Tools to Break Status Quo Rules of Education (and Beyond)
DSX believes students, families and educators can design and build new approaches to problems unique to their context. Here are a few handy tools, if needed.
All tools and models we create come from a place of love and shared for free so any community can build a learning culture that inspires humanity, rooted in equity + creativity. Below are just a few of our offerings. Use them as you see fit. We ask that you give credit to DSX and its co-designers when you use them. Thank you.
For free coaching on these tools with founder and equity designer, David Clifford, please click HERE.
Tools to Design for Equity (including de-siloing our minds)
This deck is your handy toolkit for practicing Liberatory Design. The framework and mindsets combined are a complexity-centered approach to design for equity in your heart and working context co-created in a collaboration by Tania Anaissie, David Clifford (DSX Founder), Susie Wise, and the National Equity Project (Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey). Order your decks HERE.
Building from DSX's founding value of EQUITY, the Journal for Noticing Inequity helps students, parents, educators, designers begin to develop the skills of noticing inequity (racism, sexism, ableism, agism, etc). Please download and try.
The purpose of the Social Justice Superhero Project is to help you see yourself as a change-agent in your world fighting for equity. This project also invites you to develop Liberatory Design Mindsets to explore your emotions, beliefs, community, creativity, and leadership in relationship with your world in order to build a strong sense of purpose of designing for equity.
This tool was created from this question: what if students used various methods of inquiry and exploration to discover information, problems, dilemmas, skills, connections, themselves, and purpose?
This table was designed by over a dozen middle and school teachers and college professors illustrating shared language between methods used by common disciplines in school.
Tools to Build Relational Trust + Creative Courage
The 3MinuteKnowMe was built from the constraints of time so often found in schools. It creates an opportunity to build the Liberatory Design mindsets of Building Relational Trust and Practice-Self-Awareness allowing two or more people to reflect on and share their X-shaped selves (story, strengths, skills, and stance) to begin to understand each other’s whole authentic person so that they can co-construct a healthier, more inclusive learning environment to bring out each other’s best—in just three minutes!!
3minKnowFAMILY here!!
The Flow-Fear-Food Tool creates time to reflect on a person, team or organization’s strengths + challenges in order to build individuals, teams or learning cultures that are collegial and courageously vulnerable to learn and lead creatively.
The 3MinuteBelonging Tool creates an opportunity to allow your community to reflect on when they feel belonging (or not). This brief 3-minute story can be shared with each other to reflect on and develop empathy for the multiple dimensions and emotions attached with belonging.
This tool can catalyze a culture of trust, belonging and authentic relationships.
This tool is another handy companion to design for belonging
The Learning Zones Tool was created during a project with the K12 Lab in the Dead Sea to allow educators to reflect on their learning zones prior to designing learning experiences for youth.
Tools for Building Empathy + Empathizing to Build
The Learning Culture Design Tool was created to set design intentions rooted in Liberatory Design (left) and Dimension of Belonging (below). This tool further asks of you, the designer (yes, that’s you student, teacher, admin., parent/caregiver, experience designer), to reflect on your values, beliefs and what you want participants to feel. Give it a try!! If interested, a full process of inviting feedback from participants accompanies this tool as well. Email David below
HERE is a piece, So You Want to Build a Makerspace, written by our founder, David Clifford. It is a must-read for any teacher, school or district considering a shop, iLab, media lab or, yes, a makerspace. Hers’s a quick one-pager, too, on the maker mindsets.
The DSX Experience Design Tool was created while designing a workshop for Israeli educators on the Dead Sea. It aims to allow a designer (you) to deconstruct an experience you aim to design and build. A key feature of this tool is to reflect on what you want participants to FEEL! Please reference the DSX Dimensions of Belonging to support you here.
This School Choice tool creates an opportunity for students and parents/guardians to pause and reflect on their learning needs/goals in order to find the right learning environment for them/their youth (instead of what’s assigned to you or what you believe is the “right” school. It works!!!
DSX Community Engagement Empathy Tool provides an opportunity for your community or the community you hope to engage with to reflect on, discuss together and share what is important to them regarding a learning community.
This experience allows for community to listen to each other with empathy and to co-design with each other. This will ensure a learning community that is built by/for/with the community for the empowerment of the community.
This tool has been used with students in alternative schools in Sonoma, families in Oakland, and students and teachers in Diandére, Senegal. Super fun!
STAY TUNED FOR MORE TOOLS TO BREAK STATUS QUO RULES!
To learn more and ask anything
please email david@designschoolx.org
or schedule an appointment HERE
