I put together this little road map to help students understand how to address each strand/criterion of the MYP Design Cycle fully. We also do activities addressing each strand, so they can fully understand them (for example, my Grade 8 students are moving onto Criterion B, so we are doing a lesson on ​Orthographic Drawing next week).
This is a work in progress, and I will continue to add/edit/change, but would love your input too - Let me know what is missing or what I should add!

I only see my Design students for two 90 minute lessons a week, but I want to expose them to endless amounts of excellent design! I've come up with a few ways to do this, including extra-curricular quests (in ClassCraft) and through bringing in interesting objects for them to look at (including in my first class of the year).

Some  interesting objects I bought in recently are my rug, made from plastic bottles from the ocean and my new bag, made of a recycled bounce house/bouncy castle! As well as a Lucky Iron Fish and a Right Cup!

Students seem to really enjoy learning about this objects, as they are never what they expect, and they like the play involved with guessing. Students are so used to me bringing in strange objects, that the other day a student would not believe that my brooch did not have a hidden meaning. He came up to me in the hall and said 'what's that about'....and then was very disappointed when I told him it was just pretty..

I also often end my lessons by showing students cool design, interesting videos....and often music videos from around the world, or ones that the students are requested. This creates a fun culture in the classroom and students seem to be pretty excited to see how these things.

Although there is change over time between every class, I always have students arriving at different times, so have started putting up activities on my board for them to do, while other students arrive. Sometimes these are interesting photos from the news and sometimes they are games, like Boggle! However, I have been meaning to put together some photos of cool designs to kick off my classes. I recently popped home to London and went to the Design Museum to see the Beazley Design Awards exhibition, and knew I needed to share lots of these cool items with my students!

Anyway - here you go - to use this presentation show the first image on the board, and as students come in they can guess what it is, and then when everyone arrives, you can reveal it's purpose!

ENJOY! Let me know what else I should add!

I spent the last few days in beautiful Pamplona attending Project Zero's  Understanding for a Complex World.  This was my first time attending as faculty and presenting - my workshop was called "Using the Understanding Map to Uncover Hidden Stories in Photographs". I loved the workshop as I learnt so much from the participants, and sharing is always a great way to reflect.

I thought I would share my workshop here too. This was a two hour workshop (though we actually could have used more time), so the video version just briefly describes some of the activities we did.

As participants entered the learning space, I played this slideshow, showing some photos taken around the world in the last month.

Here is the presentation that followed:

The main message was that we can use photographs as a starting point to bring complex issues into the classroom. We can also use different routines to help us slow down and go deep, instead of merely glancing at an image, having a short emotional reaction, then moving on! The routines used help students look at different perspectives, explore their emotional responses, back up their ideas with facts and finally reflect on their learning.

If you have any questions - let me know!

• Opening Slideshow here (Note section gives more detail about each photo)
• Main Presentation here.

I wanted to share a quick activity I did with my Grade 6-8 students recently. 
The theme through my Design class is 'How can we use design to make the world a better place?'. We cover a lot of complex and difficult issues in class, and often discuss how we can be ethical designers. This often covers using sustainable or recycled materials, making products to help others and more.
I've noticed an overlap within our conversations with elements of the IB Learner Profile, for example, be caring when choosing the materials you use to create.

I decided to have students look at the IB Learner Profile and to think about how we can demonstrate, strengthen or embody the different attributes of the profile. In tables of or five students where given ten post it notes, and had to divide the attributes between them. This was useful because I have a few team projects now, so I liked observing the roles they played here. As the students were working as a team, they also played special attention to supporting our phase 1 and 2 English language learners.

Here's some of what they came up with: 

At my new school we have a high student turn-over, with many students arriving suddenly, and sometimes with little to no English. Last week the EAL/ESOL teacher came to see me to get support with some of her students and the Personal Project. We decided to make a template worksheet for these students, which she could support them to work through. This template goes strand by strand and has spaces for them to add additional information from their Process Journals. It should help them a lot when they come to write the report too (we may also do this as a video instead). I did not simplify the language too much, as I wanted it to follow the MYP's objectives, but because I am really only showing key pieces of information, they should be able to easily translate anything they need.

Here's a copy of the template
​(I would only recommend this for ESOL/EAL or maybe learning support students.)

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