Design Thinking in Education

Using a human centric approach towards design, Design Thinking can transform the learning and teaching experience for our students and teachers.  

Start with "Why"

If you haven’t  had the pleasure yet, please watch the video by Simon Sinek, ‘Start with Why’.  While he is talking about successful organizations, I believe it has many parallels to our teaching and learning as well. When we start with the ‘why’, we can create more meaningful learning experiences.  

Design thinking offers us many of the pathways to making it such a powerful teaching approach.  Here are a couple of the learning outcomes that can benefit our students.

Empathize

Design thinking begins with a deep understanding of their user group, the person or group they are designing for.  This is done through interviews, observation, etc.

Define

Utilizing their information collected in the prior stage, students utilize techniques to categorize their information to create meaningful patterns & connections to identify underlying problems and issues.

Ideate

With this deper understanding, students begin to design and create ideas to help solve the problems they were able to define.

Prototype

As students negotiate their ideas with their peers, students will need to pick and choose the solution that they think will work the best considering their situations.

Test

Students will create a number of prototypes.  In this phase, students design their tests so that they can collect meaningful information that will help improve the product.

Iterate

The final stage enables our students to take their test results and to improve upon the entire design. This can include going back to the beginning to rethink the problem or to go back to the area where they think they can improve the design.