Tales of Joint Design: Can Two Classes Really Work Together?

Students' "We Believe" designs were displayed during the last week of school in front of our library. Many of the designs included QR codes sending viewers to videos and other links.

We did it! I'm still sweating a bit...but I'm still standing.

During the last two weeks of the semester, our Speech and Graphic Design students jointly wrestled with interpersonal conflicts, design snafus, confusion over expectations, and deadlines as they worked through their prototyping and testing phases of a joint design challenge. (See my previous post for details about the challenge.) They experienced triumph when design ideas came together, frustration over incomplete work by absent teammates, and satisfaction over final products being displayed. And on the final exam day, they presented what they learned to the full joint class.

So what did they learn? I decided to dig a bit deeper with a post-project survey. The results were both  satisfying and thought-provoking.

1. About 80% of the 33 students surveyed were able to correctly identify the steps of the Stanford d.School design process, and 90% recognized that a design process was not just about building things. 
2. 25% want to try design challenges in other classes, and 57% answered "maybe" to that question.
3. 44% want to try joint class projects again, and 31% answered "maybe" to that question.
4. 27 students were able to identify ways they see a design process applying to other parts of their lives, such as class projects, essays, personal decision-making, and artistic pursuits. 
5. 26 students were able to suggest opportunities in other content areas for joint projects or design challenges to take place.
6. Most of the students were able to identify roadblocks they faced with their teams and how they resolved them.

This data, along with what I observed during the process and in the final presentations, tells me that our students successfully understood the design process and were able to identify how it could be used in other aspects of their academic lives. It also tells me that students gained experience with team communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking. Thus, our project objectives were met. 

Although many students offered positive feedback and comments about their experiences, a few threads in the feedback will need to be addressed the next time we try a project like this. 

1. A few students expressed various concerns over grades. While it is not ideal to have grades attached to a design process, it is difficult in a college preparatory school to spend three weeks on a project that does not result in a graded assessment. But when two teachers are involved, grades can get messy. We thought we had this figured out by having each of us grade only the students in our own class, with criteria that differed between each class, but we will need to work on smoothing that out a bit more.
2. The core design concept--"We Believe"--did not spark as much enthusiasm as we hoped. Three of the 12 groups really took off and ended up with truly creative designs and presentations. The rest seemed to be more motivated by the grades than by the project, or lacked motivation altogether. We will need to work on helping our students own the work...although I admit I'm not sure whether it is possible to do that within the scope of a required class.

But one thread of feedback worries me. Quite a few students expressed frustration over not being given specific expectations for the project--in other words, some of them wanted us to tell them exactly what to do right from the beginning. The inherently messy, uncertain nature of a design process clearly made them feel uncomfortable, and they saw that as negative. 

This reflects the reduction in resilience and grit that education and youth experts have recently raised as a growing concern (click HERE for a Pinterest board of materials on this subject), and it's one that I have become similarly worried about with regard to my own students. While being able to follow exact parameters and specifications might be easier, it does not prepare them for the astoundingly messy-yet-brilliant experience that is professional life in most fields. Knowing that, I can't help but think we are not serving our students by making their academic experience too predictable. I want students to see a project like this as an opportunity to be creative, outside-the-box solution-finders. But I worry that our society's current systems and parenting styles have made it increasingly difficult for our students to do this. 

I'm particularly struck by the research of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan and many others regarding "self-determination theory"--that people are best motivated when they can see themselves gaining competence, acting from autonomy, and finding personal connection to their work. Daniel Pink similarly argues that people are motivated by "mastery, autonomy, and purpose." 

And the reality is that most of our current "status quo" educational methodologies are not designed to engage the intrinsic motivations of our students. So we fall back on extrinsic motivators like grades. And even those are waning as our students discover and connect with other activities--sometimes benign and sometimes not-- outside school and home.

Will I do this again?  I hope so. This is my third experience facilitating a design challenge in class, and every time I have worked to reimagine and refine the experience. I never seem to find the perfect recipe, and yet I have come to recognize that teaching is a prime example of the design process at work--so perhaps there is no perfect recipe to find. More importantly, I have learned to thrive on the discomfort that comes from uncertainty. And I believe that my students and colleagues will benefit as a result.

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This design was clean and professional. And I loved how well the students hit on the beliefs of their target group (freshmen) through both the wide variety of faces on the poster and the well-designed quick video attached to the QR code.

I was blown away by the creative efforts of this team. They were the only team to use a different material--wood--and create a physically interactive design (each block flips up to reveal the face of a person who was interviewed.) The team also used Aurasma to link the videos to the faces. Truly an outside-the-box design!