Delaware school's $10 million innovation

• Design Lab High School in Christiana opened last fall.
• The model for education has earned the school a $10 million grant.
• The vision is for the school to be able to be replicated anywhere.

Imagine sitting down with two other people, a pyramid of plastic cups, a rubber band and three strings.

Now, you have to unstack the cups and restack them – without touching them.

That was the project assigned to one class last Friday morning at the Design Lab High School in Christiana. The charter school opened last fall with the idea of approaching education the way designers approach a problem.

"We know that the world is going to change a lot in the next 20 or 30 years," said Martin Rayala, the school's founder and chief academic officer, explaining that the point of using the design-thinking process is to teach students how to tackle problems that don't already have a solution. For example, he said, designers didn't know what a toothbrush or a rocket ship would look like before they built them, but they knew how to address the problem that each of those things answered.

So, the school aims to turn out students who are equipped to answer the problems that will be presented by the ever-changing world in the decades to come.

That model for education has just earned the school a $10 million grant from XQ: The Super School Project, funded by the Emerson Collective, an education and immigration advocacy group run by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs.

The group put out a call for proposals that would re-imagine the American high school for the 21st Century and the Design Lab High School submitted one based on its academic plan.

Initially, XQ had intended to hand out five grants for $10 million each nationwide, but it ended up doubling the number due to the strength of the proposals that came in, Powell Jobs said when she announced the winners on Wednesday. There were nearly 700 applications.

Other winners include traditional public schools that are recasting themselves with an emphasis on hands-on learning; charter schools that run the gamut from focusing on high-needs students to academically successful, self-directed students; a school in Los Angeles that doesn't have a central building, but rather meets its homeless students where they are; and a Michigan school based in a museum.

The "breakthrough" that pushed the Design Lab High School to the top was its integration of design thinking into its curriculum, according to XQ.

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Rayala wants to be clear that it's not just a design school – it's a high school that teaches the core subjects of math, science, and English, but it teaches those traditional subjects in an unusual way.

Students are presented with problems – like the one with the plastic cups – and they have to figure out the solution, which often requires them to use math or science.

"They're going to have to invent much more than we have in the past," Rayala said, so they teach through project-based problem solving.

"To be able to solve problems, that takes a different mindset," said Loretta Harper-Brown, the school's recruiter.

As part of that method, Design Lab tries to foster a "do-it-yourself, entrepreneurial spirit," said Rayala.

One way the curriculum will emphasize that spirit is by having seniors spend much of their last year focused on a single major project, not unlike a college thesis. But, they can take the form of starting a business or undertaking a creative project.

The vision is for the school to be able to be replicated anywhere, without the major cash infusion that it's getting from the grant, Rayala said.

"The Design Lab is a prototype, really," said the school's co-founder, Cristina Alvarez. The idea is to redesign high schools across the country.

Part of the grant money will go toward realizing that goal and developing the school's model into a plan for other schools, Rayala said, and part of it will be used for the school itself, which is located in rented space near the Christiana Mall, operating on a $4.2 million annual budget.

"It now puts things on the table that we would have waited for for a while," Alvarez said of the grant money.

"This is going to change the lives of all of the students at this school, but also the state," said Rayala.

The Design Lab's model for education can put Delaware on the map for academic innovation, he said. The school is part of a nationwide consortium that integrates design into the educational curriculum and it hosted its annual conference in Wilmington this year.

The First State is well-positioned to be a leader in this kind of education, Rayala said.

"Delaware is a small state, so the communication is easier to do here," he said, referring to access to state officials and organizations like the Delaware Foundation for Science and Mathematics Education and the Longwood Foundation.

The school is constructing new buildings for lab space that can accommodate more complex ventures than the ones that use plastic cups.

"It's really rewarding when you finally finish the project," said Bria Evans, a junior, who had figured out the cup conundrum in an earlier class.

"You had to listen to your two teammates," said Joshua Caceres, another junior.

In fact, the project couldn't be done without teammates. In order to unstack the cups, each of the strings had to be tied to the rubber band so that the three students could each pull and stretch the rubberband so it would fit around a cup, then grab the cup and work together to lift it down.

"We rarely use pencils in this class," said Evans.

Contact Saranac Hale Spencer at (302) 324-2909, sspencer@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @SSpencerTNJ.