Look! My shoelaces are like the freeway system, because they connect the holes on my shoe, and the freeways connect places in the city!

—3rd-grade student in a Design-Based Learning class

“How do citizens want their city to look 25 years in the future?” In 1967, I was the only educator (and one of only two women) in a group of architects, planners, religious leaders, and businessmen appointed to the Los Angeles Goals Committee, an initiative started by the city's then-Mayor, Sam Yorty. We crafted and administered surveys to citizens in public places, asking for opinions about the future of Los Angeles. We collected thousands of pieces of data. The results shocked us.

When asked to imagine ways that people might move around in the future, most respondents simply described more cars, more freeways, and the possibility of a monorail. After all, Disneyland had one. Our group wanted to know why so many people surveyed were unable to envision the diverse needs of the future. I proposed trying a version of the survey with my 5th-grade students, because the lore says that kids are more creative than adults. I found the same unimaginative results. I had already started my master's degree studies and had begun in-depth research into how creative thinking could be achieved. I felt that it was a waste of time to continue working with adults when I couldn't even activate creative thinking among 10-year-olds. I thought I knew how to fix it. The work of the committee ended, but the members encouraged me to establish a systematic process that would put my findings into practice.

Wanting to teach students to think creatively, to know what they know (metacognition), and to apply BIG TOPICS, principles, concepts, and values named in the required curriculum, kept me constantly exploring ways to prepare them for an unknown future. I wanted them to be flexible, higher-level thinkers with the ability to own and reuse information and apply it in a variety of unforeseen contexts.

By the end of the 1960s, I was knee-deep in trying my ideas out in my classroom, and by 1971, I had formalized my Design-Based Learning methodology and was training other teachers to apply it in K–12 classrooms.

APPLE COMPUTER AND THE VIVARIUM PROJECT

In 1986, I began working with famed computer scientist Alan Kay and his Advanced Research Group from Apple Computer in the Vivarium Project at the Open Magnet Elementary School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Vivarium Project was not just about computers, nor was it a new curriculum or a new program. It was more an exploration for approaching the teaching and learning of complex systems and the sciences through a wide array of classroom experiences related to the existing curriculum. My work fit in, Alan felt, because “it was full of many kinds of systems thinking and other important cognitive areas, such as scaling, etc.”

(I was introduced to Alan by Rachael Strickland, an architect and videographer for the Vivarium Project who had learned of my work after finding my book, City Building Education: Transformations, Process and Theory [1984], in the library of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where I had taught classroom teachers.)

Alan wanted teachers to have students explore and experiment with ways of thinking both on and off the computer. I saw this as an avenue for delving further into my own research about Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. My hope was that by applying my methodology in this setting, the spatial domain would be seen as a gateway to Non-Specific Transfer of Learning and become organic to the life of the classroom so that students of any age could learn to generalize complex concepts.

Thanks to principal Bobby Blatt, the entire Open Magnet School was involved in Alan's research about teaching and learning. Apple supplied every two students with one computer embedded into a standard school desk under a glass window, with a pullout drawer for typing. Students could peer down into the computer and still use the desk for hands-on activities. (Of course, this predated laptops.) Over the next seven years, many facets of the Vivarium Project, including mine, had indirect involvement with computers, concentrating instead on understanding how to speed up the learning process. As part of this collaborative research, we applied my Design-Based Learning Methodology (then called City Building Education) in two team-taught, combined 3rd- and 4th-grade classrooms.

Alan loaded the school with “interesting people.” These included Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis; gospel and jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist Don Lewis; composer/bassoonist John Steinmetz; the Apple Hill Chamber Players; Jill Wright, a storyteller; and Betty Edwards, who wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and who could teach anyone to draw, even phobic people like me. Some of my hero educators—Neil Postman, Herb Kohl, and Jerome Bruner—joined us from time to time.

I worked with my assigned teachers, Dolores Patton and Leslie Barclay, and their combined 3rd- and 4th-grade class of 70 students once a week in a two-room bungalow called the Yellow Cluster. The first Design Challenge underscored the prominence of the building aspect of my methodology as the Yellow Cluster students, who were about to study the development of cities, built a small, rough Starter City, based on their community 100 years in the future. A limited building time of one hour ensured that their Starter City of the Future would be loaded with problems for the students to identify, research, and solve. A Criteria List named required elements of a city for evaluative purposes and stipulated that their City buildings be original and not function or look like what they saw every day. Dolores and Leslie taught the students to follow the Criteria List to assess how many requirements they had met, and once the Starter City was finished, had them name the problems they identified. (This included the fact that all of the buildings were out-of-scale).

The students' first buildings for the required population in their Starter City of the Future were mundane, replicating present-day supermarkets, shopping malls, banks, sports arenas, high-rise apartments, and freeways. Dolores asked, “Is this really what a city will look like 100 years in the future?” The students shouted, “No! This is what we have now! It's boring!” We asked, “What can you do to make your City original, and not just copy what exists now?” “How will you revise your design to serve people in the future?” “Where will the people live, and will they all live in the same kinds of places?” “Where will they work?” “Where will they shop?” “Where will they play?” “How will they move themselves and the things they need?” “Where will all of these things be in relation to one another, and why?” “What needs to be done to change the size of your buildings and be sure that all the shapes are original?”

For the rest of the school year, understanding that original answers mattered, not “right” answers, these 3rd and 4th graders had fun building inventive, Never-Before-Seen solutions to the questions we had posed and debating and getting consensus for what was to be placed in their City.

The school year was consumed with teaching students to identify and apply Non-Specific Transfer of Learning by having them experience a progressively more complex series of Design Challenges, and learn factual information based on our questions about the Starter City. Applying the critical Backwards Thinking™ process of my methodology, Dolores and Leslie used each Design Challenge as a springboard for teaching Guided Lessons in required subject matter across the curriculum (Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Civics). The students spent only a short time (60–90 minutes each week) physically building artifacts as solutions to the Design Challenges. The rest of the week was devoted to learning basic subject matter (the times tables, grammar, etc.), along with a study of curriculum-based information related to each Design Challenge. The students were taught to generalize and to use and reuse what they learned to revise their built creations and apply their thinking to other academic subjects. To ensure that Non-Specific Transfer of Learning took place, with each new Design Challenge, we kept asking them a variety of questions to teach them to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate their thinking—the higher-level thinking skills named on Bloom's Taxonomy.

Before wrapping up each Design Challenge, Dolores, Leslie, and I expanded the students' thinking by asking such questions as, “How would what you build affect the way people get along?” “Look, this pathway is dangerous; how can we make it safer?” “How will having this door open affect people who are walking by?” These probing questions led students to describe orally and in writing what they built, what they needed to revise, and why. Over the course of the school year, as students revised and rebuilt their designs according to new information gained from each topic they studied, the Starter City evolved into a refined City of the Future, filled with their original thinking.

“My design for 100 years in the future,” said one eight-year-old student, “is a flying spinner that delivers anything in two minutes to any place in the world.” (This was years before the advent of a drone delivery system!)

One student made “a weightless place to eat because it's too crowded everywhere. You get a glove with Velcro on it, and the fork has Velcro so you can hold it, and there's a plate with Velcro on the table, so it stays on, and there is a weight on the bottom of the food, so it stays on the plate.”

“My special walking stairs make it so the handicapped people can come places and walk up,” said another.

One 3rd-grade girl made an animal hospital that looked like a giant dog. “The extra-long tail reaches out to the home of a sick animal,” she wrote, “and it brings the sick animal into the dog's stomach where it's moved slowly to the hospital so it doesn't get hurt.” After she read about the human digestive process, she changed the word “stomach” in her story to “intestines.”

EXPANDING THE VOCABULARY FOR INVENTION

It's simple. You just take something and do something to it. Then you do something else to it. Pretty soon, you've got something.

—Jasper Johns, American Contemporary Artist

I worked with Dolores and Leslie and new groups of 3rd and 4th graders in the Yellow Cluster for five years. One stumbling block we faced was the students' limited vocabulary for inventing original artifacts for their City and applying that vocabulary to basic skills in Language Arts, Math, and Science. In my research in the early 1970s, as I sought ways to promote Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, I had collected descriptive words from artists, architects, designers, mathematicians, and scientists that they associated with change. (See TRANSFORMATIONS/Menu of Change in Chapter 2.) During the years of the Vivarium Project, computer scientists and mathematicians, including Alan Kay and Seymour Papert, were among those who contributed to this descriptive vocabulary. When they approached a problem requiring a creative solution, some said that they had a kind of listing in their heads of various things to do to change what exists that might solve the problem. The list included:

1. Magnitude (size, weight)
2. Form and Space (families of form, materials, organization, light)
3. Function (purpose, behavior, movement, sound, style, portability)
4. Time
5. Place
6. Experience (point-of-view)

Usually, however, the list was not explicit. These innovators were so fluid in making change that they felt it happened automatically.

Could Yellow Cluster students access their own creative thinking by applying these specific words of change across various domains and subject areas? The Yellow Cluster teachers and I were joined by classical musician John Steinmetz, one of Alan Kay's “interesting people.” John had been at the offsite learning labs attended by the Advanced Apple Research Group, consultants, and the Open Magnet School teachers, and had experienced building a City of the Future and a “New Skin” body cover to explore my methodology. He knew that I had an orchestral background as a trained harpist and together, we wanted to explore Non-Specific Transfer of Learning from the spatial domain to the aural domain.

We worked with a small, pullout group of the Yellow Cluster students for a few hours a week over several months. After students enlarged a small object of their choice to wear as a New Skin and named all of the changes involved in the construction process, they were ready for the next step in our research into Non-Specific Transfer of Learning. Since they had “composed” a new “them” by making small objects bigger to make their New Skin body covers, we asked them to do the same thing to the sounds their small objects made. John and I thought the students would struggle to do the complex thinking required to find an enlarged sound that correlated to their object. We didn't want to give them the answer by saying “Make the sound bigger.” The point was to find out if the students could make the leap and transfer learned information from one setting to another.

They surprised us. A 3rd grader, whose New Skin was a book, flipped the pages of a real book with a “whoosh” sound for everyone to hear. We asked our research question: “Can you do to that sound what you did to the small book in your hand when you turned it into a New Skin?” After looking around the room for a few moments, the student and two of his peers, who were also New Skin books, leaped up, ran over to a window, and used its Venetian blinds to play an accurate, enlarged version of the sound of the small book having its pages flipped.

The following week, we had the students further explore the concept of changing from “small to big.” We had them listen to and sing or say all of the sounds made by their small, original New Skin objects and put the sounds in a specific order to create their own musical compositions. We weren't teaching about music or sound. We were exploring how to teach students to internalize a specific concept learned in one area and reuse it in a new setting.

In Guided Lessons we taught them to describe different terms related to sound (loud, soft, slow, fast, intermittent, etc.). They drew pictures of all the sound variations made by their objects, and put them in an order of their choice on a 12 × 36-inch piece of paper to represent individual “musical scores.” Again, we asked our research question: “Can you do to the sounds made by these small objects in your composition what you did to make a New Skin body cover?” The answer was unanimous: “We have to make all the sounds bigger.” One 4th grader said, “if we want to make the sounds bigger, we all have to sing the sounds together.” Everyone agreed, and they sang each other's musical scores. John taught them how to conduct the group as each student led a rehearsal of his or her own composition. As they rehearsed, the students edited their order of the sounds to improve the performance. From then on during the research project, our question “Can you do to this what you did to that?” became a serious part of the teaching and learning process. We discovered that students had no trouble moving knowledge among domains or disciplines as long as we asked them the right question. The focus of our research remained: “What are some good ways to ask?” As we observed students moving information around, we found that teaching about similarities, differences, and change led them to assimilate complex concepts easily.

We developed an exercise for students to make their own Menu of Change lists. We had them fold a piece of paper into eight squares and make a rough drawing of their New Skin object in the first square and label it “original.” In each subsequent square, the students referred to their original drawing and drew and named one more change, ending up with seven different changes.

One 3rd grader, whose original New Skin object was a pencil, created a Menu of Change describing the seven changes she made to it as “chopped up,” “squashed,” “robot,” “shrunk,” “giant,” “wibble-wobble,” and “bounce.”

No two students used the same words. We wondered if they could reuse and apply these personal words in other distinct compositional areas. In our next session, we had students use their Menu of Change words to write descriptive sentences.

The 3rd grader, whose New Skin Object was a pencil, wrote the following:

We finished the session with Guided Lessons teaching students how to organize all of their sentences into original stories that summarized what it felt like to pretend to be an object.

To teach the students that they could think beyond the function of the square and rectangular buildings that they had replicated previously in their Starter City of the Future, we had them apply this Menu of Change process to the spatial domain. We focused on housing because the students had not built enough shelters for the citizens in their Starter City, and those they had built were not Never-Before-Seen. We gave each student eight pieces of shaped and tabbed white card stock that when folded formed a freestanding cube. We told them this cube was an Already-Before-Seen Shelter and had them label it “Original.” We asked them to use their Menu of Change words to build seven more shelters, each with a different function. To encourage spontaneous creativity, we gradually decreased the time allotted for each Shelter: 10 minutes for the first; 2 minutes for the last.

The 3rd grader who had been the New Skin pencil had no trouble using her personal Menu of Change words as she reimagined and reshaped the original cube to build her shelters. She “chopped” her second folded cube into sections with scissors to make more living spaces. She “squashed” her third folded cube, explaining that it was a place for keeping things safe underground. She glued pieces of paper onto her fourth folded cube to make a “robot” shelter with arms as a people mover. She “shrunk” her fifth cube by folding it smaller to shelter a pet. She added another piece of card stock to her sixth folded cube to make a “giant” building “so new people coming to the City have places to live.” Thinking about earthquakes, she made her seventh folded cube “wibble-wobble” on pipe cleaner rockers and rolled her last folded cube into a ball so her building would “bounce.”

Over the next few weeks, the 3rd and 4th graders continued to revise their City of the Future as Dolores and Leslie guided them to observe the effects of making purposeful change. When a student was stymied about what to design for a way to move around the City or a place for recreation, for example, the teachers or fellow students would say, “Do your Menu.” The students learned to pay attention to change in every corner of the curriculum. They described their reasons for applying change to the endings of stories, to wall displays, to the layouts of their classroom, and even to how they looked at mathematical equations. We often heard such comments as, “This is just like what we did the other day when we learned to change fractions!”

The Vivarium Project was an unexpected gift to my research as documented in the collaborative book on Non-Specific Transfer of Learning for Apple Computer (Change and Creativity: A Guidebook for Teachers, December 1992, Nelson, Doreen; Steinmetz, John; Patton, Dolores; and Barclay, Leslie). Realizing that no one was judging what I wanted to try out, I was propelled to revisit and refine the principles that operated in my methodology.

When computers can do what Doreen has done with manual simulations, we will be somewhere. As far as I am concerned, this is the best way to get [students] ready to study the more difficult things that are the basis of the arts and sciences.

—Alan Kay

THE HEART OF THE MATTER: THE WEIZMANN INSTITUTE, ISRAEL

There is a strong relationship between creative thinking and the ability to apply complex information in a variety of settings and to use that information in original ways. When I arrived at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel in 1997, an entire multistory building devoted to K–12 Science education greeted me. I had been invited there by a group of educators to apply my Design-Based Learning, Backwards Thinking™ methodology to a study of the human heart. I walked into a room filled with expensive models depicting the relationship between the heart and the human body that were being considered for purchase to be distributed to high school classrooms throughout Israel. I said that with my methodology they wouldn't need to purchase any of them.

I grabbed a piece of paper and rolled it up and said, “This is the heart. But instead of telling students that it's the heart, present it in the context of a ‘story.’ Tell them it's a pump that has to move a delicate liquid to places that have both thick and thin pathways, not ‘veins and capillaries.’ And tell them it has to constantly clean the liquid in four different ways, rather than referring to the four chambers of the heart. With these conditions in mind, ask students to imagine how such a pumping station would function using strings of different widths attached to their rolled-up piece of paper to represent the array of pathways served by the pumping station.

“Meeting the criteria for this physical model of their own making gives students ownership of their thinking and is a tool for self-assessment. After making and justifying these rough models, students then research and compare their thinking to factual information about the human heart. The more they talk about their solutions and the more they do research, the more they refine their physical model, which becomes a mnemonic device for activating long-term memory storage so that what is learned can be used and reused—the definition of Non-Specific Transfer of Learning.”

I collaborated with a team to write a Science curriculum for this study about the heart using my Design-Based Learning Backwards Thinking™ methodology. It specified how physical models built by students would lead to their understanding of such academic topics as circulation and movement systems at the macro and micro level—the movement of neurons, people, goods, the Earth, etc. This curriculum gained widespread use in Israeli high schools.

Over the more than 50 years that I have spent studying how to teach the principles, concepts, values, and Essential Questions associated with Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, the results of my research have proven definitive: teaching for Non-Specific Transfer of Learning through the spatial domain launches the higher-level thinking skills that propel creative and critical thinking. Non-Specific Transfer of Learning, embedded in my Design-Based Learning Backwards Thinking™ method, illuminates the very meaning of teaching and learning.

As my Design-Based Learning methodology evolved, propelling me from classroom teacher to researcher and university professor, I found one significant constant: when students of any age start their learning process with their own original creations based on required criteria, they become facile at making changes and reusing learned information and they come to experience problem seeking and problem solving (experimental inquiry) as an engaging type of play and want to participate.