There’s something magical about conversations between strangers: the buzz growing into fervor, the walls melting into mush.It often starts off in a rigid way--vulnerability held hostage to discomfort--but as time ticks on, and conversations persist, change invariably happens.
The embrace of discomfort moves us, alters us, allows us to walk a step beyond where we were when we started. It allows us to build bridges and walk across them together.
Such was the case for so many this past Wednesday, when Upper Arlington High School educators invited students, parents and community members to join us for an “empathy session.” This session was designed through the previous two professional development meetings, and it was executed as part of our journey through the design thinking cycle.
Engaging in the design thinking process serves two purposes:
It allows us to experience the steps of design thinking so we can learn it through experience, and consider ways of utilizing it in our classroom.
and
It gives us the chance to engage in an exploration that might generate ideas to help us innovate forward.
Design thinking, when boiled down, is simply just a way of problem solving, but when you peel back the layers, you see that it is a way of problem solving which is committed to solving the right problem.
The process asks people to start by identifying an issue, but instead of other protocols that follow a linear approach (identify the problem? appoint someone (or a group) to propose solutions ? implement the solutions), design thinking asks us to spend time in a circular, iterative approach rooted in empathy.
To embrace a full understanding of an issue, problem-solvers must look beyond their lens, and consider a variety of perspectives and experiences. They must also be willing to incorporate feedback into the process so all parties can be sure they are solving--and not just applying a bandaid to--the issue they are trying to fix.
In short, the process involves conversation, and sometimes those conversations are with strangers.
Though we had a very short timeline to invite people in for the “empathy session,” and the list of invitees couldn’t possibly cover every single voice in the community, we jumped on the opportunity to brainstorm names of individuals who might be able to offer different insights about learning, space and time. Once we had our list of students, parents and community members, we generated questions. And those questions were synthesized, modified and applied to different experiential structures focused on getting at the heart of what works in the classroom, what would help us innovate forward, and what constraints get in the way.
The day was broken into three experiences and every participant--guests and teachers alike--participated in two of the three:
Two-on-one interviews where one teacher scribed and one teacher interviewed a parent, student or community member.
A group discussion with teachers, students, parents and community members.
A group discussion between teachers from a variety of different departments.
The session ended at 4pm, but I didn’t get home until almost 5.
Conversations lingered well beyond the closing. Students were energized by having the chance to share their voice, parents were excited to have the chance to sit and talk to teachers they’ve never met, community members loved having the opportunity to share their experiences and consider, alongside educators, how those experiences might translate to education. And teachers loved the opportunity to sit and talk to students, parents, community members and other teachers about learning, about education, about innovation, about possibility, about growth.
We are all so busy that our conversations tend to be driven by the immediacy of need, or anchored in the context of our classes or our committees or our homework. And because of that, sometimes good ideas get edged out by reality, and conversations about the future get edged out by the urgency of now.
On Wednesday, however, despite all that fell on our plates--the end of first quarter, a long day of testing, practices, due dates and the discomfort of new experiences--all of us, teachers, students, parents, and community members alike, lept into the space carved out for connection.
And the richness of it all seeped from wall to wall.
None of us can predict where we will end up as we move through the process, but I do know that those conversations built bridges and sparked ideas, and because of that, we have all landed somewhere better.
