Design Thinking as a School Change Process

Vanessa: 00:00

Hello and welcome to ChangEd, a podcast that lifts the curtain on educational change and brings you into the room with the people doing it. My name is Vanessa, and joining me in the studio today are Aron and Joe, who we introduced in episode one.

Aron: 00:12

My name's Aron Rosenberg. I'm doing my PhD in education studying how high school students are impacted by their digital lives.

Joe: 00:19

My name's Joe Levitan. I'm an assistant professor and graduate program director at McGill.

Vanessa: 00:24

As well as Ellen, why don't you introduce yourself?

Ellen: 00:26

Hi, I'm Ellen. I've been on the next school project for the last five years about following along as it has shifted from school to school and iteration to iteration. I'm involved as a research assistant on the project. My interest in the project has to do with theories of educational change and how what we theorize about educational change shapes how we understand and do it.

Vanessa: 00:56

Today we're talking about design thinking, and I'm going to lead the conversation with a fast five. The first question is, what is design thinking?

Aron: 01:08

I know that design thinking originally was not a tool used in education. Only recently has it become associated with more humanities-based processes like educational reform. But what did it start as?

Joe: 01:20

Um, it first started out as, if I remember correctly, uh, well there were two. There was the Stanford D School and then the MIT design thinking collective or whatever they call it. And it was for creative problem solving for engineering, business, creative like arts production.

Aron: 01:40

Right.

Joe: 01:40

So it's for producing some kind of product or physical…

Vanessa: 01:45

Material good.

Joe: 01:46

Material good.

Ellen: 01:46

Exactly. UI.

Aron: 01:47

Mm-hmm. I remember the shopping cart example was used a lot when we first learned about design thinking. The idea of getting a bunch of people who use shopping carts together to discuss what they like about shopping carts, what they might wanna improve about them, and then they work to prototype new shopping carts.

Vanessa: 02:03

So basically, a creative problem solving process. Would we agree on that?

Aron: 02:07

Creative and specifically involving participants who have a stake in the design. Like some, somehow bringing together communities of people who care about this in a way that might be different than how a conventional designer might, uh, approach a problem.

Ellen: 02:22

And theoretically never ending. The design process is supposed to end with a prototype that is supposed to repeat over and over again as long as the users have input in how the product is designed.

Vanessa: 02:39

Yeah. And then one other thing is that there are key phases involved in the process. There's a lot of different terms for the phases of design thinking, but generally speaking, they are empathy, defining a problem. Then there's ideating...

Ellen: 02:53

...prototyping, testing…

Aron: 02:55

…and then back to the start with, uh, empathizing again.

Joe: 02:58

And it is not linear. It can be cyclical or it can be iterative.

Aron: 03:03

Mm-hmm. Hmm. And I guess you don't need to start with empathy building, but we like to because that's the stage where you get to get people in the room together discussing things and dreaming together.

Vanessa: 03:12

That's right.

Joe: 03:13

Yep.

Vanessa: 03:16

It's one thing to apply those five stages to designing or redesigning a product like a shopping cart, but question two is how do you apply design thinking to work with people or a social system?

Aron: 03:31

Sounds like it'd be a little bit trickier to work with people than with a product because people have their own, uh, interests, their own concerns, and you can't just, uh, shape them in the way that you want them to be shaped. You actually have to involve them in, in the discussion of the design.

Joe: 03:45

Yep. And I think that, uh, the idea of empathizing is a little bit more complicated because you're not creating a product that is a final product for some consumer. There's a whole ecology of relationships and interests and needs and goals and values that empathizing can, can be very productive, but can also be very tricky.

Ellen: 04:06

Well, and I think it's the one that gets most easily glossed over because people assume that working together creates empathy. So when they start the design process, they're like, well, we're collaborating. So we're also empathizing. It's true to a certain extent, but it's also, it doesn't happen just entirely naturally on its own too.

Vanessa: 04:25

Especially because people understand collaboration so differently. And um, it's different when you have a shopping cart and you can organize people with a common goal for the specific restructuring of an object. But when it comes to feelings and opinions and experiences, they're all so complex that organizing people towards a more emotional goal is very challenging.

Joe: 04:49

Right. And there are a lot of different factors or influences or reasons why one experience would be positive versus another, and you can't control all of those in a school.

Ellen: 05:00

When you have a group of people empathizing for another group of people, do this idea that you're supposed to have all the stakeholders in the room, but sometimes you can't have everybody. And then you wind up speaking on behalf of a group that might not be there and you kind of fake empathize where you hypothesize how they might feel about the things that you're talking about. And that can create assumptions and kind of holes in your logic of what it is you're designing.

Aron: 05:28

I think if we're specifically talking about schools, what Ellen just said is so important because schools are a really complex system that involves so many different partners. I mean, there's of course, the teachers, there's of course administrators. We often forget though, that students are the most directly impacted party, and yet they're often not in the room for these kinds of conversations. So when we're talking about having a design thinking approach to a system like education, it's even more challenging cause it's not just about people being complex, it's about all these different types of people who all are sharing some sort of an institution that we need to design for.

Ellen: 06:03

Mm-hmm.

Joe: 06:03

Right.

Vanessa: 06:04

Yeah. And the other thing about design thinking is that, the whole idea of having all the stakeholders in the room is that they come together on equal footing at the same table that you get to speak with the same value as everyone else in the room. So if you have students who are often not seen with the same power dynamic as adults in the room, it's actually much more complicated to work towards designing solutions when people have to engage in processes that challenge how they operate in relation with one another.

Aron: 06:33

Absolutely.

Joe: 06:34

Yeah. And usually with design thinking, the interests align more or less. But in schools there are instances where the interests of the teachers might conflict with the interests of the students and the interests of the administration might conflict with interests of the teachers or the students and the parents. And so there's conflicting interests at play when we're trying to engage in this work. And so that makes it much more complicated cause you can't just rally around, you know, empathizing on behalf of the consumers. You need to put yourself in the position of a bunch of different people to understand what's at play.

Aron: 07:08

And I think, um, in particular, your, your question or your comment about teachers versus students is so important because we've found from our design thinking work we've already done that students have very specific ideas about what they are frustrated about in school and what they want outta school. And when you facilitate, uh, any activity to get students to share those views, the teachers involved get surprised. Like we, we've found every time that teachers don't actually expect students to share the types of challenges or ideas that they share. And so when we do these types of workshops with just teachers, they assume they know what students want or need. But then when we bring students into the room, it's very clear that they don't know, and not that teachers aren't trying to empathize with their students, but just that this type of work needs to be explicit. We actually need to get these people together. We can't just assume that we are able to get into one another's heads.

Ellen: 07:57

Mm-hmm.

Joe: 07:58

Right.

Ellen: 07:58

That question that the school design process is focused around, what is school for? There's a very different answer when you ask teachers and students and administrators, and aligning around a shared goal or a shared answer to that question is, super important.

Aron: 08:14

Mm-hmm. Important and impossible. So it's a process. It's iterative. That's maybe one of the reasons why it's never ending, because the constituents in a school are always changing.

Joe: 08:24

The constituents are always changing, and also none of the constituents have all of the knowledge necessary.

Aron: 08:30

Right.

Joe: 08:30

Because while we know that students have very specific wants and needs, and teachers are surprised, there's also knowledge that teachers have and parents have, and adults have about what is necessary to live a life beyond school that students are gonna need at some point.

Aron: 08:45

Mm-hmm.

Ellen: 08:45

Mm-hmm.

Joe: 08:46

And so, there's both knowledges are important and, and that's complicated because they often get pitted against each other rather than being like, okay, how do we see this thing, these, this set of knowledge holistically.

Aron: 08:56

Right. Working together.

Joe: 08:57

Right.

Vanessa: 08:57

Yeah. This segues nicely into another question, which is, in your opinion, what is the most important step of design thinking? So that's question three. For me it's empathy, especially in the context of when you're applying design thinking to work with people.

Aron: 09:18

Mm-hmm.

Ellen: 09:19

And I'm gonna give a non-answer. I'm gonna say it's that stage from testing back into empathy. I think a lot of times we conceptualize problem-solving as a linear process of you finish it, you solve your problem, and then you're done. And um, I think the power of design thinking is the circular-ness of it and going back and being like, well, we tried this. How can we improve? Or what's working and what do we wanna keep and what do we wanna get rid of?

Aron: 09:47

Mm-hmm.

Vanessa: 09:48

Yeah. And that kind of circles back to what we were talking about in the episode on innovative high school models, in the fact that you can circle back to an innovation and the fact that innovation is not the goal, it is the next peak or the next mountain you go over. There's no end. It's how are we moving in a constant cycle of improvement for the current group of people that we're working with, and how do we reengage empathy with different groups, and how do we strengthen our ability to empathize with new people?

Aron: 10:19

Mm-hmm.

Vanessa: 10:19

Over and over and over again.

Aron: 10:21

Well, I was just thinking about the question, which of these steps is the most important to me? And I think my first instinct is empathizing - empathy. But what I realized by looking back at the workshops we've done with design thinking is that sometimes you can get stuck on empathy when people have so many good ideas and so many different ideas, it takes a lot of time to unpack those and to think about how they might fit together or, or not. And so I do believe that empathy is a key step, but is only the most important if you can follow through and do some prototyping and testing. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of people sitting around with good ideas, but it doesn't actually affect the change that we want it to.

Joe: 10:57

Yeah. I was gonna kind of build off Ellen's and just say iteration, which is not as explicit step, but is part of the process. So that procedural facet is to me the most important because all of them are independently important, like Aron said, but if you get stuck in one...

Aron: 11:12

mm-hmm

Joe: 11:13

...then you have a problem and you don't actually accomplish whatever it is that you're trying to.

Vanessa: 11:18

Maybe empathy is just always there, like it's an important stage, but it also is there when you're prototyping, when you're brainstorming, when you're testing, being considerate of the people that you're working with towards the solution, in my mind is really important.

Aron: 11:37

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think it's a challenge too, cuz I agree it ought to be there at every stage, but at a certain step, people who have the power in these design processes, sometimes they're like, okay, we've heard from everyone now let's try this. And what ever this is might not actually account for everyone else's perspectives. So I, I agree with you, but I also think, um, in terms of getting results or having material change happening in a school, it's not just about empathizing, it's also about trying to negotiate who has the power to make these changes, and it's not only one person of course, but how can the people who have these different levers to pull, how can they pull them in coordination with one another to affect changes that hopefully do honor what a lot of different people are hoping to get out of the system. But I'm a little bit hesitant to suggest that it'll ever be achieved, which is, I guess goes back to the iterative point. We, we need to keep working.

Vanessa: 12:26

Yeah.

Joe: 12:26

Right. And, and I think that it's also important to recognize that the know-how of different facets of this is important. So like if we're talking about the metaphor of the...

Aron: 12:35

shopping cart?

Joe: 12:36

...the shopping cart, you want a kind of a metalsmith to be making the shopping cart. You don't want, you know, somebody who has never built a shopping cart before to actually build the, the final prototype.

Aron: 12:46

Right.

Joe: 12:46

So there is something to be said about expertise in certain phases, but making sure that the right expertise is aligned with the right phase. And that the empathy where the knowledge of where we go and how we, how we're going to go about it, that's core. That's the foundation. But then after that, you need people who have the knowledge of, you know, in the case of schools, the policy structures, the physical plant, the pedagogical and curricular know-how, which is is, you know, requires a high degree of education for that to be able to maneuver within those spaces. Once that empathy has been kind of created and you have to go back, because like you said, those experts might not actually be able to represent everything the first time.

Aron: 13:30

Yeah, I think that question of expertise is so important cause design thinking is built on democratizing expertise and reminding us that we all, if we're involved in some sort of product or system, we all have some sort of expertise. But still, with design thinking there are facilitators who have a special kind of expertise and I don't know how to define that. Does anyone have a sense? Like what kind of expertise does the person who's facilitating a design thinking process need to have? They gotta be a good facilitator.

Vanessa: 13:54

Yeah. That's number one. They have to facilitate, well.

Joe: 13:56

They gotta be able to work with people well. They gotta be able to have kind of a holistic ecological perspective on the whole process.

Vanessa: 14:03

They also have to really understand the process.

Ellen: 14:05

In terms of getting people past the humps they get stuck on.

Aron: 14:10

Mm-hmm.

Ellen: 14:10

When they get stuck in various points of the design process. Being able to be like, okay, here's what we need from what you've talked about, and we're gonna take that and move on and do something with it.

Aron: 14:21

Right.

Joe: 14:22

And, and I think there's an important point about the democratization of expertise because we don't want everybody to be an expert in everything, because that would be a huge waste of energy.

Ellen: 14:32

Mm-hmm.

Joe: 14:33

So the, the challenge is how do we make sure that the voices that are concerned with the particular topic have a real say and are able to direct it in a, in a meaningful way. At the same time, like I said, not everybody's gonna be building the shopping cart.

Aron: 14:50

Right.

Joe: 14:50

You know, you're gonna need an engineer, you're gonna need somebody to work the metal. They will have slightly different knowledge bases and they're gonna have to work together to figure it out. But they're gonna need to direct it based on what the people need, cuz they know what they need. And so there's the democratization is, you know, the, the concept of democracy is really important here because it's not, you know, one vote per person for whatever decision is being made. It's how do we work together in ways where there's meaningful voice and, and collaboration and, and involvement...

Ellen: 15:20

Well, and I think an important...

Joe: 15:21

And a division of labor. Sorry.

Ellen: 15:22

No, no, that's okay. And I think the important piece in that too is that the end product is not a shopping cart. It is a social system, right? So it's infinitely more complicated to build some kind of social structure than it is to build a shopping cart. Um, because of the physical nature versus the more abstract nature of something.

Joe: 15:40

Right.

Ellen: 15:41

So, Not only do we have to think about the experts and the division of tasks, but also the complicated nuances of relationships that are gonna have to be built into that and shift as time goes on.

Joe: 15:55

Mm-hmm.

Vanessa: 15:59

So moving on to question four…

Joe: 16:01

It's the not fast five.

Vanessa: 16:03

Oh yeah, it's the super slow five.

Aron: 16:06

Slow five.

Vanessa: 16:07

So we've addressed some of these things, but I think it'd be maybe helpful to just list strengths and weaknesses of design thinking. I can start, uh, weakness is the process itself is more suitable for material change instead of social change where it becomes much more complicated.

Aron: 16:28

Do you think though, that it can be of value to social change?

Vanessa: 16:30

I think it can be of value, but I think it's so complicated that sometimes it's not worth it.

Aron: 16:35

Hmm.

Joe: 16:35

Yeah. I think that the, the simplicity of like user interface, like user shopping cart, user computer program, user app, that's where design thinking it was originated. And I think that simplicity of like, here are the clear roles, so we need to understand what the user wants and then we can create that in the marketplace format. And schools are not that. So I think that that is a helpful challenge for design thinking.

Aron: 17:00

I guess a strength just to.

Vanessa: 17:03

Balance it out?

Aron: 17:03

Piggyback and balance out what Vanessa said. A strength is that it allows multiple people to have a perspective in a design process that often or conventionally would've been more top-down perhaps. So I think of, uh, disability justice movements and how they often talk about nothing about us without us. And so if you're designing a product or a service for a disabled person, it'd be very important to get disabled people involved in that team creating this, uh, product or service. And I think it's similar with education or with any social system that involves people is that if you're creating and designing that without the people who will be served by it or who will be related to it, we're not, you're not going to end up with a result that fits into that community or that is valued by that community. So I don't know. I agree with Vanessa that it's so complicated and very difficult and maybe so difficult that with current budgetary constraints, it's not always the best, uh, option. But if it's possible, if there's the resources and support and motivation, willingness to do it, then I think it is going to allow people to have their say in a way that's really important.

Joe: 18:09

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I don't think a weak, that particular weakness is like, uh, excludes it from consideration in school change. I think that it is important to recognize the strengths and the weaknesses so that it is applied appropriately and done in the right way, or done in a effective and good way. Uh, another strength is that there are clear, fairly simple steps, and that is very helpful because oftentimes change processes are very convoluted, even when they're top-down. So this is a very helpful structure for people to be able to say, okay, here are, you know, here are the five steps we need to do. We can go back if we don't feel like we're ready, so we can iterate, but it also lays out a clear framework and structure that is helpful.

Ellen: 18:54

Except I'm gonna counter that and say that's also a weakness. It seems very simple, and they are five very simple steps little simple words associated with them. But I think sometimes people get lost in the jargon of the terminology of design thinking and get like really frazzled about the idea of like, oh, are we in empathy or are we in ideating? And like, what's ideating? And then you're like, well, it's just brainstorming. And they're like, oh, okay. Nevermind. I get it now. And the jargon of it all, complicates what is just a problem-solving process. And I think removing the terminology that's associated with it and just kind of going through it and guiding the steps as they happen without having to explain all of the actual terminology of design thinking, people would be much more...

Vanessa: 19:45

Receptive?

Ellen: 19:46

Yeah.

Aron: 19:46

Yeah. I mean, it's such a hands-on approach. It's a bit, uh, counterintuitive to begin it with a lecture where you're like, ok these are the five steps you have to follow.

Vanessa: 19:52

Mm-hmm.

Ellen: 19:53

Yeah.

Aron: 19:53

It's supposed to be, I think a participatory approach.

Vanessa: 19:56

Yeah.

Ellen: 19:56

But what we've seen so far has been less participatory and more of the explaining of design thinking.

Aron: 20:03

Mm-hmm.

Ellen: 20:04

Yeah, and I think if we get lost in the weeds of explaining what design thinking is, instead of actually doing the design thinking, then it detracts from the problem-solving or the, the ability for it to enact change.

Joe: 20:15

Yep.

Vanessa: 20:17

I have another strength, which we have already talked about, which is the iterative nature of it, I think that's a huge strength.

Aron: 20:23

I think both the iterative nature and also what Ellen's talking about in terms of stripping it, of its jargon, it reveals an elephant in the podcast, which is that design thinking didn't start with design thinking. The process we're discussing is a change process that has existed in so many forms throughout history and the idea of marketing it as a nice package design thinking with five steps.

Vanessa: 20:43

Mm-hmm.

Aron: 20:43

That's something that was done by Stanford and IDEO and it doesn't necessarily reflect all the ways that design thinking might be used.

Vanessa: 20:50

Yeah. Any other strengths or weaknesses we wanna say while we're here?

Aron: 20:54

I guess a strength, just to counteract what I just said, uh, one of the strength of design thinking is that a lot of times in systems like educational systems, there's a compliance culture where people don't feel that comfortable being risk-takers and being really, uh, bold in terms of reform ideas. Whereas design thinking, it allows a very rigid or sometimes very rigid format to try those sort of risky things. So it's a bit of an ironic approach. It allows people to be more flexible through a very strict framework.

Ellen: 21:24

Except that I would also argue that without creating the explicit conditions so that people can actually share their ideas in a way that they feel comfortable, design thinking doesn't actually create the space for people to be able to do it. Um, and we see it time and time again in, in schools where facilitators walk in and they're like, okay, now you can like, share all your ideas, but like their principal is in the room and they're like, um.

Vanessa: 21:55

And nobody's dealt with that. To make people feel comfortable. For people to share risks and vulnerabilities comfortably is really, I mean, that's the empathy part also.

Ellen: 22:05

Mm-hmm.

Aron: 22:05

That's not necessarily a criticism of design thinking. It's a criticism of design thinking that's not been facilitated in a way that allows people to feel in control of the process.

Ellen: 22:14

Exactly.

Vanessa: 22:15

But the process itself doesn't explicitly give information about how to go about that. You know?

Aron: 22:21

It's supposed to though, right? I feel like design thinking done in the way that it was envisioned by IDEO and Stanford is all about passing over that control and, um, that role of being a change maker to everyone involved, not just the people facilitating it.

Vanessa: 22:35

Right. But to me that's kind of like somebody who's naturally a good facilitator or who has experience in working with people, facilitating and being like, okay, I get design thinking. I can do it. And versus somebody else who's not equipped to do it. You can still lead design thinking.

Aron: 22:50

Right.

Joe: 22:50

There's a level of procedural knowledge that is hidden within the simplicity of the steps. And I think that procedural knowledge is what you're talking about and I think that's very important. Like there's a, a complexity that underlies the simplicity that somebody who can really understand how to go about doing this, the details of it, what it means to have real voice, what it means to make sure that there are spaces where people can actually share their true opinions. When you're talking about something as kind of apolitical as a shopping cart, that's one thing. And what you want as a consumer is fairly apolitical. But then when you're talking about what you want as a student, what you want as a teacher and your principal, you know the people, the people who are in power right there, and it might go against their mandates or their values. That adds a complexity to it then.

Aron: 23:35

Right.

Joe: 23:36

That our developments as facilitators or as design thinkers or as researchers, that's a lot of the stuff that I think research needs to develop better. Those details of how to build those relationships, which are the core of creating safe spaces, and those details of how to facilitate and think about where people can be safe to speak up. And how that information can be shared with those in power who may not like to hear what it is that, that those people have to say.

Vanessa: 24:03

Especially in social systems like education that are implicitly hierarchical, like that's breaking institutional, uh, mechanisms that have been existent since the dawn of education. So you're asking people to do a 180 on something that is just,

Ellen: 24:15

Or... not breaking them, but utilizing them more, uh, fruitfully because education is always gonna have hierarchies necessarily. So how do we... How do we take those and use them for the good, so as to move forward and change instead of getting caught up in the bureaucracy of it?

Joe: 24:36

Right.

Aron: 24:37

And sorry, I was just going... an answer to that, is design thinking that effectively and authentically engages people at all levels, including those administrators who could otherwise be a barrier to teachers innovating change on their own.

Joe: 24:49

Right. Which is I think is the strength of design thinking because it does have years and years of backup from other sectors to show like, okay, this does work. This is why this is important. It is really good in terms of advocacy of democratizing voice and democratizing change processes in terms of its kind of social place in our collective consciousness. I was gonna make a joke about don't ever think that McGill students are not self-critical because we're all doing this process and we are ripping apart design thinking.

Aron: 25:20

I'm surprised that I'm the one seemingly the most advocating for it.

Vanessa: 25:24

I'm actually surprised by that too. Yeah.

Aron: 25:27

But I think it's the, the process of design thinking without all the jargon is something I really do believe in. But then I agree with all three of you that in the ways that we've seen it, uh, manifest, it sometimes doesn't live up to those, um...

Ellen: 25:40

The ideals of what it is supposed to be.

Joe: 25:42

Yeah the ideals, principles. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Vanessa: 25:44

Yeah. And that's particular to a social system, work within a social system, which I think is like the main learning curve for the initiative. Just how do you actually apply design thinking to a social system and have the iterative cycle work the way it's supposed to, where people are able to be vulnerable, where facilitators have the procedural knowledge to lead the process well. All that kind of stuff.

Ellen: 26:06

Exactly. That idea that it, it seems very simple on paper, five steps, but underneath those five steps are, lots of very complicated social processes that need to be able to happen, and that there's just, there's a lot of implicit knowledge and skills built into those steps that without making them concrete, can not happen or impede the process.

Vanessa: 26:32

Okay, so now that we've gotten to the fifth question of the slow five. If you're going to use design thinking as a process for a school change, what are five things you need to know?

Aron: 26:45

Number one, make sure all of the partners who might be impacted by the change are there in the room at some stage in the design process.

Vanessa: 26:53

Preferably from the very beginning.

Ellen: 26:56

Number two, make sure that the people in the room are able to work together positively. That you foster some kind of relationship building or some kind of explicit collaboration practice so that people have norms for working together.

Joe: 27:14

Number three, make sure that the people in the room also have the knowledge necessary to accomplish the tasks that are required.

Vanessa: 27:24

Number four, it's going to get messy, and failure is okay.

Ellen: 27:29

Number five, make sure you actually do some things. That you don't get stuck in talking about changes that you want to happen. At some point, big or small, some kind of tangible real thing should change and you should be able to experience it.

Joe: 27:50

Right. And the organizational change literature calls this fractal improvements. So you create small improvements that you can see will have momentum to become bigger, but you can try 'em out, prototyping, in little ways to then build on off of that success if there's a success, or discard it without too much damage done if it's not.

Aron: 28:09

I think that also points to the importance of having a strong facilitation team and what makes a strong facilitation. One is having the expertise to do that facilitation, but also being open and able to listen to each participant and actually honor what they're bringing to the table.

Ellen: 28:24

So that's number six. Number seven...

Joe: 28:28

The top 10 things you need to know...

Ellen: 28:31

…is, uh, having that contextual knowledge. That whoever the facilitators are, have some kind of relationship with the people in the room or are willing to do the work to understand what the specific context of the change that they're trying to facilitate is happening in.

Aron: 28:47

Number eight schools are systems with complex factors influencing how they operate. So being mindful of those complexities and making sure that you're not just throwing design thinking at a staff, hoping that things will pick up, but actually acknowledging, okay, there's different legal requirements from the ministry. There's different tasks that the admin have. Like having to be aware of all the different complications that might make it difficult for teachers to enact change, and then building a team around that.

Ellen: 29:13

Number nine, it takes time.

Joe: 29:16

And resources.

Aron: 29:17

Yeah, space, resources, time. Those are key factors that a lot of school systems, public school systems do not have in 2022 in Canada. So we can talk all this great, um, theory, but without money and resources, none of this change can happen effectively.

Vanessa: 29:33

I think number 10, especially in the context of schools and educational change is to involve students.

Joe: 29:40

Yeah.

Aron: 29:40

Yeah. And that's number 10 is so important particularly because it's so often ignored.

Vanessa: 29:45

Yeah. Including kids in the conversations and taking their contributions seriously.

Ellen: 29:50

Especially when, design thinking, one of its values is distributing power in a kind of more equal footing.

Aron: 29:59

Mm-hmm.

Ellen: 29:59

And having all the stakeholders in the room talking together. Ignoring student input is really failing in the design process.

Aron: 30:08

And maybe number 11 is if the jargon's getting too much…

Joe: 30:11

The top 20...

Vanessa: 30:13

Here we go!

Aron: 30:14

If the jargon of design thinking isn't really working for your group, just get rid of the jargon and try the process.

Vanessa: 30:20

Okay. And number 12, don't forget to iterate. The iteration is a huge part of it. Don't be like, okay, solved it. Like it goes on and on and on and on. That's the whole point.

Ellen, Aron, and Vanessa: 30:30

It is the song that never, and yes, it goes on and on my friends. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was, and they'll continue singing it forever, just because this is the song that never ends...

Vanessa: 30:49

Those were the not so Fast Five questions for today's podcast. Tune in to ChangEd every third Friday of the month for more content on educational change. Next time, Ellen and I talk to Lisa and Bronwyn about student engagement.

Vanessa: 31:06

You've been listening to ChangEd. My name is Vanessa Gold and I'm your host. I'm a PhD candidate and part of a research team at McGill University interested in educational change. Each of us brings diverse experiences and expertise to an ongoing investigation of this topic within a current school change initiative being piloted in Quebec called NEXTschool. You can find more information about this initiative and the work our research team has done on our website at www.nextschoolquebec.com. Part of our goal in producing this podcast is to share what we're doing and involve you, our listeners in the research process, speaking with members of our team, other academics, experts, and practitioners amongst others, each episode explores one of many complex facets of educational change. You can expect topics like how to lead change, getting past inertia, the politics of change, and people's lived experiences of school change as it happens all within, but not exclusive to the NEXTschool context.

Spearheading the initiative is Noel Burke. Dr. Lisa Starr is the principal investigator of McGill's Research Team and Dr. Joseph Levitan, Dr. Lynn Butler-Kisber, and Dr. Bronwyn Low are co-investigators. Five graduate students round out the research team, including myself, Ellen MacCannell, Aron Rosenberg, Anna Villalta, and Natalie Malka. You'll be hearing from all of us as we explore the tricky and important work of making schools better for everyone.

This podcast and our research about NEXTschool is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Changed is produced by Vanessa Gold. Music is by Neal Read he's at nealread.ca. A transcript of today's podcast, citations and additional information are on our website, www.nextschoolquebec.com. Thanks for tuning in. We're looking forward to engaging with you.