Teaching with Impact: A Design Challenge Workshop for Educators (9-12)

Design Challenge Learning (DCL) is a research-backed teaching methodology that combines the best of Project-Based Learning with the added benefit of a friendly, motivating, and low-stakes competition.  Students in this model – identify a problem, design a new solution to address it, produce a short video and paper, and explain their work to a panel of judges, as they compete against other teams.

DCL has been shown to significantly increase student engagement, agency, and the key skills of problem-solving, critical-thinking, collaboration, creativity, and communication.  It has been implemented by STEM, Language Arts, and Social Studies teachers, who embed it as a classroom project and in doing so take their teaching to the next level.

Participating Teachers will:

• Learn the Design Challenge methodology and how to implement it in ways that meet their content, skills, and curricular goals.
• See examples of student videos and papers and learn key teaching techniques
• Be given access to the Educators Playbook, a complete guide to implementation that works across disciplines and age-groups
• Be introduced and invited to participate in a statewide High Design Challenge that takes place annually at UNH
• Create a plan for how to implement DCL in their own context