… Design

The methodology is not for training future professional designers. It is not an art program. The word “design” is a synonym for creativity. It is a part of every subject in the academic curriculum through the artifacts that students build. Creativity for design professionals comes with constraints from the client: the criteria for what is not wanted and what is needed. In Design-Based Learning classrooms, the teacher is the “client” and the students are the “designers.” The teacher's subject matter-driven Criteria List propels creativity. The Criteria List is a surrogate for teaching students to self-assess the success or failure of the artifacts they build and makes clear to them how information gained from research can improve and enhance creative ideas. Thinking creatively becomes a natural process that carries over into students' daily lives, giving them an understanding of the “why” of what they are learning.

… 2D

The methodology is about the spatial domain: given a BIG TOPIC Design Challenge, students imagine and build 3D artifacts that represent their original thinking about a specific topic. They learn to own their ideas. Adhering to the teacher's subject-based criteria, students build Never-Before-Seen (by them) imagery and teachers use that imagery to teach Guided Lessons (small topics) from the required curriculum. If a teacher chooses to have students do drawings, that can be a Guided Lesson that occurs after the original object is built.

… Specific Transfer of Learning

The methodology is not about teaching facts with limited applications (Specific Transfer of Learning). It is about teaching powerful ideas, universal concepts, principles, values, the Essential Questions that underlie learning anything, and the process of Experimental Inquiry that leads to transfer from one subject to another (Non-Specific Transfer of Learning).

… Small Ideas

This methodology is a pedagogy. It is not projects or a scripted curriculum. When learning starts with creativity, students are asked to think of their own Never-Before-Seen, original solutions to dilemmas before they read about how others have solved them. If the BIG TOPIC is MOVEMENT, for example, students will not be asked to build a car, truck, train, or plane as a Design Challenge. Instead, imagine the word MOVEMENT written on the wide top of an inverted triangle, the word Transportation, in the middle and the word car written on the pointed bottom. If students simply start at the bottom, learn about a car, and make a replication of it, they are not learning that a car was a solution to the need for a carrier to move people, goods, and services. Nor are they learning that carriers require a system of pathways in order to function. Instead, the teacher would give students a Criteria List describing the requirements for “Carriers” and present a BIG TOPIC Design Challenge asking for a Never-Before-Seen Way to Move People or Things or a Never-Before-Seen System for Carriers. (For a study of the circulatory system in Biology, “Carriers” would be blood cells and “Systems” would be veins and arteries.) Students formulate their original ideas guided by the teacher's Criteria List for each Design Challenge and are assessed on their ability to meet the criteria.

… City Studies

The methodology is about the City as a physical vehicle for learning, and the parts of the City that make up the whole are a metaphor for an integrated curriculum. It is not about teaching architecture or city planning. It is not a building “project.” A roughly constructed, tabletop model of an imagined City of the Future (or a Never-Before-Seen Community, Settlement/Colony, Ancient Civilization, Biome, Biosphere, Business, etc.), based on a real location or system, becomes the setting for an ongoing “story” that brings the City to life over a semester or a school year. The “story” is a curriculum-related scenario describing the reason for building the City and what it takes to make it work: students become designers (“hired” by the teacher as their “client”) to redesign their real city for a time in the distant future; they can be the first people to settle the location or they can be scientists building a biosphere. The City provides students a way in to subject matter as they build Never-Before-Seen solutions in response to a sequence of curriculum-driven, BIG TOPIC Design Challenges, and revise those artifacts following research and required Guided Lessons (small topics). They learn to continuously ask “why” questions to clarify information as they take ownership of the individual pieces they build, and interact with others while building the whole City.

The City and the tangible artifacts that are built for the City are props that spark learning. As students explore how things work or don't work in their Never-Before-Seen City, they learn that the information they acquire is transferable across a wide array of subjects and to real-life situations. Throughout the building process, students discover that their thoughts are worthwhile. They become curious about how their peers will solve the same problems they identify in their City. Once they begin reading about the BIG TOPIC posed by a Design Challenge, students are eager to make modifications to their Cities to meet the teacher's criteria. They don't need to be told to be curious or to persevere. These traits become ingrained.

Kids don't want to let their built objects down.

—Francois Polifroni, 5th-grade teacher, San Gabriel Unified School District

… The Traditional Frontward Information Delivery System

The methodology is not about teaching isolated subject matter. There is cross-curricular content for every artifact students build. Only after they build and present their artifacts are students taught the traditional Guided Lessons related to what they have built.

High school physics teacher Fatima asked her students to shake the small Starter Cities that they had built as if an earthquake were occurring, in order to determine the stability of their structures. Rigid structures broke. Others vibrated, but moved back to their original positions. Fatima described how waves carry energy from one place to another without any net movement of matter. She then had the students imagine water waves, where water moves back to its original position. Working in pairs to share ideas, her students discussed how their structures were analogous to the particles that move as energy is transferred through them. Continuing to teach backwards, Fatima found that her Design-Based Learning students were able to solve problems involving frequency, wavelength, and speed. “The students' Cities really allowed me to have something to refer to when talking about and describing wavelengths and speed,” said Fatima. “It seemed like each student had something to work with, rather than just a few students who are eager to participate in my class. Students understood the analogy between their structures and the particles of a medium that waves travel through, so they were thinking at a higher level.”

—2008

… Students Working Alone

The methodology promotes a decentralized classroom, differentiates learning, and teaches interdependence and shared problem solving. Classrooms are student-centered with the teacher as facilitator. The physical classroom shifts to accommodate the building of a small, Never-Before-Seen City, Settlement, Civilization, Biological System, etc., providing a daily visual cue for learning subject matter, and for practicing social interaction.

… Government

The methodology does not focus on formal government studies, nor does it promote an authoritarian classroom, where all knowledge and rules of behavior flow from the teacher and textbooks. It is about decentralizing the classroom, putting Civics in action, and promoting social responsibility. A City in the classroom is run by the students, role-playing as mayor, council members, housing commissioners, etc. Classroom management is taught as students transfer their information about City government jobs to comparable jobs in the classroom. Students are taught to make individual and group presentations, facilitating collaboration, communication, and shared decision-making.

… Replication

The methodology doesn't ask that students demonstrate what they know or what they need to know by replicating what others have made. Instead, after students have a go at imagining and building a Never-Before-Seen artifact that solves a real-world dilemma—before they learn how it has already been solved—they learn factual information through the teacher's Guided Lessons and compare their results with what others have historically done.

… Project-Based Learning

The methodology is not a curriculum or a stand-alone project. It is a pedagogy for teaching creative and critical thinking that cuts across all subjects to integrate the curriculum.

… Perfect Products

There are no wrong answers in the Doreen Nelson Method of Design-Based Learning. What students first build demonstrates their original thinking about what they are going to learn. Students are held accountable for their creative thinking, not for how their built artifacts look, as they describe how their artifacts solve real-world dilemmas and meet the criteria set by the teacher. After hearing the solutions of others, studying textbooks and other resource material, students continue to adhere to the required criteria as they revise their built artifacts, demonstrating their thinking about the new learning they have acquired.