The Five Ds

The Five Ds are the shape of a session. Each track spends its sessions on different pairs of them, but the order does not change and skipping one is always what went wrong.

Define

Decide what you are making, who it is for, and what a good version looks like, specifically enough to recognise one. The tool stays shut.

This is the step learners want to skip and the step facilitators most often let them. A session that opens with the tool already running spends the rest of its time reacting to whatever appeared first.

Decompose

Break the work into parts and sort them by who has to do them. Which parts need your judgment, your knowledge of the room, your call? Which parts are production work?

Sorting is the skill. Most people either delegate nothing, and get no use out of the collaborator, or delegate the deciding along with the typing, which is the failure this whole curriculum is arranged against.

Direct

Say what you want precisely enough to be answerable. Constraints, audience, purpose, and the success criteria you wrote in Define.

Vague direction produces generic results, and learners reliably blame the model for this. Ask for a page about dogs and any system, human or otherwise, gives you the average page about dogs.

Discern

Judge what comes back against the criteria, then pick one of four: keep it, fix it, ask differently, or start over.

The gate comes due here. A learner who cannot say how they would know it was wrong cannot do this step, and will default to keeping whatever arrived.

Develop

Integrate, iterate, and say what you can now do that you could not before.

The last part is not a reflection ritual. It is the difference between having used a tool and having learned something, and without it the loop collapses into offloading.

How the tracks map

Sessions cover two Ds at a time, which is what fits.

High school and community run Define and Decompose in the first session, Direct and Discern in the second, Discern and Develop in the third. Adults run the same arc compressed or spread, depending on whether you have four short sessions or one long day.

If you only have time for one

Define. A session that plans well and builds badly still teaches the thing. A session that builds well without planning teaches that the tool is impressive, which learners already believed when they walked in.