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Design Thinking: Reducing And Resolving Student Conflicts

This blog post will be about design thinking and classroom applications

By Samuel HillPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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This blog post will be about design thinking and classroom applications.

Unit context

My Year Three students were studying conflict resolution in the Sharing The Planet unit. They were specifically interested in personal conflicts, their causes, and strategies to resolve them. These are the details:

The Central Idea: Conflict and Resolution can be influenced by action and reaction

Lines of inquiry:

Conflicts between people

How to resolve personal conflicts

Conflict resolution: Responsibilities

Although it wasn't my intention to use design thinking in this unit, I was also teaching the Designing for Learner Agency online course with Jennifer Wathall & Marcus Lui. This design project was the summative assessment of the unit because I wanted to put my learning into practice. However, time was short. Also, we had to keep social distance, which was not ideal for collaborative, dynamic design.

We began with a discussion about student conflict at school. Were they really there? What can we do to reduce or eliminate them? Before we could solve the problem we needed to make sure we were solving the right problem. The Empathise phase was the first step in the design process. It allowed us to gain insights into the issue(s).

Empathise

We began by interviewing Tom Woods (one of our deputy principals). He was the principal responsible for dealing with behavioural issues and conflicts at our school and provided valuable insight and expertise. Students prepared thoughtful questions for him. They were not able to respond to his questions or ask follow-up questions. The questions they had prepared became scripted and didn't go as deep as I wanted. We will continue to work on this. They learned a lot from Tom’s experiences.

Students learned that bullying was not the main focus of this project. Tom explained that bullying is a type of conflict that is maliciously repeated. This is a rare problem at our school, so it was not something that we needed to address. More often than not, student conflicts between students are minor and result from different perspectives.

The children then examined their school experiences with conflicts. They are the students at the center of the problem and will be the users of any solution. To explore student conflicts, they used an empathy map. Tom's experience was reflected in the students' experiences. The insights gained from both empathy tasks provided some key insights.

Definition

It was overwhelming to gather so many insights in the Empathise phase. We sorted the insights into three categories to help them focus their attention: important, critical and interesting. To dig deeper into the root causes of problems, we used the 5 Whys routine. These are the key insights students identified as crucial to their design project.

Students are often not involved in conflicts.

Conflicts between students often occur at recess, on school buses and online.

Students often get into trouble when there isn't teacher supervision

Students often have conflicts in noisy, crowded areas.

Many student conflicts result from different perspectives

Every story has two sides.

These insights helped us to define the design opportunities through the use of "how might we" questions. Each student chose a HMW question that they would like to use in the Ideate phase.

Idea

As I mentioned in my previous post, the ideation stage is all about creating many ideas. Quality over quantity. My favorite strategies for ideation involve collaboration, group work, and lots of exchanging of ideas. It was a difficult task due to COVID and current hygiene regulations. We still had a lot of fun with Crazy 8!

Crazy 8 promotes creativity and divergence through fast, furious thinking. To prepare for eight ideas, students folded their paper. We had to come up with eight possible solutions to the HMW question. The timer was set at two minutes per idea. Students had an assortment of ideas in just sixteen minutes. Some ideas were more promising than others and some of the best ideas weren't always their first. Students were able to exchange ideas and learn from one another.

They chose one idea or a combination of ideas to move forward to the Prototype phase. They created a student-led conflict mediation team, a website for tracking student conflicts and a mindfulness app. A wristband that vibrates and detects raised voices to remind them to be calm was also developed.

Prototype

Because of the unit context, many ideas for this design project were more systems, rules, and routines than physical products. Because our ability to create complex models was limited by hygiene rules and social distancing, this worked well. Students enjoyed making simple prototypes to show how their designs would perform. Many of the prototypes they created were simple cardboard or paper mock-ups.

Students uploaded their photos/videos to a Padlet collaborative, ready for user testing. Students also included audio or text notes explaining what the prototype was and how it would function.

Test

First, we called Year Five students to look at the Padlet and offer feedback and suggestions. Students would ultimately use the designs. These students were able to provide constructive, critical, and thoughtful answers. These responses prompted iterations, and in some cases, pointed out serious design flaws.

The design process should provide students with the opportunity to make real changes. It was not something I wanted to abandon just because the next unit was underway. Ross Dawson was approached by class representatives to discuss their ideas and share what they have learned about student conflicts in our school. Ross provided valuable feedback and also tested their ideas. Ross suggested students combine their most popular ideas and put them all on one website. He explained that the website could be managed entirely by students. The link could also be added to school's internal platforms for student access.

Next steps

The students are currently working in their spare time on the website and the extensive content it will contain. At this point, I won't reveal much more. They are enthusiastic about it, and I am confident that I can share something significant soon. It's an exciting time of learning and collaboration.

Keep an eye out for this!

Additional reflections

Students quickly became comfortable and familiar with the design vocabulary (define, prototype, test, etc.).

The design project allowed students to show their understanding and to put into practice the lessons from the unit.

By allowing for more time and collaboration opportunities, the design experience will be richer next time.

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