Another Design Thinking PD Day for Faculty - Reimagining Creative Spaces at School

Just before Thanksgiving break I led another full day Design Thinking workshop with my faculty. Our goal was to look at our campus and consider what we could do with our physical space to inspire creativity in ourselves and in our students. Because we only had from 8:30 - 2:00pm, I decided to take my faculty through exactly the same processes that we used during our August PD day, which I described in my last blog post, but with a different topic. Since we had already been through all of the steps once, I was able to skip over a lot of the explanation of the how and why and move people right into action.

Because our PD was on the Middle School campus, I had students in 1st and 4th grade and faculty take videos of the Lower School campus from their own perspective and posted those to a website for people to look at. We used those along with a Pinterest page of creative learning spaces for the empathy portion of the design process. I also took people through a "Speed Dating" type interview process where they had a few minutes with a few different people to share what types of spaces they personally find inspirational.

We modified our "How might we" statements to focus more deeply on a particular question.

The day culminated in the making of prototypes. Faculty used a variety of materials to build their imagined spaces and then presented them to the faculty.


Overall, I think the PD day was a great success! I attribute that to a few things, a great facilitator (LOL), and a real problem to solve. Just as when we looked at Back to School Night, we are going to find ways to actually implement everyone's ideas. I think this is a key element for successful DT work. Otherwise it is just an exercise and doesn't have the same impact on the participants.