SEL Teacher Janice Toben and I have discussed the similarities between Design Thinking and Social Emotional Learning for more than three years now - since before the Innovation Lab had even been designed or built. We identified many of the similarities between the two programs, such as active listening, self-regulation, teamwork, leadership, persistence, and coming from a place of inquiry. Janice and I have been able to make our early vision of integrating SEL and Design Thinking a reality during an extensive Innovation Lab project around the topic of peace-building.

For the research/deep dive stage of this unit, Janice arranged for John Paul Lederach, Northwestern University Professor of Peace Studies and author of The Moral Imagination, to speak to our students. He discussed some of the traits that he believes are necessary to be a person who promotes peace. He led the students through an exercise that helped them understand the importance of being creative and not assuming that there are only two opposing possibilities in a conflict-filled situation. The students also had the opportunity to speak with Glen Galaich, Outreach Director at Human Rights Watch. Janice then helped the students to create a web of images and thoughts about peace. We could see that students' knowledge and interest were building.

At this point, we introduced the Peace Design Challenge: to create something that would promote peace in the world in some way. To focus their projects, students reflected on the previous experiences and began developing and writing down goals that they had for their Peace Design Challenge. Next, we had them generate ideas for ten different areas that could be used to meet these goals, such as music, peace activism, fundraising, poetry, and so on. They chose two or three of these areas and quickly wrote or sketched two to three ideas.

With Janice's help, students formed teams around common interests. They were introduced to the rudiments of project planning and learned about how to monitor their team's progress. As they proceeded with their projects, most groups found they needed to do more research, and they used the lab's computers to do this. Student-created peace projects were shared at a school assembly in honor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. They included:

• A public "Peace Art" activity on Burlingame Avenue - funds raised were donated to Human Rights Watch.
• A meditative peace garden in a corner of the Hillside Learning Complex plaza.
• An "SEL4Kids" web page to promote peaceful interactions between students at schools worldwide.
• A video about a fundraiser the students had done to benefit Smiletrain.
• A  6 minute video (this one is very large, so it may take a few minutes to load) surveying the struggle of African Americans from the time of slavery, through civil rights to the Presidency of our first African American president, Barack Hussein Obama.