Feedback is crucial for self-development and improvement of learning and practice. Only when we know how our work is perceived by others can we may make conscious changes. Teachers provide feedback to students, and students provide feedback to teachers. This feedback is used to adapt the learning experience. The seminar transforms into a shared design experience, in which responsibilities are shared among all attendees. We learn to communicate with clarity and consideration, while listening carefully with the intent to understand. Giving and receiving feedback also needs to be learned, also that there are different kinds of feedback, such as formative feedback, feed-forward and summative feedback. When learning is the students job, what is the job of the teacher?

Alongside feedback of importance is reflection. We do not learn through experience and feedback automatically, we have to reflect. Reflection is essential for deeper learning and improvement of practice. There are different ways of reflection that also have to be learned. Making conscious use of reflection may lead to new ways of reflecting—and better learning. Different methods of reflection should be made explicit, practiced and consciously used. Among those methods are writing going for a walk with a conversation partner, reflecting together as a group and reflecting in our journals or in an email. Additionally we reflect about our different ways of reflecting which permits students to develop their own ways of reflecting in other contexts and find out what works for them. And reflecting together establishes familiarity and trust.

Critical thinking is related to critical consciousness which proposes that people discover and record challenges in their communities and debate ideas about how to address them. Such critical consciousness is a foundation for democratic participation. This problem-based approach reminds us of a design studio where learning takes place through active problem solving and critical reflection. We link critical thinking to systems thinking, leading students to investigate the complexity hidden behind simple products and designs. We gain insight into carbon footprints, the miles that materials and products travel across our globalised world, into energy, labour conditions and resources. Innocuous household items become part of larger networks and relationships. We develop methods to map these, and thus gain a better understanding of their connectedness and complexity. Systems thinking enables us to discover the hidden complexity of our world, distinguish interdepencies and map leverage points.

A commitment to sustainability is very much linked to systems thinking. Only when we reveal the hidden complexity of our designs we can aim at making them more sustainable. This should become a school wide project and commitment. Engrained into our practice, life and actions. For this we also need to understand ecosystems and how they work. This will also help us to better understand the bigger picture around our school knowledge, and how it is actually linked and related to our own ecosystem, our lives and our design practice.