingly listened to each other, read their textbooks, researched other sources that Daphne presented, and revised their Creatures according to new learning.
Before Daphne had assigned the Never-Before-Seen Creature/Avatar Design Challenge, she asked her students to write about something important to them. Amilie wrote one page about Legoland, “my favorite place in the whole world.” A week later, Daphne had her students write about their Never-Before-Seen Creatures. Amilie wrote a seven-page, illustrated saga called “The Adventures of Cottie.”
Daphne's Language Arts Guided Lessons taught her students how to augment their original Creature descriptions. Classroom disruptions were few as students met writing requirements, making booklets to showcase their work. In Science, they learned about the five senses as they categorized their Creatures' attributes. For Math, Daphne had the students measure each Creature and name the shapes found in them. Studying Civics, they role-played as their Creatures to learn how to get along and solve problems in the classroom. All of this prepared them for what they knew would come next: building a tabletop Never-Before-Seen City of the Future where their Creatures would live, work, and play.
This story grew over the entire school year, enthralling Daphne's students as she taught them to identify and solve a problem that she named as the BIG TOPIC for each Design Challenge. Her students learned basic subject matter through the required Guided Lessons—small topics supporting the BIG TOPIC—that Daphne taught across the curriculum.
