“Please don't make me go out on the playground and drag my wagon around pretending I'm a pioneer moving West, it's humiliating.” My 5th-grade student Michael was adamant, refusing to join his fellow students on an imagined trek Westward to see if the covered wagons they had built would make it across rugged terrain. I thought he was just being a smart aleck, because he had said that he liked finding out about the ratio between the front and rear wheels of his wagon, how the front wheels turned with a movable axle, and why the bowed wagon top was covered with Osnaburg fabric (all part of the 5th-grade curriculum).

I was trained to be a teacher at the UCLA Lab School by John Dewey's disciples, so whether the context for learning was Native cultures, the Pilgrims, the pioneers, foreign cultures, or the United Nations, I had my students do research and then make artifacts or models to display what they learned and then role-play in the setting.

At the start of the school year, I would bring in objects that represented the subject matter (BIG TOPICS) that I needed to teach: “Realia.” I went to the Natural History Museum and rented artifacts that the pioneers used to sustain life, everything from a wagon wheel and a sluice box to costumes. I went into the Japanese community and got loans of kimonos, chopsticks, getah, and tatami mats. When using literature to teach about courage, I plastered photos of heroic acts across the classroom walls.

My next step was to have the students replicate something that they had learned about and use what they made for “play.” Armed with their replicas, they pretended to be living in a house in Japan with shoji screens, pioneers going West, or courageous heroes.

In Michael's class, my students learning about the Westward Movement imagined that they were the pioneers. As part of their study, I had them build covered wagons (the size of a shoe box), take their wagons to the playground, and “drag” them from Independence, Missouri (which I drew on the playground with chalk), to California, over mountains and rivers that I made of books and rocks covered with construction paper. All of my students, except for Michael, seemed to be relieved that they were out of their chairs and having fun.

Long after I developed my teaching methodology, I figured out what was bothering me about Michael's reluctance to “play.”

Watching iconic American designers Frank Gehry, my brother, and Ray and Charles Eames “play” with their models, I concluded that Michael had been right. As Frank designed his original buildings, and as Ray and Charles designed their unique furniture, films, and exhibitions, they “messed” with their inventions endlessly. Their designs began as a response to a challenge; the resulting products were realized when these creative people experimented with their imagined designs and refined them through research.

Had I asked Michael to imagine designing his covered wagon with the same constraints imposed in the 1800s—no electricity, the need to navigate various landscapes and provide families with shelter from the elements—he would have learned about methods of mobility and protection, and he most certainly would have wanted to test out his design. Instead, I had asked my students to replicate an artifact to underscore what I had taught them about the perils of the Westward Movement.

Most of the learning in my classroom back then was focused on the transmission of information to my students from me, and from textbooks and other resources. I was not fostering my students' ability to think creatively and to express themselves. Indeed, asking students to replicate what already exists can leave them with the impression that only people in books are creative and inventive. Merely replicating something that someone else has accomplished inadvertently stifles self-expression. Yet at the beginning of my teaching career, applying John Dewey's pedagogy, all my hands-on projects had students build models of what I showed them. I had fun and my students were learning the required information, but it stopped there. I discovered that there is a profound disconnect between having students replicate subject matter by building physical objects and what I wanted my students to achieve: the higher-level thinking skills for original thought and creativity, as described in Benjamin Bloom's 1956 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives—a classification system defining levels of cognition.

The answer to my quandary came when I pictured Bloom's Taxonomy as a “Learning Ladder.” I imagined turning this “Ladder” around so that the last step described in the Taxonomy, creativity and self-expression, started the learning process. Teaching “backwards” this way enabled me to pre-assess what students already knew about subject matter and piqued their curiosity about what I would be teaching them.

The Learning Ladder graphic illustrates how teaching for creative thinking through my method of Design-Based Learning with Backwards Thinking™ achieves all of the higher-level thinking skills listed in Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy. At the top of the graphic, I depict Bloom's Taxonomy as a “Traditional Education” ladder that begins with the teacher's delivery of information and leads, ideally, to students acquiring those higher-level thinking skills deemed necessary for invention, creation, and design.

In my early career as a classroom teacher, I spent all my time imparting information, but teaching students how to meaningfully assimilate it was another story (as evidenced by my student Michael and his covered wagon). I never reached the final goal of the Taxonomy: having students invent, create, or design original artifacts based on what I had taught them. I wasn't alone. Other teachers felt—and feel—this way. My depiction of the “Traditional Education” ladder represents this common disconnect between teaching information and teaching for self-expression.

The Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ Learning Ladder reverses the first and last steps that Bloom described. It begins with “Invent, Create, Design,” as students respond to BIG TOPIC Design Challenges by roughly building 3D artifacts to represent their initial thinking about subject matter before they crack open a textbook. Through learned information acquired during a teacher's required Guided Lessons, students delve deeper into that subject matter to revise their original 3D designs and place them in the context of a City of the Future, or a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement/Colony, Ancient Civilization, Biome, Biosphere, Business, or any other curriculum-based setting that changes as it is built and governed.

Creating artifacts for a remote future and learning how to revise them invites students to speculate about “what if” and practice how one thing might become something else and why. “TRANSFORMATIONS, Menu of Change™” on my Learning Ladder, guides students to practice what John Dewey called “experimental inquiry,” a thought process he described as being “very near the attitude of the scientific mind.” Shown here is a sample vocabulary for ways students can try out making deliberate change when they get stuck coming up with original ideas. For example, a student builds a Never-Before-Seen Shelter for their Starter City of the Future, but it is too big or too small (Size/Scale), and how the Shelter will work for the inhabitant has not been thought out (Function).

Built into each Design Challenge, the words on the Menu of Change™ prompt students to think critically about concepts they must adhere to in applying subject matter to revise their Never-Before-Seen artifacts in order to have them work in the context of their City of the Future. The teacher-led questioning about the Size, Scale, Function, etc., of the students' artifacts targets the higher-level thinking skills in the Taxonomy that lead to transfer of learning (Non-Specific Transfer of Learning). Giving students vocabulary for ways to experiment with changing one thing into something else in varied academic and daily life settings activates their conscious understanding of how to use and reuse information. This is metacognition.

I gathered this vocabulary while researching Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, wanting students to know that they were capable of changing something that exists (for example: clothing, housing, cars, the way we shop, the way we communicate, school, energy sources, and waste disposal) into something original as a response to a need or problem—or just for fun. I wanted them to internalize the fact that change can be deliberate and doesn't have to be an accident or a twist of fate, and that the kinds of changes they would learn to make would apply in a variety of settings. I verified that when such great thinkers as scientist Jonas Salk, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, artist Claes Oldenburg, electronic composer Morton Subotnick, and my brother, architect Frank Gehry, brought their innovations into being, they solved problems through seemingly automatic, observational experimentation that the words I named represent. As part of my research, I later had the good fortune to formalize this vocabulary through conversations with Salk, Alan Kay, and others.

When I first taught “backwards,” presenting the “TRANSFORMATIONS, Menu of Change™” concepts (Size/Scale, Function, Role, Direction, In Space, Over Time) as my students imagined and built their tabletop, Never-Before-Seen Starter City of the Future, I discovered that their ability to apply and reuse what they learned (Non-Specific Transfer of Learning) happened seemingly automatically. By exercising “Experimental Inquiry” through the higher-level thinking skills named by Bloom (as shown on my Learning Ladder), my students learned to observe, analyze, record, and evaluate in preparation for making revisions to the artifacts that they built to represent their initial thinking about subject matter topics.

During the course of my research in K–12 classrooms that resulted in my methodology, I learned that when requiring students to use their imagination to be creative and launch their “experimental inquiry,” words matter. A “Never-Before-Seen Shelter” results in an original artifact as opposed to a “house.” A “Never-Before-Seen Creature” results in an original artifact as opposed to an “animal.” A “Never-Before-Seen City of the Future” avoids the replication of a “city” that exists today. (Again, the same holds true if the Never-Before-Seen City of the Future is a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement/Colony, Ancient Civilization, Biome, Biosphere, Business, or any other curriculum-based setting.)

One way to think about my methodology is that ultimately everything can be a design problem: what to wear to a Halloween party if you don't have a costume, what the picnic table is going to look like for the 4th of July, what citizens can do to save the planet from global warming.

As the “client,” the teacher invites students to become the designers of their City of the Future. The kicker is that students role-play governing their City as they build it. By role-playing, and through back-and-forth discussions to reach agreement on rules and regulations, they learn to take on social responsibility and make decisions about social justice in order to make changes to revise their Starter City.

The “Long-Range Plan: Sample Sequence of Never-Before-Seen (NBS) Design Challenges” shown on the Learning Ladder graphic represents a progression of Design Challenges taking place over a semester or school year.

AN ON-RAMP TO CREATIVE THINKING

In K–12 Design-Based Learning classrooms—physical or virtual—learning always starts with the spatial domain, because tactile learning sticks in the brain and increases focus and retention. On individual pieces of a predetermined landform representing a real location or system, students roughly build a tabletop Starter City of the Future, or other Never-Before-Seen contextual, built environment, based on required curriculum. The interdependence of the parts of the City is a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all subject matter.

Design Challenges are derived from BIG TOPICS in any K–12 curriculum. Each Design Challenge is posed to students to elicit their initial thinking about subject matter and Essential Questions by having them build Never-Before-Seen artifacts for their City, prior to being taught required Guided Lessons (small topics).

Students build Never-Before-Seen Creatures/Avatars to be their surrogates as “citizens” of the City. They build Never-Before-Seen Places and Spaces to revise and grow their Starter City. Having students build on their individual land parcels and bring them together—as parts to a contextual whole—to determine how their City will function, teaches students to seek out the problems they will solve in a series of progressively more complex Design Challenges.

If the teacher's City “story” is about a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement, or Civilization, for example, the “built-in” dilemmas that students invariably identify and solve as Design Challenges could include not enough places for others to live (BIG TOPIC: SHELTER), not enough ways to get around the City, pathways that lead nowhere or directly into someone's front door (BIG TOPIC: MOVEMENT), too many places for shopping (BIG TOPIC: EXCHANGE), and not enough for education, health services, recreation, outdoor spaces, and other necessities for daily living (BIG TOPIC: WELL-BEING).

(See Chapter 2 for teacher stories using the methodology across grade levels and subject areas. These include high school Science teacher Richard Rosa's “Organic City: Seeing the Unseen,” built by students to learn about evolution and the survival of living things.)

After gaining real-world information through Guided Lessons, reading textbooks, and doing research, students revisit their initial thinking about the subject matter presented during a Design Challenge, compare their built solutions to what they have learned, and revise their solutions by discussing the changes they would make and/or by physically modifying their designs. A teacher's semester-or year-long City “story” evolves with each dilemma that students identify and solve by building and refining their Never-Before-Seen answers to Design Challenges. At the same time, students practice civic activism and responsibility as they learn to assume roles in their City government and experience the social give-and-take of working together for a common goal: a functional City made whole by a diversity of imagined possibilities.

Regardless of a student's age, by starting with building before textbook study, the playfulness inherent in my method of Design-Based Learning seals the deal.

TAPPING INTO TEACHERS' INNATE CREATIVITY

Teachers learn the methodology in a similar hands-on way in trainings by graphically visualizing an integrated curriculum. They learn a dynamic way of planning by making and manipulating physical informational tools that they can use, reuse, and reconfigure according to their grade level or subject matter requirements for a semester or school year. They learn to make long-range plans in three steps, using the tactile, visual, and written domains to ensure deep understanding of how an integrated curriculum functions in a Design-Based Learning classroom. When K–12 teachers learn to apply the methodology to their regular curriculum and make a comprehensive, semester- or yearlong plan, they are often surprised to find, as they dig into the state standards to develop the lessons they need to teach, that students' creative and higher-level thinking skills are consistently required.

Teacher trainings begin two-dimensionally, with a study of the Design-Based Learning methodology's 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™. The trainings continue with the creation of a simple, three-dimensional planning tool: 3D Red Triangles that represent the relationship between a BIG TOPIC (the subject of a Design Challenge) and small topics (a teacher's required Guided Lessons). During the trainings, the Design Challenges and Guided Lessons, brainstormed using the 3D Red Triangles, are refined and written on 2D Curriculum Integration Charts. The information on the Curriculum Integration Charts is further refined as teachers create their individual 3D Long-Range Planning Boards, each displaying a monthly, BIG TOPIC Design Challenge and its related small topics (Guided Lessons). The information displayed on the Long-Range Planning Boards is easily modified to accommodate changes in grade levels, subject matter, and curricular requirements. (Teacher trainings range from a 40-hour immersive introduction to a variety of options that provide up to 120 additional hours of follow-up and support as teachers apply the methodology in their classrooms.)

The physicality of the Design-Based Learning planning process, taught in three different ways, brings out teachers' innate creativity. Their planning for tomorrow and beyond becomes personal. When they walk into the classroom, they can't wait to see it at work. (“Once it connected it was just like butter,” said educator Terry Ceja. “One idea trickled into another and pretty soon I couldn't sleep because I was so excited! I discovered I have imagination and creativity, and I use it in everything I do now.”)

THE 6½ STEPS OF BACKWARDS THINKING™

K–12 classroom teachers find that Backwards Thinking™, the method of Design-Based Learning, doesn't require a whole new series of lessons or a new curriculum. All that is needed is to rethink the sequence of lessons to amplify any mandated curriculum and “sneak up” on learning: as students express their ideas by roughly building a tabletop City with original 3D artifacts, what seems like fun to them, in reality, leads them to engage with the required Guided Lessons that follow.

During my visit with respected education expert Jerome Bruner in 2015, he said, “I worry that today's drive toward subject matter accountability is freezing creative thinking.” My years of experience have shown me that it is not an either/or, that good test scores and creative thinking are compatible. The data I have collected consistently show that students in classrooms using the Design-Based Learning methodology excel. The quantitative data show that standardized test scores in Language Arts, Math, Science, and other subjects improve markedly, even for English language learners and those with learning disabilities. The qualitative data collected from students, teachers, administrators, and parents through surveys and anecdotal records describe the positive impact of Design-Based Learning on student engagement and understanding.

Design-Based Learning, with its 6½-step process of Backwards Thinking™, has the same learning goals as traditional methodologies. It begins with BIG TOPIC Design Challenges that open the door to students' creativity by asking them to build artifacts to represent their own ideas about BIG TOPIC subject matter. High-level learning begins immediately.

Having students use the vocabulary for BIG TOPICS as they build their solutions to Design Challenges within the context of their City or other built environment, provides practice in the higher-level thinking skills that make learned information reusable (Non-Specific Transfer of Learning). During this process, Design Challenges always adhere to the vocabulary for the Guided Lessons that are taught after students build and evaluate their original, City-related artifacts according to a teacher's pre-set Criteria List. Asking for “houses” simply gets houses. Asking for “roads” gets ordinary roads. Students' creative thinking skyrockets when Design Challenges are named as BIG TOPICS that define the function of what their designs are meant to accomplish. Teachers ask students to build Never-Before-Seen Living Creatures (not “animals”), Never-Before-Seen Shelters or Ways of Protection (not “houses” or “jails”), Never-Before-Seen Places of Learning (not “schools”), Never-Before Seen Places to Exchange Goods or Information (not “malls” or “the internet”), Never-Before Seen Pathways and Carriers (not “roads,” “freeways,” “bike paths,” “trucks,” or “trains”).

Following each Design Challenge, students compare what they built according to their initial ideas to new information acquired during the study that follows. Textbooks, other source materials, and technology become resources to support students' creative and critical thinking as they are taught required subject matter Guided Lessons. With new information, students revise their built artifacts by talking or writing about them or rebuilding them.

The more that teachers ask students to give physical shape to their thinking about BIG TOPIC subject matter before Guided Lessons, and the more they prompt students to identify and solve problems within the context of a built City by demanding originality, the deeper their students' thinking becomes.

To facilitate teachers' understanding of the Backwards Thinking™ process, Leslie Stoltz, a teacher at Chaparral Middle School in the Walnut Valley Unified School District in Diamond Bar, California, who trained hundreds of teachers in the methodology, worked with me to develop the 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™ circle chart guide.

KICK-STARTING THE MAKING OF AN INTEGRATED CURRICULUM

During their in-depth training in the methodology, K–12 teachers learn to make a semester or yearlong plan through a series of hands-on experiences to ensure understanding of how to create an integrated curriculum. They craft 3D Red Triangles, write Curriculum Integration Charts (2D), and fabricate Long-Range Planning Boards (2D and 3D). The Long-Range Planning Boards reflect each teacher's unique, integrated curriculum in a comprehensive, creative, and highly professional display. This physical planning process gives form to a contextual “story” that evolves over time, capturing the imagination of students as they learn to seek and solve problems by building a sequence of three-dimensional artifacts for their City to represent their thinking about what they are learning.

Over the 50-plus years that I have guided teachers through this process, invariably when they display their Long-Range Planning Boards in their classrooms, students see what is in store for them over the semester or year, understand the reason for learning basic skills and Guided Lessons, and eagerly anticipate the next Design Challenge.

3D RED TRIANGLES: A POWERFUL TOOL FOR MEMORY RETENTION

In the initial planning process, teachers prepare for their first three months of school by studying the state standards and the required curriculum for their grade level or subject area. They select three subject matter BIG TOPICS to develop Design Challenges with subsequent related Guided Lessons that will propel students' learning as they build a City of the Future or other contextual environment.

To visualize how a BIG TOPIC becomes a Design Challenge and how small topics, derived from a BIG TOPIC, become a series of interdisciplinary Guided Lessons, teachers construct three 3D Red Triangles from heavy paper stock, and invert them to become containers. They label each inverted 3D Red Triangle with a BIG TOPIC that they have named; they fill each 3D Red Triangle with small topics (written on Post-it Notes or slips of paper) that they have named as the cross-curricular Guided Lessons they must teach. Each 3D Red Triangle represents how a single 45- to 90-minute Design Challenge leads to approximately one month of student immersion in required learning.

To model the planning process, a blown-up version of a 3D Red Triangle demonstrates for teachers the relationship between a BIG TOPIC and the related small topics that fuel Guided Lessons. Given PROTECTION as the BIG TOPIC and a Design Challenge that would require students to build a Never-Before-Seen Way to Protect Citizens Living in a City of the Future, teachers form nongrade level groups to brainstorm small topics related to PROTECTION (shelters, clothing, umbrellas, skin, hair, skulls, organs, shells, nests, parents, community, government, leaders, rules and regulations). They write the small topics on white Post-it Notes or slips of paper. They throw their small topics into the oversized 3D Red Triangle, reach in, and select a small topic that is not their own, and discuss how they would teach that topic as a Guided Lesson at their own grade level. This can be an eye-opener, when a high school teacher, for instance, discovers how a 2nd-grade teacher's delivery of a Guided Lesson can be modified to expand the scope of the BIG TOPIC.

Examples of vocabulary of BIG TOPICS, derived from K–12 lessons as defined in the State Curriculum Framework, range from IDENTITY (Never-Before-Seen Creature/Avatar) and PROTECTION (Never-Before-Seen Shelter) to COMMUNITY (Never-Before-Seen Starter City) and EQUITY (Never-Before-Seen Government). Other BIG TOPICS could include MOVEMENT, COMPETITION, DIVISION OF LABOR, SUSTAINABILITY, and SCARCITY.

The Design Challenges become progressively more complex. As teachers gain proficiency in the methodology, they learn to fill and string together 5 to 10 3D Red Triangles to display a sequence of Design Challenges with Guided Lessons for each month of an entire semester or school year. They tailor their sequences to a curriculum-based “story” for students' evolving City of the Future (or a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement/Colony, Ancient Civilization, Biome, Biosphere, Business, etc.).

Connecting a series of 3D Red Triangles displays a progression of monthly, BIG TOPIC Design Challenges that activate the growth of the interdependent parts of a student-built City of the Future.

A four-month sequence of BIG TOPIC Design Challenges and small topic required Guided Lessons. The sequence order is flexible, according to teachers' subject matter requirements.

An Example of a Proposed, Four-Month, 4th-Grade Language Arts Sequence

Students write a descriptive story detailing the physical characteristics of the Never Before Seen Creature/Avatar that they built for the Design Challenge, BIG TOPIC: IDENTITY. The BIG TOPIC for the next Design Challenge is PROTECTION. After students build their Never-Before-Seen-Shelters to protect their Creatures/Avatars, they write about the physical characteristics of the Shelters and refer to a list of descriptive words to write about what it is like for their Creatures to live there. Students build a Never-Before-Seen Starter City for the BIG TOPIC Design Challenge COMMUNITY and write a detailed account, using their descriptive words to report about who they worked with, what materials they used, and what they built and why. For the fourth Design Challenge, BIG TOPIC: ORGANIZATION, students design and learn to implement a Never-Before-Seen Way to Govern their City and write speeches, job applications, and rules and regulations.

An example of a six-month sequence. (In this photo, teachers ran out of red card stock and improvised.)

Textbooks tell teachers to present “page 7” and have students answer the questions on “page 8,” but not how to make the information on “page 7” usable and reusable in the long term. Instead of lockstep textbook instruction, starting with a BIG TOPIC Design Challenge opens the door to expand teaching across the curriculum. Textbooks, other source materials, and technology become resources to support students' creative and critical thinking as they are taught subject matter Guided Lessons (small topics) that follow each Design Challenge.

CURRICULUM INTEGRATION CHARTS

Teachers transfer the content of their 3D Red Triangles to paper or computer-generated Curriculum Integration Charts, making one Chart per Design Challenge. Each multicolored Chart documents the relationship between a BIG TOPIC Design Challenge and the required standards that are the basis for the content of the teacher's Guided Lessons in an integrated curriculum.

BIG TOPIC: PROTECTION

Problem: The Never-Before-Seen Creatures need shelters.

Essential Question: How are people, animals, and things protected?

GUIDED LESSONS
Small Topics
Language Arts	Social Studies	Math	Science	Visual and Performing Arts
Create a diagram showing the Shelter's design features Compare/contrast your Shelter to another	Explain whether your Shelter would be best in an urban, suburban, or rural environment and why	Measure the height/width of your Shelter using two different units of measurement Describe Shelter in terms of which 2D shapes could be traced from the 3D Shelter	Investigate the properties of the various materials in the Happy Trash used to build your Shelter Create a safety plan for your Creature/Shelter during a natural disaster	Create a painting of your Shelter using 3D shapes Identify and describe Shelters in famous works of art

LONG-RANGE PLANNING BOARDS

A series of Long-Range Planning Boards display an integrated curriculum for any grade level or subject area. For each monthly Design Challenge and its related Guided Lessons, teachers fabricate a Long-Range Planning Board by refining the information from their 3D Red Triangles and their 2D Curriculum Integration Charts. The resulting 5 to 10 separate Long-Range Planning Boards encompass five months of a semester or 10 months of a school year. Basically scale-enlarged pacing guides, Long-Range Planning Boards are made of poster board or fabric with clear, 4- × 4-inch plastic pockets attached.

With a color-coded, detachable legend, Long-Range Planning Boards are portable, reusable, and easy to modify according to changing requirements. Together, they visually display a teacher's unique, cross-curricular sequence of monthly BIG TOPIC Design Challenges, with Essential Questions that amplify the required curriculum. The visibility of this display in the classroom enables students, parents, and administrators to see that academic requirements are being met. (See Chapter 18: Long-Range Planning Boards in Depth.)

The teachers I work with often say that their usual teaching practice is a series of fragmented topics and themes from the State Curriculum Framework, workshops, and staff development classes. They describe this fragmentation as tiring, confusing, and demeaning, and say that it doesn't ask them to be the professionals they are or give them the tools for using their own expertise. They're 100 percent right. Every time new requirements emerge from the federal government, state, and district, teachers must attend professional development trainings to learn how to plan and deliver them.

These trainings are usually not interdisciplinary. Teachers are taught how to pace sequential subject matter lessons from textbooks to engage English language learners and to teach Language Arts, Science, and Mathematics, often using these new activities and techniques for a period of time, then putting them aside when the next training occurs. Missing in these trainings is how to weave the new requirements into a sequential, integrated curriculum that will spark students' imaginations and sustain their engagement over a semester or year. Design-Based Learning teachers develop and display a sequential, in-depth course of study with the flexibility to accommodate ever-changing academic requirements.

Through all the years that my Design-Based Learning methodology has evolved, propelling me from classroom teacher to researcher and university professor, I have found one significant constant: When teachers make and display their Long-Range Planning Boards in their classrooms, they see their integrated curriculum come to life as their students anticipate each new Design Challenge, become facile at making changes and reusing learned information, experience problem seeking and problem solving as an engaging type of play, and want to participate.

I thoroughly enjoyed every second I was fortunate to be a part of the UCLA Design-Based Learning training. It was THE best training session I have attended in all my years as an educator. I left with a plethora of knowledge, but most importantly I left with an attitude that I CAN change the world. It is because of you and this methodology I am confident going into this new school year.

—Phelondra Clifford, TK–5 Art and Innovation Specialist, Learning by Design Charter School, Los Angeles Unified School District

ESSENTIALS OF THE DOREEN NELSON METHOD OF DESIGN-BASED LEARNING