Once again, thank you Nogah Kornberg from I-Think at The Rotman School of Management who provided ideas for this lesson. I-Think is looking at how to bring the problem solving skills taught in the MBA program to elementary and secondary students.To understand what brought us to this activity it is recommended that previous posts on Integrative and Design Thinking be read. I am fortunate to have regular conversations with Nogah and am drawing on her expertise as I figure out how to do this.
What do you do when you are presented with a really bad idea? My tendency is to reject or dismiss the idea and to explain why the idea is bad.
Integrative and Design thinkers approach bad ideas differently. Ideas are just ideas and all are worth exploring fully to determine where value might lie. Nothing is ever rejected outright.
Today my grade 7 students explored really bad ideas.
We began with this:
Our next step was to select one of the bad ideas and see where value might lie. We selected turning the gym into a chicken coop. Students had no problem coming up with reasons why that might actually be a good idea. They ranged from having defenses in place should the school be egged to learning how to run a business to having a food source to being able to run your own KFC outlet because you'd have a supply of chickens.
Next students were asked to work in partners, select one of the bad ideas and find value in it. Most students selected the trip to Africa to be hunted by lions.
We regrouped towards the end of class and talked about the purpose of this activity. I presented them with the work of Roger L Martin, dean of Rotman, who interviewed extremely successful people to find out if there were common attitudes or approaches that led to success. One thing he found was that highly successful people don't reject bad ideas. They explore them fully to see what might be useful within the idea.
Students must now come up with their own really bad ideas, search for the value in them and then convince the class.
What do you do when you are presented with a really bad idea? My tendency is to reject or dismiss the idea and to explain why the idea is bad.
Integrative and Design thinkers approach bad ideas differently. Ideas are just ideas and all are worth exploring fully to determine where value might lie. Nothing is ever rejected outright.
Today my grade 7 students explored really bad ideas.
We began with this:
Our next step was to select one of the bad ideas and see where value might lie. We selected turning the gym into a chicken coop. Students had no problem coming up with reasons why that might actually be a good idea. They ranged from having defenses in place should the school be egged to learning how to run a business to having a food source to being able to run your own KFC outlet because you'd have a supply of chickens.
Next students were asked to work in partners, select one of the bad ideas and find value in it. Most students selected the trip to Africa to be hunted by lions.
We regrouped towards the end of class and talked about the purpose of this activity. I presented them with the work of Roger L Martin, dean of Rotman, who interviewed extremely successful people to find out if there were common attitudes or approaches that led to success. One thing he found was that highly successful people don't reject bad ideas. They explore them fully to see what might be useful within the idea.
Students must now come up with their own really bad ideas, search for the value in them and then convince the class.
Hi Heidi,
ReplyDeletethis is a great idea - thanks for sharing. I am curious as to how students reacted to the idea of being asked to find value in a "bad idea" (or as I am a maths teacher, it would be a wrong answer or a n idea that led you in the wrong direction - which students count as a "bad idea"). What did the students see as the goal of the exercise and how did you communicate to them how the learning community would value the "bad idea" in the end?
thanks,
Carmel
Hi Carmel,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments. This activity was done in the context of previous work regarding the Ladder of Inference, Mental Models and Causal Modelling. We have spent a great deal of time exploring where ideas come from, what information we pay attention to and how that causes us to make inferences, assumptions and draw conclusions. Students are learning to use a set of integrative and design thinking tools to generate better ideas and develop solutions to problems. This is a step in that learning. The discussion afterwards centered on not closing the door on ideas before they have been fully explored. There will be a follow-up activity to this.