TEL 101: Designing Your Life

What we did

The Design team’s role in this effort was to:

1. develop a design project for students that would be relevant to their lives, and
2. work with a group of Peer Leaders (upperclassmen at the College who taught the class sections) to prepare them to implement the design project with the students.

The project asked students to identify an area of their life that they wanted to improve, interview others to gain diverse perspectives on their challenge, and then try out several possible solutions. Students used the book Designing Your Life as their core text and completed assignments from the accompanying workbook throughout the semester. During the process, they reflected on their iterations using a digital portfolio. Both the first-year students and the Peer Leaders engaged in this process of designing a solution to a challenge in their own lives.

Impact

Students gained experience developing a changemaker mindset and developing digital portfolios – laying a foundation for future success as students in the Teachers College and beyond. One Peer Leader, Rocky, tried out a new way to connect with her friends and family through a letter-writing campaign. In her reflection, Rocky says that she learned that she prefers writing her thoughts on paper to keep in touch rather than the ways she had tried before. We were excited to see how this one project could make a positive impact in Rocky’s relationships with others and how she, and other students, will use and continue to use a design thinking approach here at MLFTC.

Here are a few sample websites made by our Peer Leaders.

• Rocky Manzanet
• Hannah Scully
• Luisanna Granillo
• Paige Ellis