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What kind of challenges can be addressed using Design Thinking?

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What kind of challenges can be addressed using Design Thinking?

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Design thinking ideas for teachers, school, district, and community.

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Educators across the nation have been using Design Thinking to solve challenges in their work. Projects range in scope and scale including design solutions- from curriculum, to space, to processes and to systems- addressing problems in the classroom and across entire districts.

How might my classroom be redesigned to better meet my students' needs?

Michael Schurr, a 2nd grade teacher in New York, realized that he never asked his students what would make them comfortable in the classroom. He decided to talk directly with his students to figure out the best design for their environment.

Based on his students' input, he was able to redesign his classroom to better address the needs and desires of his students. He lowered the bulletin boards so that his students could actually see the content he'd spent hours assembling, and created a more comfortable semi-private space for the students to study by rethinking the student cubby space. His students are more engaged, and move more fluidly in the classroom space. Now Michael consistently engages his students in helping him more effectively shape their learning experience.

Michael is using design to re-imagine his classroom through the lens of his students' needs.

How might we create a 21st century learning experience at our school?

The faculty at Ormondale Elementary School in California wondered if they were preparing their students well for the future. They decided it was time to corroboratively design an approach to teaching and learning that they felt was updated and relevant for the 21st century.

Collectively, they embarked on a design journey and came to an approach they call "Investigative Learning", which addresses students not as receivers of information, but as shapers of knowledge. The faculty continues to evolve and share this approach with new teachers through the creation of a Manual of Investigative Learning to keep track of their philosophy and methods. They have gained support from their school board, and have become recognized as a California Distinguished School.
The faculty at Ormondale Elementary School uses design to address the needs of their evolving student body.

How might we redesign our approach to curriculum development and delivery to center around the needs and desires of our teachers and students?

With a movement toward student-centered and personalized instruction, the Howard County Public School System in Maryland is using Design Thinking to tackle next generation curriculum redesign incorporating 21st Century skills. Currently, there is a disconnect between the existing paper-based curriculum and the interactive digital resources that are now available anytime, anywhere for teachers and students.

Tapping into teacher, parent, and student behaviors in and outside of school, the design team collected inspiration around the ways that people engage with information and interact with curricular materials. Understanding the desires of teachers, students, parents, and administrators has helped the team rethink curriculum delivery as well as develop resources to replace, augment, and enhance current curriculum documents.
Howard County is using design to re-conceptualize curriculum creation and delivery to meet the needs of all learners.

How might we redesign our high school to elevate student engagement and
academic outcomes?

Consistent low student achievement results at Castle High School in Hawaii demonstrated the need for a redesign and restructure of the school. Design Thinking Hawaii, a non-profit organization that engages volunteers to apply Design Thinking to big challenges, partnered with the Hawaii Department of Education to reimagine the Castle High experience.

Through a series of mini-charettes, Design Thinking Hawaii has collected the needs and interests of learners, teachers, and families and engaged the larger community to imagine new solutions that could help the school be more effective. The adopted plan captured the community's priorities in new content and structures, and Complex Area Superintendent Lea Albert is enabling the school and community to prototype and iterate core curriculum, character education, and support services. This is the first public-school model in Hawaii to co-design its offerings with community, targeting systemic educational problems.
Design Thinking Hawaii is using design to provide the state with input that will shape the redesign of Castle High and other schools in the community.

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What kind of challenges can be addressed using Design Thinking? Educators across the nation have been using Design Thinking to solve challenges in their work. Projects range in scope and scale including design solutions- from curriculum, to space, to processes and to systems- addressing p

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Design Thinking + Project Based Learning + ice cream = reinventing ice cream

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Fusing Project Based Learning into Design Thinking plus one scoop of ice cream to ignite students' curiosity and inspire them to design innovative solutions.

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Curriculum co-design using design thinking methods.

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The recent release of the Gonski 2.0 report has done an excellent job of re-opening the conversation around how our schools could better fulfil their purpose.

Much of the commentary has centred on the report's recommendations for teaching and learning in schools. But the whole chapter focused on "creating, supporting and valuing a profession of expert educators" has not received enough attention.

The suggestion that teaching and learning can be significantly improved by better supporting our teachers is vital and should not be overlooked. In particular, there is growing evidence that teacher collaboration can lead to more satisfied teachers while producing better outcomes for students.

What does Gonski say?

The positive impact of active collaboration is summarised in the report on page 58:

Teacher collaboration occurs in many forms, however not all types are equally effective. Active collaboration - such as peer observation and feedback, coaching, mentoring, team teaching and joint research projects - allows teachers to learn from each other and typically has a positive impact on students. In contrast, collaboration that concentrates on simply sharing resources, planning activities or administrative issues has little or no positive effect on student achievement.

While the report flags the need for action on embedding professional collaboration in everyday teaching practice, it doesn't provide much in the way of suggestions for how to achieve this. This criticism has been repeated by many in education.

While active collaboration between teachers has long been recognised and encouraged (for example, as a part of the AITSL teacher professional standards), the reality for many teachers is there is precious little time in which to collaborate. Even where there is time, there is a need for more structure to the way teachers collaborate so it happens in an authentic, productive way.

What is design thinking?

The ability to empathise, think creatively, collaborate productively, experiment with solutions and communicate ideas are all key parts of design. They are skills anybody can learn.

Read more: How the mindset of designers can make us better leaders

The term design thinking has become a popular buzzword to refer to this set of skills. It's particularly popular in education because design thinking is a great way to learn 21st century skills, such as creativity and critical thinking. If teachers develop these skills themselves, then they are in a better position to teach them.

Design thinking is not just about knowing the design process and having the tools to use it, but also about adopting a design thinking mindset. This involves seeing the world in a solution-focused way and having the creative self-confidence to try tackling problems in new ways.

Design thinking in schools

Our team has been working for the last year on a project that involves partnering with groups of teachers in different schools around Queensland to work on design problems. This kind of partnership between designers and non-designers to solve problems is known as co-design.

Author provided, Author provided (No reuse)

The first problem that we have worked on is the planning of a term of work for the new ACARA Digital Technologies curriculum. Instead of teachers working individually, we work with school leadership to create time and space for them to work as a group. We support them in framing the problem, developing student-centered ideas, and preparing classes. Teachers learn to adopt a design thinking mindset simply by taking part in this process.

For example, some teachers implicitly conceive of curriculum planning as "making sure that the curriculum gets covered". We challenge them to work as a team to reframe the problem through a journey-mapping exercise. We find they come up with a new frame such as "keeping students as engaged as possible for an entire term".

We also use exercises such as developing personas and brainstorming to come up with ideas that are more "out there" than they might first think possible. We then provide the technological and content knowledge to help them achieve their goals.

This form of facilitated collaboration with teachers around design tasks has had success. Preliminary results show that teachers feel supported (because they can draw on the help of a team), happy (because collaboration is one of the fundamental drivers of professional satisfaction), and empowered (because they see the results with the students).

The challenge presented by the Gonski 2.0 report is these benefits need to be scalable - teachers across the country all need to have these opportunities to collaborate meaningfully.

Sharing the knowledge

Our research (based on earlier international work) provides evidence we can achieve this goal by:

1. Instilling a design thinking mindset in teachers. This has been proven to be a great way to create the space for meaningful collaboration, while developing the capacity of teachers for teaching creativity, critical thinking and interpersonal skills.

2. Using co-design as professional development to meet these needs in a way that could reach every teacher across a state, through a combination of face-to-face and online workshops.

3. Sustaining these partnerships over time by creating online spaces for teachers that enable them to share and re-use knowledge but that remain connected to real-world institutions and events. For example, we developed a community of design teachers in Queensland that was underpinned by professional development workshops and support of teacher associations.

These three pillars provide a direct way of responding to the recommendation in Gonski 2.0 for better teacher collaboration.

Our proposal is to shift funding away from the approaches that have defined the past decade - like online databases of resources that give little context, "standalone" online communities that are divorced from real-world organisations, or "driveby" professional development workshops. Funding should instead be put towards the provision of co-design teams that provide the link between professional development, online resources and online communities.

Read more: Why teachers are turning to Twitter

Further, co-design is a meaningful way of sharing learning between schools. Each time we work with a school we are able to share with them resources and advice from our work with previous schools.

For example, one rural school we worked with took a term-long project that had been successful in a city, and adapted the assignment to make it fit the rural context. Most of the lessons needed only minor changes, and the result was the rural students felt the project spoke directly to their own experiences.

Gonski 2.0 presents an excellent opportunity for us to re-evaluate how we nurture, support and provision our teachers. The report states:

For teachers to fulfil their role as expert educators, schools need to be seen as professional learning organisations. They need to develop a culture that values continuous learning where teachers, as well as students, can feel safe to admit gaps in knowledge and understanding.

We believe that this culture of collaboration, growth and experimentation is best achieved when teachers adopt a design thinking mindset. Teachers come to adopt a design thinking mindset through a combination of design experience, professional development and ongoing support. Co-design presents an excellent way to achieve all three.

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How design thinking can help teachers collaborate

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The recent release of the Gonski 2.0 report has done an excellent job of re-opening the conversation around how our schools could better fulfil their purpose. Much of the commentary has centred on the report's recommendations for teaching and learning in schools.

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"Designing the "why" of learning".
"A mindset to prepare students for the future."
Curated resources from the University of Calgary library.

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Getting Started with Design Thinking in the Classroom

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Getting Started with Design Thinking in the Classroom

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LAUNCH - a design thinking framework geared towards K-12.

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Every day, I ask my kids, "What did you make in school today?" Too often, they can't give me an answer. But on the days that they do, their eyes light up and they passionately describe their projects. It's in those moments that I am reminded that making is magic.

I want to see schools transform into bastions of creativity and wonder.

But here's the thing: this is hard to pull off. We all have curriculum maps and limited resources and standards we have to teach. We don't always have fancy maker spaces or high-tech gadgetry. Our time is limited and so creativity is often a lofty ideal that rarely becomes a reality.

This is what I love about design thinking. It works within the standards in every subject. It's a flexible approach that you can use with limited resources. It isn't something new that you add to your crowded schedule. Instead, it's an innovative approach to the work you are already doing - a process designed specifically to boost creativity and bring out the maker in every student.

This is why A.J. Juliani and I developed the LAUNCH Cycle. It's a design thinking framework specifically tailored to K-12 classrooms that you can use at any grade level. Think of it this way. Making is the mindset. Design thinking is the process. The LAUNCH Cycle is the framework.

Every Child Is a Maker

I believe that every classroom should be filled with creativity and wonder. I want to see teachers unleash the creative potential in all of their students so that kids can be makers, designers, artists, and engineers.

I realize that school can be busy. Materials can be scarce. The creative process can seem confusing, especially when you have a tight curriculum map. So creativity becomes a side project, an enrichment activity you get to when you have time for it. But the thing is, there's never enough time.

We can do better.

I am convinced that creative thinking is as vital as math or reading or writing. There's power in problem-solving and experimenting and taking things from questions to ideas to authentic products that you launch to the world. Something happens in students when they define themselves as makers and inventors and creators.

I believe all students deserve the opportunity to be their best creative selves, both in and out of school. I believe all kids are unique, authentic, and destined to be original.

I have a crazy belief that all people are naturally creative. Too many people have believed the lie that there are certain "creative types" who are the exception to the rule. This is why I believe in design thinking as a powerful process for helping students embrace a maker mindset and recover this sense of creative wonder.

What Is Design Thinking?

The term "design thinking" is often attached to maker spaces and STEM labs. However, design thinking is bigger than STEM. It begins with the premise of tapping into student curiosity and allowing them to create, test and re-create until they eventually ship what they made to a real audience (sometimes global but often local). Design thinking isn't a subject or a topic or a class. It's more of way of solving problems that encourages risk-taking and creativity.

Design thinking is a flexible process for getting the most out of the creative process. It is used in the arts, in engineering, in the corporate world, at universities, and in social and civic spaces. You can use it in every subject with every age group. It works when creating digital content or when building things with duct tape and cardboard. It can even be used in planning events or in designing services.

When students use design thinking, they are more likely to develop a maker mindset and when that happens, you see this . . .

Isn't that what we want for our students? Isn't this what we mean when we talk about students as passionate, creative, lifelong learners? And is this what it looks like when we talk about preparing kids for the creative economy of the future? But how do we actually make this happen?

The Student-Friendly LAUNCH Cycle

For the last 12 years, I've used design thinking. As a teacher, I used it for everything from coding projects to service projects to documentaries to engineering challenges. As startup co-founder, we used the design thinking cycle for product development. As an author, it's a framework I use for publishing. However, as a teacher, I realized that design thinking needed to be relevant, developmentally-appropriate, and simple enough that any child could use it.

A.J. Juliani and I realized the need for a student-friendly design thinking framework tailored specifically for a K-12 environment. We both had spent over a decade using design thinking and we had each added a few innovations, including an inquiry phase, a research phase, and a launch phase. After testing this out in multiple classrooms, we finalized the LAUNCH Cycle.

You can read all about it in our book Launch: Using the Design Thinking Process to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student.

We created an acronym to help make it easier to remember:

L: Look, Listen, and Learn
In the first phase, students look, listen, and learn.The goal here is awareness. It might be a sense of wonder at a process or an awareness of a problem or a sense of empathy toward an audience.

A: Ask Tons of Questions
Sparked by curiosity, students move to the second phase, where they ask tons of questions.

U: Understanding the Process or Problem
This leads to understanding the process or problem through an authentic research experience. They might conduct interviews or needs assessments, research articles, watch videos, or analyze data.

N: Navigate Ideas
Students apply that newly acquired knowledge to potential solutions. In this phase, they navigate ideas. Here they not only brainstorm, but they also analyze ideas, combine ideas, and generate a concept for what they will create.

C: Create a Prototype
In this next phase, they create a prototype. It might be a digital work or a tangible product, a work of art or something they engineer. It might even be an action or an event or a system.

H: Highlight and Fix
Next, they begin to highlight what's working and fix what's failing. The goal here is to view this revision process as an experiment full of iterations, where every mistake takes them closer to success.

Launch to an Audience
Then, when it's done, it's ready to launch. In the launch phase, they send it to an authentic audience. They share their work with the world!

Getting Started with Design Thinking in the Classroom

The following is a series I created on design thinking. Note that I continue to update this and revise this, so be sure to bookmark this page an come back to revisit it periodically.

Part One: An Overview of Design Thinking

Part Two: The LAUNCH Cycle

Part Three: Taking the Leap

The FREE Design Thinking Toolkit and Maker Project

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Getting Started with Design Thinking in the Classroom

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Every day, I ask my kids, "What did you make in school today?" Too often, they can't give me an answer. But on the days that they do, their eyes light up and they passionately describe their projects. It's in those moments that I am reminded that making is magic.

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Guiding thoughts from IDEO.org. Part of their Design Kit.

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Do you have a design thinking or design-based learning thought or idea that you'd like to share?

Can be your own or one that you've discovered.