00:14 JAMES GAMAGE, HOST:
Welcome to today's episode of Responsible Disruption, where we explore innovative educational practices. I'm your host, James Gammage, and I'm thrilled to have Amanda McIntyre-Steel with us today. Amanda is a dedicated teacher with the Calgary Board of Education known as the CBE. And a passionate advocate for integrating design thinking into the classroom as a complementary curriculum specialist with the CBE. Amanda is passionate about supporting teachers in fostering creativity and real world skills in students through complementary programming. Our extensive background includes teaching career and technology foundations known as CTF. Career and technology studies, known as CTS and Fine and Performing Arts for grades four through 12. This experience inspired her to create the first Calgary career and Technology education conference and establish a CTF gallery that provided a platform for students to showcase their innovative projects. She has also formed a design thinking book, Study Group, and developed partnerships with stakeholders to pilot new programs and experiences and offer financial support. Through her unwavering dedication to innovation in student empowerment, Amanda has influenced career education in Calgary, connecting educators and inspiring students to pursue their passions. So welcome, Amanda.
01:37 AMANDA MACINTYRE-STEEL, GUEST:
Thanks for having me.
01:39 JAMES: I'm really excited to get into this and understand your work, but could you share a bit about your background first and your role within the CBE?
01:49 AMANDA: As you mentioned, I've taught CTF (Career and Technology Foundations), CTS (Career and Technology Studies), and fine and performing arts, spanning grades four through twelve. CTF is an optional program of study designed to help students discover their passions and interests through various occupational areas such as construction, foods, and fashion studies. I've been fortunate to primarily focus on complementary curriculum rather than core subjects. Additionally, I hold a master's degree in educational leadership and school administration from Gonzaga University.
02:25 JAMES: So tell me what a complementary curriculum specialist does. What does that mean?
02:30 AMANDA: Yeah. So we call it specialist. A lot of school boards will call them consultants, but essentially it's someone who provides leadership to schools, around instructional capacity, professional development, community connections and works with data collection to report to stakeholders, apply for grants, etcetera.
02:50 JAMES: As part of my role, which focuses on design thinking and its social impact, I decided to organize a book study group with some of my fellow educators. The focus of the study was on design thinking in education, and the book we chose was Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student by John Spencer and AJ Giuliani. I selected this book because it aligns perfectly with our commitment to fostering creativity and innovation in the classroom. The book provides practical strategies for implementing design thinking to engage students and enhance their learning experiences. Running this book study group was a way to explore these strategies in depth and share insights with colleagues, ultimately aiming to bring more dynamic and student-centered approaches into our teaching practices.
03:34 AMANDA: When I first started my position, I took over a program called "Design the Shift," which was supported by ConocoPhillips and focused on STEM and design thinking. The partnership had just come to an end when I started. During that time, I read the book Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley, and it was really inspiring. I hadn't delved too much into design thinking; I had versions of it but never quite the exact framework. As I became the CTF specialist, I found that half of the learning outcomes really lent themselves perfectly to design thinking around planning, creating, appraising, and communicating. It explicitly states having an iterative cycle that students are going through, so it fit really perfectly to delve into design thinking. What I really like about this book is that it's written by a former educator through an education lens. A lot of the literature is very business-focused and has more of a financial component to it, which doesn't align with our goals in education.
04:41 JAMES: Yeah, I mean, I skimmed through the book a few weeks ago, and it definitely puts a design thinking slant on the educational environment. I can imagine it's very useful for educators in that space. So, how did that book study program operate? In your role, did you have connections with CTF and CTS educators and reach out to them to see who wanted to be part of it, or how did it work?
05:09 AMANDA: Yeah, a big thing for me, as a complementary curriculum teacher, is that you're often the only person in your building teaching that subject area. When I taught art, fashion studies, or photography, I was often the only one in my building, without anyone to directly collaborate with, unlike core teachers who have groups of colleagues in their subject areas. I wanted to find different ways to bring teachers together to improve their practice in community because that’s the best way to improve—together. I offered the book study from November to May. The book had a built-in study guide, which made it easy to use. I wanted to ensure that participants had ownership of their learning, were engaged, and were active participants. They weren’t just attending and letting me speak. Since it was an online meeting, I wanted everyone to take turns leading. They could use the prompts provided or come up with their own innovative presentations and take us through design thinking exercises. The purpose was really to learn together. I conducted a data poll to get everyone who teaches CTF and only reached out to CTF teachers because I was the CTF specialist at the time, aiming for people to engage courageously in something new in education.
06:45 JAMES: And just for my understanding how many CTF Teachers, would that be in the CBE?
06:54 AMANDA: So I don't have the exact stat off the top of my head, but I used to send out a monthly newsletter and I sent it to 600.
06:58 JAMES:
Do they tend to get together anyway for other things other than this? You know, it's a like a support group. You mentioned that there's won't be many CTF teachers in any one school, so do they get together for other things? Is it part of the bigger program?
07:24 AMANDA: It's really tricky because, as with anything, there's a lot of transition between schools. Finding ways to get people together and help them connect with others on the board who are doing similar or really cool things is challenging. We employ over 10,000 people as a system, so there are a lot of people in our organization. Finding different ways to connect folks is really important. As a specialist, having access to that data and the time to make those connections is crucial because teachers are busy teaching during the day. My goal is to support them in ways they can't do because of their locations.
08:05 JAMES: Sure. So how did the book study group operate? You know, did you work through it chapter by chapter? How did the participants engage with it with the work?
08:16 AMANDA: So we had some design thinking exercises, and, like I said, everyone could do what they wanted differently. So we had someone take us through a visual essay, which is illustrating your thinking, and we did some quick draws with Google and played some Kahoots. Everyone in education knows what a Kahoot is. I’m not sure how popular it is outside of education. And then sharing different inspiration through social media and doing live polls and Google Jamboards and lots of discussion and ways to engage with the content in the book. I mean, it clearly was a book that was written for educators, and it really resonated well with the group. The flow of the book and the activities that you did—yeah, I think it did. It was nice to see somebody who would actually put it into practice. It’s a lot easier, you know, translating it to your specific subject area when you see what someone else has already done. And because it was actually a really easy read, I think that was helpful too. Because, you know, we met Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, and people had done a full day of teaching and then were engaging after school with a group of professionals for an hour. And so, it being a bit of a light read was really, really helpful.
09:35 JAMES: So what did the teachers get out of it? If I was to speak to some of the participants in the group, what would they say was the value of engaging in that book and in the book study process?
09:54 AMANDA: I think the pieces that inspired the best conversation were some of the pieces around encouraging fact-checking with your students in a digital age. The importance of, you know, students seeing is believing, and so they're not really understanding all the work that goes into online content or podcasts or anything like that. So how do we support students in the design thinking process and give them the tools they need that they can apply to any subject area? Modeling problem-solving and risk-taking, engaging in design thinking as a teacher or facilitator can take you in unexpected directions. Being comfortable with not having all the answers, when traditionally we were raised with the teacher as the textbook. So how do we allow and encourage that divergent thinking? Even talking about the distinction—I really like this one—between a project and a recipe. The idea being a project encourages ideation, generative processes, and personalization, whereas a recipe just rewards compliance and neatness, resulting in everyone ending up with the same artifact or process of presentation. Even a big piece in education is starting to focus less on the final product and more on the process as being much more important. Even if you end up with a box of loose parts, but you can explain every contact you made, every connection you made, all the things that went wrong, and how they could have gone right, that learning is so valuable. It didn’t result in a tangible thing, and that’s OK.
11:42 JAMES: So as somebody who, well, I engage in the educational curriculum through my kids or I have done so through my kids. How much flexibility in the curriculum is there to be able to think and act that way with the students?
11:58 AMANDA: It can be really tricky. It’s hard to incorporate something that can take them in so many different directions, and this is a reason why we wanted to go through this book study process. Everyone feels really limited, and generally, we're very fortunate with the CTF curriculum. There are 14 learning outcomes, and they are very broad, allowing for that flexibility. We really have this sort of gift of being able to do whatever it is. The interesting thing that not a lot of people know is that the outcomes, in, say, math, are very straightforward—you must learn how to do this—and in science as well. But in CTF, it's the same 14 learning outcomes whether you're teaching construction, foods, or fashion studies. They’re purposely vague so that you can use whatever equipment, whatever expertise, and take students through exploring that area to figure out what they love. Ideally, they might work towards a career, but it could just be working towards their passion.
13:01 JAMES: OK, that's interesting.
13:03 AMANDA: And besides that, we also have developed—this is kind of cool—something called locally developed courses. What that means is when there’s an opportunity to expand upon the curriculum where it’s not explicitly located, you can create an LDC. In that LDC, you can teach something and focus on objectives that may not fit into the standard curriculum. We actually have an LDC called Design Thinking for Innovation.
13:36 JAMES: Ohh wow.
13:36 AMANDA: And it’s for grades ten through twelve, and it was written by one of my colleagues that I work with. It’s all about thinking differently and exploring the design thinking process, which is very, very cool.
13:54 JAMES: And so a teacher who starting the school year starting in September and a teacher that's working out their Lesson plan, they can incorporate that LDC. They can incorporate that LDC into their lesson planning without any kind of authorization or anything.
14:12 AMANDA: So it’s actually its own complementary course. The same way you would have construction in grades ten through twelve, this is actually called Design Thinking for Innovation. It’s a completely different course and often involves 3D printing, laser cutting, and prototyping. We actually developed that. Now, with CTF, we’re really lucky; in grades five through nine, you can do that sort of design thinking process within the curriculum. That’s the option we have if you really want to dig deep into design thinking in high school.
14:46 JAMES: OK. Oh, that's cool and can you ever see a way that it could be incorporated? Something like that could be incorporated in some of the other subject areas like math or English language arts or something like that?
15:00 AMANDA: Yeah, absolutely. In our group, we had a lot of folks who were math teachers or social studies teachers because CTF is complementary. Depending on your schedule, you might be a math teacher with one CTF block, and then you’re teaching whatever it is that you’re teaching. So, a lot of our conversations didn’t necessarily revolve around CTF. It was like, “Oh, I’m going to do this in my social studies class and incorporate this and that and the other.” I think the learning can be applied anywhere because we do projects in those core classes. So how can we make those projects more engaging? We always find that if you teach complementary, it’s almost easier to engage students somehow; it just seems more hands-on that way. But it’s possible to take those lessons and apply them to core subject areas as well.
15:51 JAMES: OK. Well, that’s excellent. That’s good to hear. As a passionate advocate for design thinking in all sorts of spheres, that makes me feel good. Perfect. Thank you. So, you mentioned in your bio the Career and Technology Education Conference and the CTF gallery. Tell us a little bit about those and how they might fit within, you know, what you did with the book study group.
16:20 AMANDA: Yeah. So, you had mentioned how to make connections. The Career and Technology Education Conference was born out of a partnership I made when I first started with Calgary Catholic. We said, "You know what? We have the same teachers. They’re all trained in the same place. We’re often across the field from each other, and we don’t know the person who’s teaching the thing that we’re the only person in our building that teaches." So, how do we facilitate these connections? We started offering PD throughout the year, and it became, "Let’s do a conference where we bring both school districts together in Calgary." There’s also one in Edmonton. We approached the Calgary Regional Consortium, and they were more than happy to support. So, we all got together and planned the first-ever Calgary Career and Technology Education Conference as a way to connect teachers and do some really great learning around the subject areas we are passionate about. Now, we have the Calgary City Teachers Convention, which is fabulous, but the stipulation for our conference was that you had to be a CTF or CTS teacher, which is a high school teacher. It wasn’t open to core teachers because often what we do is, you know, build a birdhouse at stake, and everyone says, "I want to do that." Our CTF/CTS teachers miss out on that opportunity because it’s cool for everybody but much more targeted for them. So, we wanted some targeted PD around that.
17:50 AMANDA: And then the CTF gallery was really connected to this book in the sense of the launch aspect. A big part of design thinking is launching to an authentic audience. So, I wanted to give teachers an opportunity to have student work launched to an audience. We’re really good in Fine Arts at having, you know, music programs, plays, or art galleries. But when it comes to building a cutting board, a wooden toy, or taking photographs, we don’t tend to display them as much. So, I thought, let’s do an art gallery, but for CTF only. It was in January at C Space Loop. Teachers could apply to the gallery and showcase student work. Then we had a reception, and students and their families could attend to go around the gallery and be super proud of what they’ve done.
18:47 JAMES: Yeah, that's excellent thinking beyond maybe beyond Calgary. Are you aware of any other initiatives in the sort of CTF and design thinking space that might happen elsewhere in the country or around the world for that?
19:02 AMANDA: Yeah, absolutely. There are a few examples. For example, the United Nations has their 17 Sustainable Development Goals. A lot of people will take those and sort of change them into CTF challenges. For instance, we have the Minecraft in Education challenge. I’ve certainly heard of Minecraft; only my kids have been spending far too long playing it. But in education, tell me more about the challenge. So, it uses the City of Calgary's resiliency strategies to impact four key areas in Calgary. Students use Minecraft in Education to build whatever they think answers the challenge question. This relates to the Sustainable Cities and Communities United Nations goal. That’s one example of something we have locally. There’s also Wonder Day or Wonder Week or Genius Hour. I know my daughter engages in that at the elementary level, but the idea is exploring questions you’re curious about. It dedicates time in school that you might not typically have because you’re focused on curriculum to explore those curiosities and build design thinking and imagination. Then, there are the Change Maker Challenges, using your imagination and passions to generate ideas in response to a social challenge. There’s also the UFC has a Design Thinking course, and there are Design Thinking and Innovation courses as well. There are many local and further places where you can find these different challenges to get inspired by.
20:39 JAMES: And as a I mean a number of the listeners of this podcast won't be educators, but they'll be parents. How are these opportunities communicated to kids? Or to their parents through the school?
20:53 AMANDA: Yeah, I think you may not even recognize them as design thinking, and that’s the challenge. Even my daughter came home and said, "We’re doing Genius Hour," and only because I’m familiar with design thinking and have come across that. You may not be aware that your child is engaging in design thinking in some capacity. Obviously, it depends on their age level and how complex that’s going to be. I think, as educators, we could do a better job of advertising the idea and the concept of design thinking. It may not be something that a lot of folks are familiar with.
21:27 JAMES: Yeah, that’s probably the case. And thinking about the educators themselves, if an educator wanted to start exploring design thinking in their teaching practices, how would they go about doing so? Are there any common misconceptions? I think one of them might be about the curriculum. I’ve learned that in the last 20 minutes or so. Tell us a little bit about that. How can educators just start exploring?
21:55 AMANDA: I think just giving it a shot. It’s like anything. It’s a different way of thinking. You could take some courses if you’re really nervous about getting started. But the idea that we often ask our students to be vulnerable and engage in activities that encourage them to think in different ways—come on, you guys, let’s just do it. We don’t often do it ourselves. How do we model being willing to take risks and say, “Let’s try this design thinking thing”? Let’s try this new way of looking at a problem. You’re going to have some failures; that’s built in. Within design thinking and education, how do we use these failures to learn from them? It’s an inevitable part of the process.
So often in education, we reward compliance and we reward kids who are doing things perfectly. We love perfectionism. You’ve marked everything perfectly on the rubric, so now you get 100%, and everyone loves that. But how do we say, “You’re going to fail at this, and this is part of it, and you’re going to fail at things in life”? It’s okay, and we’re going to move forward. There are so many valuable lessons in trying out this framework beyond just the obvious, which is getting through curriculum and doing content. There’s more at play that we need to look into, and it’s really valuable for students to engage in learning in this way.
23:23 JAMES: Yeah, it gives them the license to explore and maybe learn from failure in a sort of safe environment, I guess. Yeah. So we're coming towards the end, but when we do these podcasts, I always leave the last question to our guests. So undoubtedly I've missed something or there's a point that you would like to make so our listeners can take away from the podcast. So is there anything that we've missed or anything that you want to talk about today?
23:55 AMANDA: Yeah, just a few things. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, there is something called the Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit. It’s actually put up by IDEO. Have a look at their website, IDEO. They have a really good little resource—a quick resource on getting started.
24:13 JAMES: That will go in the show note.
24:14 AMANDA: Yeah. And Dr. John Spencer has his own website, and you can subscribe to his newsletter. He gives tons of resources and makes these great little two-minute videos that explain different concepts of design thinking. You could use them in your classroom to explain a Socratic seminar or whatever design thinking exercise you want to try with students. That’s another really good one as well. You know what? One thing that came up in the first chapter that we looked at was—and this isn’t in the book, but it was one of those tangents that happened to come up—have you heard about the George Land Creativity Study? OK. So in 1968, George Land developed a creativity test that he devised for NASA to help select innovative engineers and scientists. He took that test and gave it to five-year-olds. Can you guess what percent fell into the genius category of imagination?
25:18 JAMES: A lot higher than adults, but anyway, yeah, probably 60% or something.
25:23 AMANDA: 98%. So, this was a longitudinal study. He followed them for 10 years. He tested them again at 10 years old and then again at 15. By the time these students reached 15 years old, what percentage of them do you think fell into the genius category of imagination?
25:45 JAMES: 50%.
25:46 AMANDA: 12%. So the big landmark statement is that what we have concluded is that non-creative behavior is learned. The mindset going into the study was: How do we stop killing creativity? How do we encourage creativity in our students? How do we develop a more positive mindset around failure so that they will take risks in education and try things they are unsure of? Having that framework, ironically, is often for teachers, so we feel comfortable because we have something to fall back on. But how do we get students to take risks if we’re not willing to take risks? They need that modeling. The former education model was very factory-like; everyone was taught in the same way, and we expected to turn out students in the same way. Nowadays, we want to focus on teaching students the skills for this ever-changing world, with things we had no idea were possible. How is AI going to influence us in the future? How can we use it as a tool? What are the creative ways we can do things differently that we could never have anticipated in the past? How do we make learning now as relevant for the future as possible?
27:07 JAMES: Great. A how-might-we question and a great call to action to end the podcast. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Amanda, thank you for taking part in the podcast today and sharing your insights and experiences. I've learned a lot, especially as a parent with kids who have gone through the junior high and high school process. It’s encouraging to hear about the opportunities for design thinking in education within the CBE. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon, and thank you to all our listeners for tuning in. Until next time, goodbye.
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