CHEP, Virginia Tech, 2020
What classroom activities can be used to support a group of students who are all working on individual projects across multiple domains? This is the question the presenters faced as they designed and led project-based courses to help undergraduate students learn to use technology more innovatively in the workplace. Methods from design thinking provided many of classroom activities, and lessons from the creativity literature helped to inform the way the activities were implemented and modeled by the instructors. This session will provide an overview of the course design and the classroom activities that engaged students and the instructors.
The course was project-based (Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Condliffe, 2017; Edutopia, 2001) and its design was informed by the theoretical perspectives of constructionism, situated cognition/situated learning, and self-directed learning—as described by Clinton and Rieber (2010) and especially with regard to the freedom in choosing any project topic, which was a primary characteristic of the first of three sequential courses in the studio experience. The assignments and in-class activities completed by students were based upon theories and practices borrowed from the creativity and design thinking literature. While students did most their project work outside of class, classroom activities were oriented toward helping students to share ideas and to provide each other with design feedback.
Methods from design thinking provided many of classroom activities, and lessons from the creativity literature helped to inform the way the activities were implemented and modeled by the instructors.
A unifying theme that might be applied to all class activity is community building. Eventually, the course community became characterized by a “culture of prototyping” (Rauth, Köppen, Jobst, & Meinel, 2010, p. 3), but building the community took time. In this session we will share the classroom activities that helped to build the supportive course community. These activities are (a) tool presentations, (b) idea presentations, and (c) prototype presentations that incorporated peer review and feedback. Attendees will be asked to participate by briefly sharing some favorite tools they use to accomplish their work as a way of modeling the way idea sharing activities were implemented in our course.
Creativity research has produced some basic findings about the nature of creativity, such as its generally accepted definition (Runco & Jaeger, 2012), divergent thinking (Silvia et al., 2008), convergent thinking (Cropley, 2006), problem finding (Getzels, 1975), and psychological safety (Amabile & Pillemer, 2012). The instructors simplified and shared findings from this and similar research as a way of demystifying creativity for students, and to help them understand that creativity is a skill that can be developed as any other. Attendees will be asked to complete a brief survey assessing their beliefs about their creativity and the results will then be displayed and briefly discussed.
Finally, the general course design will be described, and the presenters will provide their assessment of the effectiveness of the course, including ideas for improvement. At this point the attendees will be asked to engage in a design conversation concerning any questions or ideas they may have about implementing a similar kind of learning environment.
This deck was for a presentation given at CHEP 2020 and some slides might not make sense outisde of their intended context.