Seven-year-old Amilie was inconsolable. She tearfully held up a smooshed piece of paper with one big, puffy, blue pom-pom attached. Her second pom-pom had fallen off and before she could pick it up, another student had stepped on it. To an outsider, the object in Amilie's hand might appear to be just a tangle of paper with a fuzzy ball dangling from it. But to Amilie, this was “Cottie,” shaped by her own hands and imagination. And now Cottie was missing an eye.

Daphne Chase, her 2nd-grade teacher, asked Amilie how she might fix Cottie with the materials available, and Amilie gave it serious thought before deciding that two smaller pom-poms were the solution. “Now she's even better than before,” she said.

This wasn't an arts-and-crafts project. It was the Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ process, reversing the standard teaching method to ignite creative thinking by having students imagine and build original artifacts as they develop and revise a tabletop City of the Future (or other curriculum-related environmental context) for a purpose: to activate Non-Specific Transfer of Learning so that students consciously use and reuse subject matter in multiple settings.

Thirty minutes was all it took for Amilie and Daphne's other students to complete building their Creatures/Avatars, the first of 10 sequential BIG TOPIC Design Challenges that Daphne would present to them monthly over the school year. Each Design Challenge was woven into a story based on the 2nd-grade curriculum and played out in the tabletop City her students were building. The “story” that Daphne told her students was that their City (built on a 30 × 60-inch table) was a magical place where their Never-Before-Seen Creatures/Avatars would be coming to live together as a community 100 years in the future.

Daphne's BIG TOPIC for her first Design Challenge was LIVING THINGS. To meet the state-mandated requirements for learning about animal life, and to prepare her 2nd graders to read about mammals, reptiles, and birds, Daphne had them create their Never-Before-Seen Creatures/Avatars out of found materials as they referred to her Criteria List naming the basic attributes of living things.

(The beauty of a Criteria List is that it, in a sense, becomes a surrogate for the teacher. When students say, “I don't know what to do,” the teacher responds, “Check the Criteria List.” Instead of asking, “Did I do it right?” students are taught to self-assess by using a Criteria List as their guide.)

Daphne asked her students to think like their Creatures, imagine what they ate, who the Creatures' friends and relatives were, where they slept, how they moved, what they were afraid of, what they dreamed of, their likes and their dislikes, and even when they would die! As the Creatures took on personal meaning for her students, Daphne referred to them to teach her BIG TOPIC–related, required Guided Lessons and to invest students in the evolution of the City they were building and would be revising.

Concurrently, Daphne introduced her students to ways to become a supportive community of learners. Over the course of a month, she taught them to give presentations about how and why their Creatures were Never-Before-Seen. They practiced being good listeners and how to politely question each other about how their Creatures were similar to, or different from, real animals they read about and why. The 2nd graders couldn't wait to explain how their Creatures' basic needs for survival compared and contrasted to those of all living things. They willingly listened to each other, read their textbooks, researched other sources that Daphne presented, and revised their Creatures according to new learning.

Before Daphne had assigned the Never-Before-Seen Creature/Avatar Design Challenge, she asked her students to write about something important to them. Amilie wrote one page about Legoland, “my favorite place in the whole world.” A week later, Daphne had her students write about their Never-Before-Seen Creatures. Amilie wrote a seven-page, illustrated saga called “The Adventures of Cottie.”

Daphne's Language Arts Guided Lessons taught her students how to augment their original Creature descriptions. Classroom disruptions were few as students met writing requirements, making booklets to showcase their work. In Science, they learned about the five senses as they categorized their Creatures' attributes. For Math, Daphne had the students measure each Creature and name the shapes found in them. Studying Civics, they role-played as their Creatures to learn how to get along and solve problems in the classroom. All of this prepared them for what they knew would come next: building a tabletop Never-Before-Seen City of the Future where their Creatures would live, work, and play.

This story grew over the entire school year, enthralling Daphne's students as she taught them to identify and solve a problem that she named as the BIG TOPIC for each Design Challenge. Her students learned basic subject matter through the required Guided Lessons—small topics supporting the BIG TOPIC—that Daphne taught across the curriculum.

Continuous assessments of students' ability to achieve the curricular requirements took place as the class experienced a new Design Challenge and multiple related Guided Lessons each month, taking place sequentially over the school year. For their second Design Challenge, derived from the BIG TOPIC: PROTECTION, Daphne's students built Never-Before-Seen Shelters for their Creatures on individual land pieces for their tabletop City. The students then built Never-Before-Seen Ways for their Creatures to move from place to place in the City (BIG TOPIC: MOVEMENT), to get food and goods (BIG TOPIC: EXCHANGE), and to have fair rules (BIG TOPIC: GOVERNMENT). Integrated into the curriculum, each tactile, BIG TOPIC Design Challenge, followed by Daphne's required Guided Lessons, turned her students into captivated learners.

Daphne, a teacher in the San Gabriel Unified School District, is one of thousands of teachers worldwide trained in my Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ methodology. (The methodology has also been practiced for more than 30 years at what is now called the Open Magnet Charter School, in the Los Angeles Unified School District.) What happened in Daphne's class is typical of classrooms, virtual and physical, where teachers apply the methodology, whatever the grade level or subject.

BIG TOPIC Design Challenges propel a sequential “story” that evolves over an extended period of time within a student-imagined, student-built City of the Future or other reality-based, Never-Before-Seen environments rooted in required curriculum. Students take ownership of the “story” and its evolution as they learn to run their City of the Future, seek out BIG TOPIC–related dilemmas, and build Never-Before-Seen solutions to such questions as “What will living environments and social relationships be like in the future and why?” “What will a learning place be like and why?” “How will medicine be practiced?” “What can be done about pollution, overpopulation, and climate change? Mean people? War?” “What are the dreams, the hopes, the fears, and responsibilities of citizens, and how have people throughout history responded with unique designs when different cultures come together?”

“Design-Based Learning opens worlds of opportunities for learning that go far, far beyond the classroom and normal classroom skills,” said Jeanne Miller, who teaches 7th- and 8th-grade honors-prep English Language Arts, Social Studies, Ancient Church History, and Family Life at St. Bonaventure, a Catholic school in Orange County, California. “Through the City my students build and my curriculum-related Design Challenges, I've had them respond to stories I make up about invasions, corruption, high taxes, unequal distribution of wealth, despotism, overthrows of government, and treason—Ancient Church History provides a rich source of ideas! A creature is entrapped in a Never-Before Seen Jail Net high over our City at this very moment for attempted murder. But it's not all depravity and ruin. My Design-Based Learning practice has developed all types of interesting twists and tangents, with Design Challenges linked to TED Talks, and Guided Lessons about religion, lotteries, and stock markets. Design-Based Learning has facilitated any number of deep, mind-blowing discussions, with me absolutely dumbstruck at the wisdom, honesty, and courage of my students as they debate, discuss, and question and find their own answers.”

By imagining and building their original solutions to dilemmas within a contextual, three-dimensional environment, students gain an invested interest in learning from textbooks and other research about how others have solved or approached the same dilemmas. Through this process, students learn that everything (objects, places, processes, philosophies, institutions) has been and will be designed by someone—and that they are a “someone,” too.

Teachers immersed in applying the methodology say that a tactile buy-in to learning results in elevated scores on standardized tests, and fewer behavioral problems. They report that starting backwards—having students apply their thinking about subject matter to build Never-Before-Seen solutions to BIG TOPIC dilemmas before reading textbook examples, and having them compare their original designs to what they learn—triggers success.

“We do a Design Challenge before we learn what we have to learn,” said Madeleine Skinner, as a 12th grader in the Academic Design Program at Walnut High School. (In August, 2020, Madeleine wrote, “It's been about six years since my first experience learning in a Design-Based-Learning-focused classroom, and now I am studying to become a teacher with the hope to pass along the innovative education I am thankful to have received.”)

Promoting creative thinking to be accessible to everyone bumps up against the common misperception that originality is the singular domain of artists, scientists, mathematicians, and designers. My admiration for original thinkers has to do with their tenacity as they transform, rearrange, and translate information to make it their own, rather than replicating the work of others. It isn't surprising to me that students who are taught primarily to accumulate and replicate information about what others have achieved may relegate learning to a box labeled “school.”

As a former classroom teacher, I know that there is something irresistible about telling students ways that they can do things better. If the BIG TOPIC is SHELTER, an elementary schoolteacher might want to say, “let me show you pictures of how bees make their houses, how a turtle carries its house with it, how Inuit people used to live on the ice. Could there be an igloo in the tabletop City you are building?” A high school History teacher might tell students about segregation and explain how it manifested unfair housing.

A Design-Based Learning teacher applying the method's Backwards Thinking™ process instructs students about real-life shelters for people or other creatures, for example, only after having them build their own Never-Before-Seen solutions for their City, referring them to a Criteria List derived from mandated subject matter standards and a set of conditions required for housing. After subsequent Guided Lessons, the teacher might say, “now that you have learned about how people through history have made their shelters in response to their environment and their needs, compare what you built to what you have learned and think of ways to revise your design.”

The teacher still does what a teacher is supposed to do. What is different is that by having students first express their ideas about the BIG TOPICS and concepts they will be taught, the Design-Based Learning methodology sparks students' receptiveness to learning information from textbooks and other resources. Students are taught to apply what they learn in multiple ways as active, not passive, learners. They begin to think critically about how what they learn in the classroom has meaning for their lives now and in the future. (This happens when the methodology is applied in online teaching as well.)

Activating long-term memory storage through the spatial domain, where the methodology lives, is “forever learning.” Research shows that spatial memory is always there and inexhaustible and is propelled by novelty, discovery, challenge, and the use of metaphors to make learned material personal and reusable. This has been the bedrock of the Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ method since I began formalizing it in 1969.

I like Design-Based Learning because it's not just like art. It's more like something never seen so you can actually create something in your mind and bring it to life.

—Anali He, 4^th-grade student, San Gabriel Unified School District