#2 Teachers as Innovators

Seven stories to know about the k-12 lab
(because Edison would say that you won't remember more)

In a relay race, the fastest athletes run last, often leaving the teammate who passed them the baton coughing in the dust. Well, the K-12 Lab often feels the sweet sting of being left behind by teachers who take design thinking to the next level in their schools. Fortunately, the Lab isn't jealous because the students soon leave the teachers behind.

Melissa Pelochino

After taking a two day design thinking workshop at the d.school, East Palo Alto Academy Elementary School reading specialist Melissa Pelochino transformed her reading lesson on the short story X: A Fabulous Child's Story into a design challenge. Students not only read the book, they also developed empathy for the characters by designing ways to improve their lives. Soon thereafter every book had an accompanying design challenge. Some of them involved creating reconstructions of the settings inside the classroom. One idea for the future is to recreate the cockpit of the crashed plane in the movie Hatchet, because half of her 8th graders have never been in a plane.

Michael Kidwell

In 2008, Principal Jeanne Elliott of Bayside Middle School introduced design thinking to her school as an entire 6th grade course. The design course teacher, Michael Kidwell, undertook about 20 hours of training the summer before his first year at a K-12 summer training session. He then proceeded to teach nearly 1,000 hours of design thinking to over 100 students.

Charles Dershimer

After sending faculty to a d.school workshop, the Henry Ford Learning Institute decided to make design thinking a core component of their schools' mission. Charles Dershimer took the lessons learned at Stanford, then immediately created lessons using design thinking to teach biology. From there he began training other teachers in the organization in design thinking and developed tools to help teachers assess the impact of design on their students.

Kim Saxe

The Nueva School lent the K-12 Lab their Kindergarten teacher for the summer while we designed the school's innovation space (the I-Lab). Kim Saxe helped lead the Lab's efforts and after a year resigned as Kindergarten teacher to become the I-Lab's director. She trained Nueva's entire faculty twice in her first year. Kim continues as the I-Lab's director and is a leader in promoting design thinking in K-12 education.

The K-12 lab passed design thinking to all these teachers, and they quickly took it to places we could only hope to have reached.