DBSE DesignLab with a focus on school development consulting

The project aims to transfer the US-American approach DBSE to the German context. With the help of DBSE, the problem-solving skills of actors in the school system are to be strengthened so that participating schools can continuously improve through repeated effective problem solving. Ultimately, the implementation of the design-based school development approach in Berlin should lead to an improvement in the quality of education and problem-solving skills of schools in critical situations and in the school support services.

The focus of this project is on school development consulting, in which schools are firmly integrated as important development and testing actors in a research-practice partnership. The aim is to test DBSE with increased consideration of this group. In order to realize a system-wide approach, representatives of school supervision, schools and science are also included in the co-design loops. The resulting training format should be adapted to the prior knowledge, existing practices and needs of the schools for particular challenges and transferred to the Berlin regulatory structures (new state institute) after the end of the project. The scientific management is also working to further theorize the central mechanisms of DBSE in order to weave scientific knowledge into the training program and thus enable a sustainable nationwide transfer to regulatory structures.
For the education department of the Robert Bosch Stiftung, this cooperation project, with its multi-actor partnership consisting of education practitioners, researchers, administrators and us as a civil society actor, is an exciting learning environment. We see multi-actor partnerships and a systemic approach to the project as a prerequisite for systemic impact. We want to use our expertise to support capacity building and professionalization of the regulatory system and to help establish transfer structures and processes.

School development consultants (SEB) from ProSchul and the regional training center in Berlin work with schools to address their problems using the DBSE logic. The aim is to understand how established consulting routines can be changed in the direction of effective problem solving and the change of school and teaching practices through continuous reflection on consulting cases. The work will initially take place in two Berlin districts, where the school supervision has already worked with DBSE in the past project or has been introduced to the process in workshops. In the second cohort, two more districts will follow. Regular case conferences between science and SEB will be established in the process, in which the cases will be discussed and DBSE consulting scenarios will be developed. Data (audiographies, data on the DBSE iterations, etc.) collected by the researchers and evaluated during the process will be introduced into the case conferences and discussed from different perspectives in order to open up scope for action and to reflect on, systematize and theorize one's own actions.