Teaching Design Thinking

In the spring of my first year at Princeton University, I walked into CIV262, my first true engineering course, with great anticipation. I had loved the physics and math courses I’d taken in the fall because of the certainty they promised: though there were many paths to the correct solution, when I arrived at an answer I always knew whether I was right or wrong.  Engineering, I was sure, would provide that same clarity.  

Within the very first hour, Professor Billington, a soft-spoken 70-year old whose passion captivated his students, challenged that assumption. He didn’t start with formulas or scientific principles, but rather with a discussion about how a civil engineer had to consider economic, aesthetic, and structural constraints. “The right answer isn’t that the bridge stands up,” he explained, “it’s that you have designed your structure for the context that each particular situation presents. After all, everything you design is for people.” For me, this was the beginning of understanding that the process of engineering design required getting to know social and environmental constraints first, and designing second. “That you design for gravity is inevitable,” Billington reminded me in his office one day, “but that can’t be the only force you consider.”

I decided to become an educator - rather than an engineer - while still an undergraduate. But I finished my engineering degree on my advisor’s suggestion that this “engineer’s way” of thinking would help me make sound decisions in the classroom. And indeed, in the next twenty years I would use design thinking - the process of empathizing, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, refining and repeating - for as many decisions as possible. As a teacher, were my students not completing homework thoughtfully? Start by asking them what their days looked like. As a head of the math faculty, was my team not communicating on the field? Try implementing some of my colleagues’ (multitude of) suggestions and evaluating them together.  And later as an administrator responsible for learning across grades, were our 12th graders detaching in “senior spring”, and thereby impacting the overall mood of the high school? Ask the seniors what legacy they hoped to leave, and then ask the underclass students how those efforts worked.  

I think I now appreciate fully the most important lesson Professor Billington taught me: that the process of design thinking is itself the most valuable learning outcome I can teach. This, I think, is the promise of Haile-Manas Academy. In every class, we will empower students to look to others to understand a challenge and then look to themselves for the solution. For every student, the culmination will be the Design for Social Change class. Seniors will prepare deliberately, year by year, for this class, and in satisfying its requirements they will synthesize the disciplinary knowledge acquired in departments, the skills of collaborating, and the knowledge that they, even as teenagers, can propose - and carry through on - solutions that make our world a better place.