Snyder ISD sends delegation to Stanford

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  • Six Snyder teachers and administers recently attended a design thinking workshop at Stanford University. Pictured (l-r) are Jennifer Beard, Brittany Arellano, Ann’e Posey, Ryan Maney, Canita Rhodes and Cole Gossett. Sixty educators from across the nation, including six from Snyder ISD, participated in group activity during the design thinking workshop.
    Six Snyder teachers and administers recently attended a design thinking workshop at Stanford University. Pictured (l-r) are Jennifer Beard, Brittany Arellano, Ann’e Posey, Ryan Maney, Canita Rhodes and Cole Gossett. Sixty educators from across the nation, including six from Snyder ISD, participated in group activity during the design thinking workshop.
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Earlier this month, Ryan Maney, Snyder ISD’s STEM coordinator, took a group of five teachers and administrators on a six-day trip to Stanford University for a workshop covering design thinking.
The group from Snyder represented six of only 50 school workers from across the U.S. and around the world accepted to attend the the workshop.
Traveling with Maney were Brittany Arellano, Jennifer Beard, Cole Gossett, Ann’e Posey and Canita Rhodes.
As part of the trip, the group toured San Francisco-area schools that have already implemented design thinking in their learning processes.
Design thinking is a method of creatively solving problems keeping in mind the end-user. It is geared toward thinking about how a creation will influence the people who interact with it.
This approach is characterized by five main phases: Empathizing with users, defining the problem and user’s needs, brainstorming solutions, creating models and prototypes, and finally, testing those models and receiving feedback.
If needed, the process starts over, taking the recently received feedback into account.
At the workshop, the Snyder group learned this process through firsthand experience. The group completed each step and immediately stopped to reflect on each new aspect.
“In my classroom I will be using design thinking to rethink how my projects are conducted, Snyder Junior High STEM teacher Cole Gossett said. “My students and I will be redesigning projects that we have done in the past so that in the future, the need will be more human-centered.”
He also noted that he may use design thinking to redesign his classroom to be more conducive to his students’ learning.
In order for students to understand design thinking, they must first learn empathy, says Maney. This means they must connect with the user, which will allow them to make changes based on a real user’s experience instead of a theoretical one.
The teachers that went on the trip are all looking forward to implementing design thinking in their classrooms. Gossett hopes that they will be able to better connect with their students and will profit from their feedback in changing the project and classroom structures.