Human Centered Design of Biotechnology

Teaching Strategies

“Improvement is not forcing something; it is releasing something.”¹⁹

Project Based Learning

The traditional education model is lecture-memorize-test.  That is an outdated model.  Project Based Learning (PBL) allows students to deep dive into a real-life problem for an extended period of time and develop critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills.  The culmination of most projects is a public presentation in front of an audience, preferably outside of the sphere of the school.  PBL is different from just “doing a project” because the project is the whole unit instead of being the culmination of the unit.  During PBL, the teacher becomes more a coach rather than the source of all knowledge.²⁰

Universal Design of Learning

The Universal Design of Learning (UDL) has three components:  Engagement, Representation, and Action and Expression.  Taking these three ideas into consideration while designing a project makes them more engaging and meaningful for learners.  Developing Engagement helps students understand the why of what they are learning.  Engagement helps motivate and stimulate interest.  Representation encompasses the what of learning.  Representation is activated by presenting information in different formats.  Action and Expression is the how of learning.  Students can express their learning in different ways.²¹  UDL will ultimately help me create the Curb Cut Effect in my classroom.

Engineering Design Process

The Engineering Design Process (EDP) is similar to the Scientific method in that an idea is tested and evaluated.  In this case though, students will need to build a prototype to solve a problem.  In order to do this in a precise way, students will Define, Identify, Evaluate, Prototype, Test, Iterate, Communicate, and Reflect.  Students will first need to define and research a problem.  Then students will identify the constraints and criteria for a solution to the problem, including consumer and environmental impacts.  Next, students will brainstorm solutions and pick the most promising idea (evaluate).  Students will then build a prototype of their solution and test the effectiveness of their prototype.  Testing will yield data that can be used to improve the prototype.  Iterations, the cycle of improvement, can be done as long as time and money permit.  At the end of the project, students will present their prototype (communicate), get feedback, and reflect on the process.²²  EDP will help students create the Curb Cut Effect for a medical need.

Design Thinking & Wicked Problems

“It might help us in the wealthy world to pause for a moment and reflect not on what we lack but on our good fortune. And the best way to do that is to look at those with less in their hands.”²³

Design Thinking is very similar to EDP, but adds one very important step:  Empathize.²⁴  In this stage, students must think about the consumer, user, or target audience.  While most of my students are low socioeconomically, they will most likely be designing for people who are even less fortunate.  It is difficult to understand the motivations and needs of other people unless one actively tries to empathize.  The other stages of Design Thinking follow EDP closely:  Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.  This process is ideal for solving “wicked problems”:  problems that are complex and have many potential solutions.²⁵

SAMR

The SAMR model, developed by Dr. Ruben R. Puentedura, is a way to evaluate changes in technology or the advance of innovation.²⁶  The model divides innovation into enhancement, making existing technology better, and transformation, totally changing technology to fit a changing world.  Enhancement encompasses substitution and augmentation.  Substitution is the interchange of one technology for another.  Augmentation is substitution, but with improvement to the existing technology.  Transformation encompasses modification and redefinition.  Modification is a significant redesign of technology, allowing for new tasks.  Redefinition is the creation of new technology by the creation of new tasks or needs.  It is important for students to know that their innovative designs can fit into any of these categories and do not always need to be completely new ideas.

SWOT

The SWOT Analysis is a common tool for businesses to evaluate ideas, designs, and products.²⁷  The main areas of analysis are strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  Strengths and weaknesses are thought of as internal characteristics of a business or product while opportunities and threats are thought of as external.  This can also be simplified to positives (strengths and opportunities) and negatives (weaknesses and threats).  This process encourages discussion of what is going right and what could go wrong, including strategies to encourage innovation and mitigate issues.  Doing a SWOT Analysis as a form of Peer Review can help students honestly celebrate the strengths and build strategies to deal with the weaknesses of their design.  Peers can help identify issues and brainstorm solutions, reevaluate project goals, and create next steps.  For students, creating an action plan as the final step of a SWOT Analysis is essential in order to avoid project paralysis because of perceived failures.

Intelligent Failure

“Only leaders can create and reinforce a culture that counteracts the blame game and makes people feel both comfortable with and responsible for surfacing and learning from failures.”²⁸

Failure is a key component of learning.  It is just as important to know what doesn’t work as it is to know what works.  This is a difficult concept for most people to accept, but valuing and using failure can be taught.  Students might never design a working prototype or might come across an insurmountable piece of our vast bureaucracy.  That’s ok!  Going through the design process and participating in version failure (taking small steps) instead of abject failure (total failure which impedes learning) encourages a “growth mindset”.²⁹  According to Dr. Carol Dweck, students perform better when they believe that they can improve with practice and hard work instead of believing that their talent and intelligent are fixed (“fixed mindset”).³⁰  Communication of failure is also important because this will save other innovators time, and open up the problem to other minds and viewpoints, thus increasing the innovative brainpower.

Different types of failure require different responses from leaders.  Failure happens with routine work, complex tasks, and cutting-edge research.  Routine task failure often requires a review of procedures while failure during cutting-edge research often requires a new experiment.  It’s also important to recognize which types of failure are preventable, which are related to how complex a problem is, and which failures are intelligent.  Preventable and complex problem failures may require a review of the individual doing the work (Didn’t follow the rules?  Didn’t pay attention?  Lacks training?) or of the processes involved in completing the work (Poor directions?  Too difficult?  Was there a design flaw?  Did something unexpected happen?).  Once a leader has identified the type of failure they are dealing with, they can analyze the situation, make note of lessons learned, and employ appropriate remedies.  Therefore, an organization must engage in a cycle of “consistently reporting failures, small and large; systematically analyzing them; and proactively searching for opportunities to experiment.”³¹

Comprehension Strategies

“They found that the only distinction between an innovative and a non-innovative team was psychological safety.”³²

Many of my students are not enthusiastic or confident readers.  Presented with a technical text, they would rather not read it and fail than try to slog through it.  In order to mitigate this fear, I often integrate comprehension strategies that have been successful at easing students into a reading and making them more comfortable with the comprehension process. Below are a few of my favorite strategies.

Text-to-Speech

Reading quietly, reading aloud, and being read to allow my students to access text by activating different senses.  It is important that none of these happen alone.  If a student prefers to read quietly to themselves, they should also repeat the reading aloud to themselves, read it to someone else, or listen to a text-to-speech generator while taking notes or annotating.  Accessing a text several times, in several ways forces students to take the time to think about the content.  My district pays for Snap & Read, but there are many free online resources.  Snap & Read will read any text aloud, adjust readability, translate, and outline.  If students need free resources, naturalreaders.com and ttsreader.com are free text-to-speech readers that will read simple copy-and-paste text.

Annotation

Annotation is my favorite way to help students understand text.  This is not a passive teacher exercise!  Tables 1 and 2 show two types of annotation, depending on the format of the reading.  Once students have had the opportunity to access the text and annotate individually at least once, students can come together in small groups or as a whole class with the teacher to dissect their annotations.  Start with the Main Idea of the text:  What is this about?  What’s the point?  Briefly discuss important points.  The main part of this discussion should be about difficult to understand words and phrases.  I have found that students really connect with this part of the annotation process because they are comforted by knowing that most other students don’t understand the same things.

General Highlighting Annotation Guide

Table 1:  The general highlighting annotation guide is useful for stories and simple informational texts or articles.

Science and Engineering Annotation

Underline	Underline useful info about the problem
	Circle unfamiliar words and phrases
	Box useful information about the design
	Write notes in the left margin
	Write questions in the right margin

Table 2:  The science and engineering annotation guide is useful for technical texts that describe experiments or engineering design.

Phonetic Spelling

My students really depend on this part of the reading process and ask for it when I don’t include it.  Reading technical texts can really be intimidating when students don’t know how to say the words, so I include an informal phonetic spelling session with most readings.  Any word that is difficult to pronounce, such as prosthetic, can be reduced to individual sounds such as pros-theh-tick.  I always say “spell it like it sounds, not like it’s spelled”.  I can say the word for the students and they can do their own phonetic spelling or I can guide them to Google search, Merriam-Webster, or other website that will “say” the words so that they can listen to the words several times at their own pace.  I generally guide them away from traditional linguistic phonetic spelling because it contains many symbols that students are not familiar with and would be too time consuming to learn in this class.

Modeling

Learning does not have to be reduced to lecturing, reading, taking notes, and taking tests.  Modeling is my favorite science instructional teaching strategy.  Modeling is not just building models of solar systems, although that is a great activity.  Modeling can be a demonstration, a drawing, or a prototype made of things students find around the house.

Demonstrations

Modeling can be demonstrations by teachers or students to the class or a group.  I have demonstrated the exothermic reaction of the sugar in gummy bears and potassium chlorate.  This results in a lot of fire and heat and is safer done as a demonstration.  Demonstrations can also be done when supplies are hard to find or prohibitively expensive.

Experiments

Experiments are the ultimate modeling exercise for science teachers.  Experiments can be used to prove a concept (measure blood drop angle vs. size of blood drop to find the established correlation in Forensics) or to explore a concept (which fertilizer will grow the best roses in our garden for Biology).

Engineering Projects

Engineering projects are great for exploring solutions to complex problems.  These can be as simple as interactive posters for public awareness and as complicated as building a prosthetic limb for a surfer who lost her arm.

Graphing

Graphing and graph analysis are critical scientific tools.  Graphing gives students an analytical tool that lets them visualize complex data sets.  For example, they might graph the number of homeless in San Jose over the past 20 years and compare that to economic trends.  Graph analysis helps students understand graphed data and, most important, recognize data manipulation.  Table 3 shows various strategies to help students annotate and understand graphs.

Graph Annotation and Analysis Strategies

Table 3:  Students can use these tools to annotate and analyze graphs.