Michael Berrell
Assistant Professor
SUNY Farmingdale
Most design faculty arrive in higher-ed with a portfolio, not a pedagogy. Drawing on fifteen years of teaching—from high-school art rooms to senior BFA capstones—I translate three active-learning structures into designer-friendly routines that make a classroom feel less like a lecture hall and more like a working studio.
• Agency-Style Jigsaw – Students take on specialist roles (art director, strategist, production artist). Each digs into a targeted reading or demo, then teaches the rest of the team before they assemble a full brand campaign.
• Flipped Chapter Exchange – Half the class distills one chunk of the text, half tackles another, and both sides trade five-slide Pecha Kucha briefs so studio time is free for critique and iteration.
• Iterative Think-Pair-Share – Sixteen individual concepts collapse to eight, then four, then one polished solution as teams merge and refine, mirroring the review ladders of an agency.
I’ve run these circuits in typography, branding, and service-design courses; the pattern is consistent. Roles spark accountability, students vet ideas in smaller circles before they ever reach me, and critiques get sharper because everyone arrives as a mini-expert. The shift echoes John Dewey’s claim that learning “is rooted in experience.” By staging role-play inside a typographic grid, students move from doing to knowing—reflecting on their choices as they make them.
The paper positions this toolkit alongside the practice hubs at Stanford’s d.school and Cooper Hewitt, but its tone stays grounded in studio life. I close with a one-page Method Map that pairs common design-course goals with these structures, so any instructor can drop in a project, set the roles, and watch the room light up—no educational jargon required.
This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.