Every child can: Riverside school’s design-led approach to empowering children

In this piece, Kiran Bir Sethi eloquently responds to what it means to bring the design mindset into education. A designer by education and an educator by practice, in this piece she generously shares excerpts from her book ‘Every Child Can: Riverside School’s Design-Led Approach to Empowering Children’.

Design at Riverside is not an end but a means to learning, i.e., they evoke design not as a separate subject in the timetable, but as a philosophy. We hope this nuanced case study will inspire our readers to know more about Riverside and their methodologies.

Over the years, I have found myself constantly having to explain what design is, often clarifying that it is not just about products and fashion. In fact, when I am introduced as the founder of the Riverside School, people often ask me if I have stopped being a designer. The power of design in shaping experiences and crafting cultures is not acknowledged or understood well. Design encapsulates a larger idea – it is a structured process to discover a solution, based on insights from and about the user. If one understands the power of design from this perspective, it opens up the possibility for anyone to embark on this journey of solution discovery. While this idea is accessible to everyone, I must clarify that mastering the design process takes years of study and practise, just like becoming a master craftsman. I will explain in more detail about the design process in subsequent chapters, but a very simple way to understand it is to think of it as a series of answers to the following questions:

Step 1 – What is the current scenario? Who is being affected and by whom/what?

Step 2 – What is the preferred scenario? What will change look and feel like?

Step 3 – How will I implement the solution?

Step 4 – How will I measure its impact?

___________________________

The design process has been used to powerful effect to find solutions that can save lives and enhance living, from life-saving alarms to delightful smart phones. And yet, while it has been employed to create a wide array of products and solutions that improve our lives, it has largely been ignored when thinking about how to craft the very foundations of our society and nation: how children are educated. There is compelling evidence that demonstrates the disproportionate benefits of well-designed, high-quality early childhood interventions for lifelong growth, which in turn contributes to building a better nation and world. The Mid-Day Meal scheme introduced in the early 1960s in Madras (now Tamil Nadu) was a game-changer in incentivizing school attendance, which in turn had a direct impact on children’s learning outcomes. The scheme was a carrot; it was not about infrastructure or pedagogy. It offered parents from disadvantaged backgrounds the most compelling reason to send their children to school – a way to ensure that their child had one full meal a day. The programme was designed to change the behaviour of the parents who otherwise, perhaps, did not see a reason to send their children to school. It was also a great step forward in addressing nutritional deficiencies that would otherwise have become endemic. Identifying this root cause of why children were not attending school required a deep curiosity to understand and empathize with the users and their context. This is a key tenet of the design process – don’t assume, discover. Today, this mammoth effort reaches 120 million children across the country every day. Today, 120 million children have a fighting chance at an education.

Change is possible.

___________________________

A study carried out by the RAND Corporation and the National Education Association in the US found that nearly 75 per cent of teachers and 85 per cent of principals experience frequent job-related stress, compared to just 33 per cent among all working adults; 59 per cent of teachers and 48 per cent of principals say they are burnt out. Research has demonstrated that it is not the stressful event alone that is the differentiator here. The mindset with which one responds to stress drives the difference in the body’s response. Why am I sharing this? A mindset is a set of attitudes and beliefs that help us make sense of, interpret and respond to the world around us. Stanford University social psychologist Carol Dweck, in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, discusses a set of beliefs she calls the ‘Growth Mindset’. People with a ‘Growth Mindset’ treat challenges as opportunities for personal growth, believing that they are not limited by their present skills and can actively improve through effort and feedback. In contrast, people with a ‘Fixed Mindset’ assume that their skills and abilities are fixed at birth and cannot be changed. As we emphasized in the first chapter, we believe strongly in the design process. And the great thing is that the more you practise this process, the more intuitive and natural it becomes, which in turn leads to cultivating a ‘design mindset’.

One of the beautiful facets of the design mindset is that it encourages us to embrace collaboration, experimentation and iteration, therefore eliminating the need to seek perfection from the start. Often, it is frowned upon for a leader to acknowledge that they do not have the answers or know the solutions off the bat. However, embracing the design process liberates us from this pressure, because it works on the premise that the cycle of feedback is imperative to find the optimal solution. In simple terms, the design mindset proactively shifts how we approach problems, viewing them as opportunities for change, which in turn, allows us to manage stress better, be more productive, and feel more optimistic.

Cultivating the design mindset

I would like to share four habits of the mind that have helped us build a design mindset. We know it is a process that guides us, but to understand how best to act on the process, there are four habits that we can practice to make it part of our mindset. It will help to think of these four habits as a series of mental exercises: practice them consciously and consistently for maximum impact. One disclaimer here: while these habits might seem simple, following them every moment of every day is not easy, and requires a great deal of discipline. Even after twenty years, we are still a work-in-progress. In my experience, a mindset is built over time, not overnight.

The four habits are:

HABIT 1 – Stay curious, start with empathy

HABIT 2 – Co-create, negotiate

HABIT 3 – Start small, grow big

HABIT 4 – Show, not tell

Stay curious, start with empathy

It was 2002, a year after I started Riverside. I was sharing anecdotes from my childhood with seven-year-olds, and teaching them some of the games I played as a child. The children also shared their play routines, but one student shyly said, ‘Mama mujhe bahaar khelne nahin deti.’ (Mama does not let me play outdoors.) Despite all our practice in the design process, we fell into the trap of righteous bias, assuming the parents were insensitive to the needs of their child. I called up the mother to impress upon her the importance and benefits of playing outdoors for her child. Despite hearing my indignant tone, she graciously invited us to her home to understand why her daughter could not go outdoors to play.

We encountered a reality very different from the one we had assumed. The eight-member family lived in a modest apartment block, with dozens of shops on the ground floor, situated on a very busy, traffic-filled street. There wasn’t a single open area, park or garden in or around the neighbourhood. The only open space my young student had to play in was the 6×6 feet patch of their floor outside the apartment door, by the elevator. Far from being insensitive, we witnessed family dynamics that were filled with love and joy: especially heartening was to hear the grandfather stating with pride how his granddaughter read him the news daily from the English newspaper. We were moved and humbled when the parents shared with joy how their entire society celebrated our student’s lead role in the school’s theatre production.

And, yes, there was a lot of play – it just took place indoors, they said.

What we experienced, observed and learnt from that visit was a humbling, salutary lesson that relying only on our intuition or ‘gut feeling’ and assumptions often leads to labelling and not enabling. This experience led to us to institute the Home Visit Process, which is a time when the team visits each student’s home every year, to intentionally avoid the pitfall of starting a child’s journey with us on assumptions.

Being curious as opposed to reactive, and having the patience to understand the situation as opposed to jumping to conclusions, allows us to shift from making assumptions about the problem to discovering insights that reveal opportunities for growth and change. Very often, the way we perceive the situation is shaped by our biases and past experiences, which can lead us astray, and to the wrong solution. When we rush to solve the problem, we might often solve the wrong problem, and when that solution fails, we blame the situation and further cement a mindset of believing that change is impossible.

As leaders, building a habit to stay curious will serve us well. While you might meet a student, parent or teacher who may have given enough reason to start the conversation with ‘you always do this’, it is good to remind ourselves that this time it might be different; this time might be a ‘first time’. Be curious to understand, instead of judging. I guess this is another description of empathy. When done with integrity, I have seen the shift in relationships, the trust that is forged, the comfort in sharing, and knowing that someone is willing to listen.

I know it’s easier said than done, but by practicing the habit of staying curious and starting with empathy, you model what it means to be humane. When this is done daily, you build a culture where people matter.

Co-create, negotiate

‘It saves time.’ This is the most common refrain when people justify using a more top-down, hierarchical approach to problem-solving.

Of course, one can surely solve the problem and make the decision on behalf of the user. While it may look like it saves time, I have often seen that to undo and redo the solution ends up taking more time. Therefore, the argument that the design process is time-consuming is, in my experience, flawed.

Let me illustrate what I mean with this story from 2010. We had a new teacher from Ireland, Niall Walsh, join the team. He had a deep passion for sports and in less than a month, this passion saw him express an interest in redesigning the existing annual sports programme, starting with the annual Sports Day. It was an exciting change – a way to look at the sports day as an inclusive celebration, inviting a varied set of talents, rather than only skill in the game.

Niall had thought out a new format where students would play in squads and each team would be selected by him to reflect a varied set of skills. When he set out to create the teams, he faced the indignation of young and passionate Naren Desai and his peers from the eleventh grade, who stormed up to me and declared, ‘This is not the Riverside way!’

Niall was perplexed – he had an exciting idea, the right intent, and many students were enthusiastic when he proposed the new design. So, what could go wrong? As it panned out, everything did.

What Niall had not realized at the time was the difference between the top-down ‘teacher told me’ approach, and the collaborative approach to decision-making at Riverside. The ‘Riverside way’ was co-creation and negotiation – a deep belief that all decisions that impacted the students would be made in consultation with them. On Niall’s part, he shared that by taking the key decisions, he thought he would save time and move faster to implement the new format.

When Niall and the students sat down and worked together on implementing the new format, ideas emerged which even Niall had not considered. This is the key ingredient of this habit – liberating yourself from having the answers, and joyfully embracing ambiguity.

The new design now had squads made up of sports enthusiasts, designers, speech writers, people managers, cheerleaders and members from the teacher team. Not only that, the students worked with Niall to design the parameters and rubrics for every aspect of the sports day: from the selection of the captains to the scoring matrix; from which sports would be part of the event, to the budget and, finally, the decision on when during the school year the event would be conducted.

This shift was reflected in the comment by young Anushka Joshi, who had joined Riverside that year and for whom in the previous school, the sports day was a day to be dreaded! Because this new avatar of the sports day was built to include all children and all talents, Anushka, whose superpower was ‘words and storytelling’, was in much demand by the squad leaders as the chief speech writer! After the first roll out of this version of the sports day, Anushka said, ‘for the first time, I woke up early to reach school on a sports day’!

It was not surprising then that the reimagined design of sports day was a testament to the power of co-creation. Today, it is one of the most anticipated days on the Riverside calendar.

Discovering a solution collaboratively may initially seem relatively more time-consuming than conventional problem-solving, but it actually frees up time in the long run. Once you work with user insights to craft the solution (enabling a democratic and inclusive process for change), the ownership for the outcome is collectively shared among all stakeholders.

At Riverside, immersed in an environment where the process has been practised every day over years, students also develop a design mindset. At times I have heard this pushback, ‘but how will they manage in “real” life?’ This is what they learn to do. The students learn to voice their opinions, but they also learn to be curious and empathetic. They expect to participate in creating solutions, but they also learn to invite collaboration.

How, then, can this mindset be bad for the real world?

Start small, grow big

Over the past two decades, I have had the opportunity to meet many leaders who have shared with me the challenges that come in the way of change. The most common have been:

Where to start?

If it is working, why change it?

The effort required for change

The uncertainty of the outcome

Leaders, while understanding the need for change, often fear failure. Very often, the need to design solutions for, say, a schoolwide change can weigh us down. This fear can often be paralysing, and therefore, maintaining the status quo seems the safer option.

A powerful way to flex your design-thinking muscles is to start small. Here’s an example:

Riverside doesn’t have a canteen, and therefore, students bring a lunchbox from home. Besides the academic competencies, one of the key goals for our early learners is to move from dependence to independence, including the independence to be able to eat their lunch by themselves. We found that for a lot of children, their parents’ love and affection manifests in the form of over-stuffed tiffin boxes with lots of ‘liquid’ items like bowls of dal and yogurt! Inevitably, we found students struggling to finish their food and being unable to manage the spillage and waste. And because of the dal and yogurt, we found that often our support team had to feed the children, which defeated the goal of making our students independent.

One easy solution could have been for us to quickly make a rule barring all liquids for lunch, and informing the parents. But this would not have been a respectful response, since we wanted our children to have the benefit of parents’ love and care in packing the food.

So, we started small. Food being such a personal and sensitive issue, we needed to have the parents on board as partners to make the solution truly impactful. We invited a small group of parents of our K-1 students, and shared how we could collaborate to design a nutrition plan that was healthy yet enabled the children to become independent eaters. For our part, we called in a nutritionist who shared recipes which the parents iterated, offering some of their special tips and tricks to make the menu more child-friendly. It became a joyful exercise of discovery and creativity, and within a week, we had a robust nutrition plan designed in consultation and collaboration with the parents, the teachers, and the students.

One of the huge benefits of starting small is that it allows us the time and integrity to be able to honour the design process of empathy, co-creation, and iteration – to craft a truly user-centred solution.

The first week of testing gave us insights into which foods hit the brief and which needed refinement, and once we knew it worked and we saw the change in the independence of the children, we knew we had a winner! And who became the evangelists for the entire key stage? That same group of parents!

Within a few weeks, we had rolled out the new menu for the children of the entire key stage (Riverside has three key stages: Key Stage 1 is elementary school, Key Stage 2 is middle school, and Key Stage 3 is high school).

The icing on the cake was that several parents informed us that even at home, the students had become independent eaters. Mission accomplished – start small, grow big.

Show, not tell

In 2003, two years after we started Riverside, a visiting school leader said, ‘I want my school to do what you are doing.’

To which we said, ‘Absolutely, we would love to share our approach, no problem. Please bring your team here so we can conduct training sessions for them’.

Over the years, we have trained many schools to use our approach – in each instance, we hosted their teams at Riverside, demonstrated our practice, conducted workshops, and felt confident that we were helping other schools, and students, succeed.

How wrong we were! It was only when we visited one of our partner schools that we realized that conducting training sessions alone was not sufficient in enabling our partners to implement our processes and protocols. The one common observation our partners made was that while the teachers who had come to our school for the training had a clear idea of the why, what and how, it was often very challenging for them to communicate this to the other members of their team. Something was getting lost in translation. It was also very difficult and expensive to bring entire teams to be trained at Riverside. This critical observation was the trigger for developing our rigorous documentation process. We developed origin videos (which explained the ‘why’ of our processes), how-to videos, templates, evidence and research, so that we could do more showing, and less telling.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard a leader or teacher say, after viewing the documentation, ‘Oh, that’s what it looks like, now I can do it.’

Another reason for my obsession with documentation was also the sense of dismay I experienced when I realized some of the great schools around the world had not archived their practices and wisdom for others to learn from and iterate upon. Since 2015, our codified processes have been able to have a measurable impact on our partner schools. The strength and breadth of our practice and processes now allow partner schools to take Riverside to their teams.

But, the greatest benefit of the codification was for the team at Riverside. We have since used it to sustain and iterate our practice, and make the onboarding of new teachers more effective. Moreover, making our practices visible to our parents and students has also allowed for a more seamless alignment with the school’s vision. This is the power of codification. Someone’s wisdom somewhere can benefit someone’s practice anywhere!

________________________________

In a nutshell, the design mindset:

• Saves time: As you have seen, staying true to the design process takes time. But by identifying the real challenge, and working with users to design solutions, you will inevitably save time by avoiding the undo-redo cycle. The shared ownership of the solution increases the proactiveness of all stakeholders in the implementation of the solution.

• Is liberating: The design-thinking process implicitly acknowledges that no one person will have all the answers; not even the school leader. You no longer need to carry the burden of knowing the answers, but enjoy the process to facilitate solution discovery. Give yourself the liberty to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty.

• Gives courage: As you implement the design process, you may learn, as I did, that the framework liberates you from the fear of failure. I know that if I follow the process with integrity and involve the users, we will work towards enhancing the user experience.

• Builds community: When all the stakeholders collaborate to identify and resolve challenges, they build trust. They begin to understand and respect one another. It builds a community that values collaboration over competition, purpose-driven practice, and optimism for change.

• Keeps joy and optimism alive: While there is much to say about competencies and skill for the work we do, there is an equal need for stamina to continue to do our work. This is where the design process has its greatest impact – it makes you comfortable in uncertainty, tells you that you are not alone in this journey, and it not only gives you courage, but also keeps the sparks of optimism and joy alive within you.

Kiran Bir Sethi is an Indian designer, educationist, education reformer, and social entrepreneur. With a degree in visual communication from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, she ran a flourishing design practice, but it was when her children started going to school that Sethi recognized her true calling – putting design thinking into education. She founded the award winning Riverside School in Ahmedabad that focuses on empowering children with the I CAN MINDSET. She then founded aProCh (an initiative to make cities more child friendly) and Design for Change, which is today the largest movement of change – for and by children where children use the simple framework of Feel/Imagine/Do/Share design solutions for some of their greatest challenges. Her most recent venture is the Riverside Learning Center, which offers training programmes to empower schools across the world to become ‘I CAN SCHOOLS’ by using the codified processes from Riverside. Over the years, Kiran, Riverside, and Design for Change have won several accolades and awards and some of the most recent ones are: Riverside wins the World’s Best School Prize for Innovation, HundrEd.org selects Design for Change into the Hall of Fame, The Earth Prize, the Rockefeller Innovation Award, The Lego Remagine Award, The Lexus prize, was The Top 10 Global Teacher nominee and the Light of Freedom Award. She is an Ashoka and Yidan Fellow. Sethi is a published author, having written a book, ‘Every Child CAN’ for HarperCollins, which chronicles the journey and offers readers a glimpse into Riverside’s unique design-led approach to empowering children.

Born in Bangalore, India, Sethi comes from a family of designers. She lives in Ahmedabad with her two children, Raag and Jazz and her husband, Geet. She loves life, dark chocolate, and Govinda movies!