“Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” – Josef Albers 

The Lubar Entrepreneurship Center hosted 32 Milwaukee public school K-12 teachers for a four-day intense summer on-line workshop, K–12 Design Thinking Bootcamp, in early August. This professional development opportunity offered educators a space to re-imagine teaching and learning in the post-pandemic world while looking at curriculum through Design Thinking lenses. As teachers move into an era of virtual and hybrid learning, centering on student’s needs and their unique constraints becomes ever more important. 

The Bootcamp started by challenging teachers’ assumptions about K-12 courses and learning environments at various scales spanning from a single curricular unit to an entire school. Through the assumption storming exercise, participants were able to generate questions opening truly innovative space of possibilities for re-imagining K-12 education and designing small curricular experiments: 

“What if school became a community space for all ages based on knowledge, skill and desire to learn vs. an age-based assembly line?”  

“What if mastery of content in a class drove learning and advancement vs. seat time?” 

“What if we valued the process of learning just as much as the final outcome?” 

The Bootcamp’s teaching team, Nicole Powley, Nathaniel Stern, Brian Thompson, Madeline Horinek and Ilya Avdeev, experimented with ways of creating a virtual learning environment for participants that not just tried to match in-person workshop experience but would go beyond. For example, on-line synchronous sessions allowed us connecting participants with amazing UWM faculty-coaches (Dave Clark, Kim Beckman, Kim Litwack, Trudy Watt and Daniel Burkholder – all alumni of the Stanford’s Teaching & Learning Studio Workshop) to design “take-home” curricular experiments. Milwaukee’s non-profit Islands of Brilliance offered their perspective on designing learning experiences for neurodiverse students as a source of inspiration. 

Through hands-on activities and a series of design challenges, workshop participants were introduced to underlying principles, methods of design thinking, mindsets, and identities of designers. Teachers were encouraged to collaborate, show unfinished work, and let go of their assumptions. Workshop participants examined various approaches for gaining insights, such as empathy fieldwork with students and stakeholders. Participants also experimented with various brainstorming and prototyping techniques that fit best with virtual pedagogies. 

The bootcamp teaching team is grateful for teachers’ creativity and fearless approach to learning, especially right before the start of new academic year! The team is also inspired by the questions that teachers were posing to design a better future for Milwaukee middle- and high-school students: 

“What if…a school’s purpose was to create creators?” 

“What if schools succeeded in developing all students into critical thinkers and global citizens?” 

Thank you!