Schools and Preschools

DBSE DesignLab with a focus on school development consulting

Design-based school development (DBSE) is designed to strengthen the problem-solving skills of actors in the school system.

About the project

Design-based school development (DBSE) is designed to strengthen the problem-solving skills of actors in the school system. The aim is to make the best possible use of scarce resources and energies for development in the system. This internationally proven approach enables development projects to be carried out efficiently and effectively. It also enables the education system to continuously improve through repeated effective problem solving.

The DBSE DesignLab is a project of the Berlin Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family Affairs (SenBJF) in cooperation with the Robert Bosch Stiftung and under the scientific direction of Prof. Dr. Nina Bremm, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. During the project period 2024-2027, it will focus on the further development of design-based school development consulting in the sense of a science-practice partnership (WPP). While school development consultants from the Berlin support system (Fortbildung Berlin and ProSchul) accompany selected schools in the DBSE logic with the support of the respective school supervisory authorities, data-based feedback and design proposals from the scientific community provide impulses for reflection and further development of the consulting practice.
DBSE is seen as a supplement to existing advisory practices and is to be reviewed and further developed, in particular with regard to its ability to connect with effective problem-solving strategies in the German school development context. The Berlin overall strategy for educational quality aims to improve the language and mathematical skills of Berlin's schoolchildren and to significantly reduce the number of those who fail to meet minimum standards. Emotional and social skills are also to be promoted and secured. These objectives will be included in the DBSE DesignLab as a framework. Findings from the WPP are to be incorporated into recommendations for subsequent adoption by the new Berlin State Institute.

The DBSE-DesignLab is a follow-up to the Design-Based School Development (DBSE) project at Berlin schools. Between 2019 and 2023, the teaching staff of a number of selected schools, their school supervisors and the Senate Department for Education came together. Together with the originator of the concept, Prof. Rick Mintrop, and external school development consultants from bildung.komplex, they tested the DBSE approach in the German context. The project was scientifically accompanied by Prof. Nina Bremm and funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung. School development consultants from proSchul and the Berlin Further Training Center, as well as school supervisors, were regularly invited to participate in the pilot phase. During the course of the project, a separate focus for the school development consulting profession was identified.

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.