Using Design Thinking in Higher Education

This is an interview with Mark Blegen PH.D., Dean of Health Sciences at St. Catherine University. This is the story of Mark implementing Human-Centered Design in his classroom and co-designing the class with his students. Student-centered education in action!

Transcript

Mark Blegen, I'm a Dean of Health Sciences at St. Catherine University, and my background is exercise, physiology and human performance.

Two, probably three years ago now, the Dean at the time had been telling us about design thinking and human-centered design and asked us-- asked a group of the leadership if anybody would be interested in taking this three module, each module is a five-week course, through Darden's Business School. 

And so that was my first exposure to it and how to use it and from there we used it in our School of Health quite a bit.

And then about two years ago I thought, this is something I could use in the classroom.

Just the whole idea of the empathizing and prototyping, and to approach education in a different way.

And so the first day of class two years ago in an upper-level exercise physiology course, I said, "We're going to design this course together."

And so gave them a quick rundown of what we were going to do and over the course of the next two or three days, sat down in groups and we designed what the class is gonna look like.

To me that was refreshing and opening because the students had buy-in, and then throughout the semester we came back to some of the tenets of design thinking and even used it for some of our exams to create prototypes and do a little bit of feedback and things like that so it really opened up the classroom.

Students learn at a very young age how to do school and they know that if they do exactly what the teacher, what the professor says. 

And if they regurgitate the facts they'll be fine, but they might not learn anything.

So, and a lot of times kids spend a lot of time being talked at so to have an instructor sit down with them and say, "Let's do this together. What's gonna make you successful? How are you going to learn? What's worked in the past? What hasn't?"

I really think they bought into the process and said, "Hey we're gonna design this. We're gonna take ownership of it."

And it was one of the most exciting semesters that I had in that class.

Professors have gone to school for a really long time to know a very narrow field and they want to tell you about it because they're passionate about it but what that turns into in the classroom is a professor typically preaching, standing, you know, the sage on the stage model saying, "Here's what you're gonna know."

And what we know about learning is not about standing up and telling someone what to know, but it's involving the students in the process.

But so many people in higher ed believe it's about the content and you've got to get all this content in. And that's not what it's about.

It's about the relationship and I think that's where design thinking comes in. Human-centered design. Because I can't tell you in my almost 20 years of higher ed how many meetings I've been in where we don't talk about the student. We come up with curriculums, we come up with programs, we come up with plans, and nobody has stopped to ask the question,

"What about the students?" Right, "Are they gonna like it? Are they gonna enjoy it? Are they gonna do it? Are they gonna learn anything?"

And so I've always been student-centered, but I think the design thinking process, human-centered design, has really helped me hone in on what the students need.

But by and large, right, almost to a person, the students said number one that they learned so much and that-- even I ran into a couple of graduation last weekend that they still remember that class and the tests we took and I think a lot of times, especially in higher ed, right, students learn to regurgitate those facts, and then you ask them a week later, or a month later, a year later, "What'd you learn?"

"I don't know." Because it wasn't relevant, it wasn't useful, they don't remember it. And several students came up to me last week at graduation and just said,

"I still remember designing the stroller, and talking about heart rate," or these things that we learned in the class and the idea that,

"Mark, you were the only instructor in my four years at St. Kate's to say, 'How do you want to do this together?'"

And so that's-- it's a good moment for a professor.

I work with young faculty and students all the time on telling a story because if you're going to stand up and just read PowerPoint slides, word after word after word, they're not going to remember it.

And so if you can teach them to share a moment to share a story with a lot less words and people remember it so much more vividly.

And I think there was a little bit of that, I think number one there was buy-in, but because we created that experience and they had that moment together, the students remember it.

And they might not remember all the exact details but the fact that they can remember some of and say, "Here's what I did and here's why I did it," really meant a lot to me.