Each year, the kindergarten students in Beverly Piper's class couldn't wait to dress up in costumes they designed to celebrate Chinese New Year. That was the best way to teach about cultural celebrations, Beverly said, adding that her students liked making their costumes and pretending that they lived in China. She wasn't happy when I persisted in asking, “What was the question that these costumes answered? Did your students learn the concept of cultural celebrations, or simply replicate costumes worn to celebrate Chinese New Year?”

Beverly was in the first Design-Based Learning master's program cohort group at Cal Poly Pomona in 1995. To begin using her innate creative abilities, she just needed the spark of motivation provided by group discussions. To expand her young students' understanding of multicultural traditions—and to focus on pedagogy and methodology rather than a project—Beverly came up with a memorably creative approach to teach them that different people celebrate beginnings in different ways.

Instead of limiting her teaching about multiculturalism to Chinese New Year, Beverly applied my methodology and met the curriculum requirements by having her students bring a favorite toy to class and design a Never-Before-Seen Holiday for the toy to celebrate. She asked them what they thought would make their toys want to celebrate a new year, then had the students dress up in full-length ponchos made from old sheets that she had collected and cut up. Using markers, they covered the ponchos with pictures representing the New Year hopes of their toys.

The result: the “turtle” celebrated a clean place to live by drawing a broom and a cloth on his poncho and wearing white gloves. The “Barbie Doll” celebrated a year without broken parts by drawing all of the parts on the poncho and carrying a photo of her intact doll. The “teddy bear” celebrated getting washed by making a drawing of his teddy bear tucked into a washing machine. Finally, after all the students' costumes were ready to be paraded around the school campus, Beverly showed the class photos of people celebrating Chinese New Year. The kindergartners made the connection immediately, saying, “That's just like us, Mrs. Piper!” Afterward, in Guided Lessons, Beverly taught her students about different celebrations throughout the world, and had them bring examples of New Year celebrations from their own cultures to share with the class.

Beverly, who succumbed to an illness before graduating from the program, left a legacy of unique Design Challenges for other teachers.

When teachers studying Design-Based Learning announce right off the bat that they are not creative, I wince. Clearly, they are! Their need to ensure that the required curriculum sticks with their students drives them to want to do things differently. The open-ended possibilities of my 6½ Steps of Backwards Thinking™—a process of design, research, and revision—inspire teachers to call on their own creative powers to select and deliver information through a sequence of Design Challenges and related subject-matter Guided Lessons that amplify their required curriculum. The question that some ask during this process—“Can't you just tell me if you liked or didn't like what I did, or if I did it right?”—disappears as teachers recognize and claim their own creativity.

Rana Masri, a Math teacher at Delmar High School, Model Continuation School in the San Gabriel Unified School District, said the methodology was a lifesaver during the Covid-19 pandemic, which made virtual learning a necessity. (See “In the Virtual Classroom” in Chapter 3.) “Creative thinking is something that has become consistent in my online classroom. Not only does Design-Based Learning ask my kids to think creatively on a regular basis, I'm able to teach them to problem-solve so they can see how a subject that may seem abstract and foreign becomes relevant to something they are actually building, and makes factual information their own. Constant collaboration and interaction online pushes them out of their seats to become builders and storytellers in a Math class … and I learned how to be creative myself.”

Teachers are natural designers, whether they know it or not. Designers solve problems and organize their designs to satisfy a need. Teachers do, too. They solve the design problem of how to organize the physical and virtual classroom. They design and connect lessons, and they confront a teacher's biggest design dilemma: how to make learning subject matter fun and make it stick, while satisfying school administrators and parents, despite being inundated with “new” and changing academic requirements.

Mandatory teacher trainings can be confusing, contrary, and misleading. Think about food: we know how and what to eat. Or do we? Cow's milk or soy milk? Eat fish, it's healthy. Don't eat fish, it's loaded with mercury. Cut down on carbs, load up on carbs. Don't drink coffee, it's harmful. Do drink coffee, it protects against disease. What teachers are told can be just as contradictory: follow a prescribed, lockstep subject matter curriculum and yet at the same time, present students with open-ended dilemmas so they can learn to think creatively and critically and persevere in seeking and solving problems.

The mandated Common Core Standards Initiative, launched in 2009, left teachers casting about for ways to teach student-centered lessons and meet the required four “Cs”: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking (21st Century Skills) and make them compelling: a game for spelling, a coloring book for Math facts, a video about a foreign country.

Summoned by their school district to take one training after another, teachers go home overwhelmed, frustrated, and confused by many presenters who themselves are looking for ways to hold teachers' interest. Teachers receive little follow-up coaching as they try to implement what they learn. There is limited time carved out for the regular exchange of ideas with peers, to describe their approaches to teaching the material, get feedback, and explore the intellectual underpinnings in the field of education.

“I've been teaching for 15 years,” said one teacher, “and nobody has ever asked me to think about what my field is all about and the difference between pedagogy, methodology, and a project.”

In their search for ways to make learning relevant, teachers can become curriculum junkies. It takes time for teachers to develop their own plans (“We're studying Japan and there's someone from Japan living next door to me. I'll ask her to come to the classroom and talk about her life in her home country”). It takes time for teachers to design ongoing student-centered experiences that stick in students' brains, but teachers love finding creative ways to impart “forever” information and to see growth in students' thinking.

The Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ methodology gives teachers the freedom to express their creativity in how they teach subject matter. They like that their plans are not cast in concrete and that they can easily alter their sequence of Design Challenges as new requirements or grade levels come along. Design-Based Learning gives them a versatile, contextual playing field—situated in an evolving “story”—for teaching across the curriculum, facilitating classroom management, making information reusable, and elevating student test scores.