When the teachers and administrators at Ormondale Elementary, a public K-3 school in California, wanted to find ways to bring 21st century skills into their classrooms, they knew this challenge would take time and long-term commitment. They chose a timeframe (one school year) and a process (design thinking) to get started.

During the summer, the teachers kicked off the project with a two-day design thinking workshop. The Discovery phase began with an activity that asked them to develop empathy for the learner of the 21st century: The exercise entailed teachers imagining one of their current students in the year 2060. They imagined what these people had done in their lives and careers. As a group, the teachers then captured the most interesting themes and worked backward to understand the skills these people would have needed to develop as children to be successful. With this inspiration from their own experiences, the group then went to visit outside organizations that were facing analogous challenges. By interpreting all this information, the participants came up with many generative questions, such as “How might we enable the globally aware student?” and “How might we provide opportunities for interest-driven learning?”. The brainstorms that followed started with ideas about tools and classroom design and expanded out to include curriculum and the educational system as a whole. By prototyping several of these ideas, the teachers saw a set of similar patterns emerge across all of the prototypes: They understood that they were all passionate about a teaching and learning approach that they called Investigative Learning. This approach would address students not as receivers of information, but as shapers of knowledge. At the end of the workshop, the teachers planned and committed to experiments based on this philosophy that they could conduct in their classrooms.

Over the course of the following school year, the teachers tried out lots of ideas in their classes: One teacher developed new communications for parents. The technology team built new tools to support teachers in Investigative Learning. And another teacher even got a small grant to renovate a classroom and create a different learning environment for her students. But they didn’t go it alone. To build a network of learning and support, they dedicated time in their weekly meetings to discuss what was happening, learn from each other, and help each other through stumbling blocks.

In the second year, the group got back together for a second workshop to make sense of all the experiments that had happened around the school. During this session, they shared and discussed their experiences, created a typology of Investigative Learning methods, and developed a framework for Investigative Learning standards and assessments.

Today, the faculty at Ormondale Elementary School are continuing to evolve their approaches to Investigative Learning. As new teachers join the school, other faculty help them understand how to construct these experiences, and have created a “Manual of Investigative Learning” to keep track of their philosophy and methods. They have gained support from their school board, and have become recognized as a “California Distinguished School.”

Find videos about Investigative Learning at Ormondale at:

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When the founders of Motion Math got together to think about how to use games to help kids learn, they knew that teaching math and designing a product weren’t the same thing. As teachers who both worked with elementary-school-aged kids, Gabriel Adauto and Jacob Klein started with an understanding of what kids liked and what parents and teachers valued, but they also recognized that their experience and intuition weren’t enough to design a successful learning product.

They turned to design thinking to develop the game and combined it with the Backwards Design methodology to create the educational content. With Backwards Design, they were able to hone in on how they would assess students’ mastery of concepts and work from there to get the concepts right. And with design thinking, they were able to create a game that was fun, engaging, and that was valued by parents, teachers, and students. “The most important part of merging the two processes was iteration, being open to really listening to what people want,” commented Adauto.

Adauto and Klein started the process by defining a challenge to create a game that would address the biggest stumbling block for elementary school kids. They went out to talk to teachers. Over and over, they heard that fractions were a big pain point. Next, they looked for inspiration from the most popular games at the time, one of which had a bouncing device to move a character around a screen. From there, the team started brainstorming, and generated lots of ideas for interactive games that could help kids learn fractions. Many prototypes and feedback sessions later, Adauto and Klein launched Motion Math. “We did lots of feedback sessions with paper prototypes. The most valuable feedback session we had was with parents, teachers, and kids all together. We saw how the groups interact, and it helped us realize that the payers [parents and teachers] and the players [kids] had different needs and understood different things. But the game actually had to meet all these needs simultaneously.”

Since launching, Motion Math has been on the “Top 5″ list of educational apps, was featured in the Wall Street Journal, and won an Excellence in Design Award from Children’s Technology Review. Most rewarding for Adauto and Klein, institutional school purchases are very strong, teachers have emailed them with videos of kids playing the game in the classroom, and students from preschool age to community college are using the game and learning math skills. And the founders are building on their success and are designing more educational games to address other hurdles in elementary education.

In 2010, the faculty at Riverdale Country School, an independent K-12 school in New York, embarked on a design project to create more collaboration among teachers. With three teachers leading the process as facilitators, a group of 15 teachers worked as a design team to take on the challenge. They started with observations and conversations not just in their own school, but also went out to seek inspiration from analogous environments. Splitting into three teams, they interviewed employees at Sirius XM, Consumer Reports, and IDEO – organizations that were noted for their teamwork and collaboration. One of the teacher-facilitators noted that this inspiration was important to the team: “It was really provocative. We saw that people have very different ways of managing their time and we developed a new awareness.”

Bringing this inspiration back, the design team discussed their learnings and clustered them into three themes: online tools, faculty spaces, and teambuilding activities. They identified opportunities for design within these areas, and brainstormed dozens of ideas. The teams built different prototypes, including an online collaboration tool to make faculty meetings more effective, a new faculty lounge, and potluck brunches to bring teachers together in casual settings.

After several experiments with a few different collaboration tools, the Riverdale teachers now have an online platform for sharing lesson plans and activities as well as creating meeting agendas to save time. “It seems to be working for us. We’re sharing more as a team and we’ve freed up time to get more done in our meetings.”

And there is a lot more happening: The teachers at Riverdale were so energized by design thinking that they submitted ideas for several design projects. In early 2011, they assembled a core team of five teachers to conduct a one-year project to revise the school’s Program in Character, Conduct, and Ethics. Another team of teachers is helping to design a smooth transition for the new head of the elementary school. And teachers are using design thinking in their classrooms and are sharing their enthusiasm and ideas with their colleagues. The impact has expanded way beyond the initial design project and continues to spread.