Educated by Design. Michael Cohen
guide to becoming more creative, letting empathy direct your design process, using rapid prototyping, and learning how to truly collaborate with a team.
This book reads like a handbook to bring out the creativity in all students. You can go back to chapters, or even skip around because each chapter offers insights on important skills. Most valuable, however, is the peek you’ll get into Michael’s world as he transparently shares his journey. Please read this book with confidence, mark it up with notes, and tweet out your thoughts! The mission of instilling creative skills and a spirit of innovation in our students is essential and we, as educators and parents, must model journey!
Introduction
THE BEAUTIFUL PARALLEL BETWEEN GOOD TEACHING AND GOOD DESIGN
I received an email. Not one of those emails letting you know that a website has updated its privacy policy. No, this was an email from a student, and I want to share it with you:
Award-winning essays, honors and Advanced Placement courses, and a 4.0-plus GPA—this was the student who emailed me, and his words reminded me why I do what I do every day. This student, like so many others I have taught, lacked creative confidence, creative capacity, and most of all, belief. This student, one who on paper is a model student, has mastered the art of convergent thinking, an art of all things with singular correctness. The moment there is diversity, multiplicity, or an unknown, this student feels helpless. His lack of experience around divergent thinking makes him resistant to risk and fearful of failure.
As educators, we invest a massive amount of our energy into ensuring our students have the knowledge and skills to succeed in life. But how much time are we devoting to ensuring that our students can successfully engage the abstract world? How are we preparing them to navigate a future that is both unscripted and unknown? How are we teaching them to trust their own intellects?
Innovation doesn’t come from skill or knowledge alone; it comes from belief—belief in yourself, belief in others, and belief in something bigger than all of us. We want our students to believe that they have the ability to create something incredible, but for that to happen, they must experience the freedom of authentic learning. Our students must be allowed to take risks and be given the space to experiment, fail, and try again. Only then will they be able to leverage their skills and knowledge to take full advantage of those lightbulb moments.
Thomas Edison wasn’t trying to invent the lightbulb. He was trying to invent the ability for the world to see in the dark. What abilities are we helping nurture in our students? How are we helping them find their sweet spot? How can we help them believe that success isn’t measured solely by money or skill? How can we teach them to value a project based on how much the world needs it or its support of the greater good? And what about us? How might we model this idea?
For some of us, education is a career, but for many of us, it’s a calling. We need to make sure we have found our own sweet spot in the work we do. To do that, we must learn a thing or two from the world of design.
Education and Design
We are all educators. We are also all designers. We design new things every day! Our lessons, our classrooms, and our practice are all influenced by a design process. Design is about taking the obvious and expected and revealing the unconventional and potential from within. I believe all educators are designers!
I entered the field of education in 2009. I didn’t consider myself an educator. I was a designer, creator, and a visual storyteller who happened to teach others about good design. In 2011, I was offered a job as a director of education technology, and at that point, I had to make the choice—designing or educating. I chose the latter. As I grew in the role, striving to create incredible programs and putting into practice a vision of meaningful and intentional uses of technology, I realized something powerful. I don’t have to choose between design and education. Both are about creating opportunities for learning and leveraging creativity to solve interesting problems.
In 2016, I left my school to rediscover the sweet spot in the work I do. I had opportunities to travel around the world and engage incredible teachers, leaders, and students. It gave me a powerful new perspective and sense of gratitude. It also reignited my passion to contribute something great to education. In December 2017, I took a job as a director of innovation at YULA Boys High School to focus on developing programming around entrepreneurship and creative thinking. The goal of the program was to give students a time and place to work on refining their creative problem-solving process and abilities—to take a chance, mess things up, and then adapt and turn that mistake into something even better.
Revealing Creativity
I believe that creativity is a mindset, not an art set. Creativity is the ability to look at ourselves and the world around us and notice what isn’t obvious to others and to author unconventional solutions to the problems we identify. We all are capable of this mindset because creativity comes from within. It’s not something teachers give to students—it’s something they reveal.
Too often in this life, creativity is purged by the fear or experience of being judged by others. Think about a time when you were in grade school and you created something you were proud of but someone else said it was bad. What did you do? How did that affect you? Those experiences are part of life. What we need to do is help our students develop creative confidence and creative capacity. That process starts by letting them explore.
Now, exploration isn’t a free-for-all. Good explorers pack the right tools and resources, assemble the right team members, and most importantly, have the right mindset to keep moving forward in their journey.
What does that kind of exploration look like across K–12 education? Is it an after-school program? A lunch elective? Is it 20-percent time? Wherever you start, you have to believe that you are helping your students on an important journey. In the chapters ahead, I will share some of my own students’ journeys.
Creativity is a Mindset, Not an Art Set.
King Solomon famously said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” He was referring to the ingredients and their potential, not the next iPhone or the next unknown. A creative mindset requires us to shift our perspective with our tools and teams, but most importantly, our try. We have to try this.
Disclaimer: You will fail. Your students will fail. But when failure is part of the journey and not a destination, it can bring about significant growth. Remember, the greatest ascent happens only after the greatest descent.
Technology is not about the device; it’s about what we can do with it. We must look at how technology can help our students become designers, authors, and creators of the awesome and the impossible.
We must show our students that learning is not confined to a classroom, and learning opportunities are everywhere. That means instilling in our students the belief that perfection should not prevent them from producing and publishing work that provides value for others.
We must show them the power of intentional design processes and to paraphrase Seth Godin, ship it and get their work out in the world.