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Problem Statement: How do we transport goods in our community and how can this process be improved?
Science/Social Studies Standards

SS2G1 Locate and compare major topographical features of Georgia and describe how these features define Georgia’s surface.

SS2E2 Identify some ways in which goods and services are allocated (such as: price, majority rule, contests, force, sharing, lottery, authority, first-come-first-served, and personal characteristics).

SS2E3 Explain that people usually use money to obtain the goods and services they want and explain how money makes trade easier than barter.

S2E2. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information to develop an understanding of the patterns of the sun and the moon and the sun’s effect on Earth.

Physical Science S2P1. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information about the properties of matter and changes that occur in objects.

S2P2. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information to explain the effect of a force (a push or a pull) in the movement of an object (changes in speed and direction).

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Design and evaluate solutions for sustaining the quality and supply of natural resources such as water, soil and air.

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Add in your statement / question that is guiding your PBL. This should be something for the students. Include the standards you're covering in this question, or at least some of them. You can use the STE(A)M four square if you want or you can write it out how you want. Post by noon on 2/25 so we can review before our call 2/26.

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I think this is a great question, but one that doesn't have an absolute answer. I would say, consider the standards that make sense in the project. Do not force fit standards in to a project. Also, as you are learning how to plan and execute PBL, I say start with something smaller and interdisciplinary, if possible.

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Driving Question Tubric 2.0

The DQ Tubric 2.0 helps you practice writing Driving Questions by framing initial words, person or entity, action or challenge, and audience/purpose.

The Tubric is a fun, hands-on way to practice the often-challenging task of writing a Driving Question for a project.

Use the Tubric in professional development or collaborative planning time to help you and your colleagues design effective projects.

Log in to get this resource...

To view or download this resource, log in here.

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Frame the DQ's initial words, person or entity, action or challenge, and audience/purpose.

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How big is too big for a PBL? I am thinking about how many standards.

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How big is too big for a PBL? I am thinking about how many standards.

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Example School Planning Photos

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Start planning your next PBL project with confidence, using this step-by-step form as your guide.

Why is a project planner important?

When you're ready to design a project for your classroom, it's helpful to have a framework to capture your ideas and organize your plans.

A Gold Standard PBL unit has a lot of pieces to plan: your goals for student learning, entry event and driving question, major product(s) students will create, daily lessons, and more.

It's also a good idea for a school to use a common framework for PBL unit planning, so teachers can collaborate using the same language, and share projects more easily with colleagues.

So we've created a Project Planner to support you in the planning process.

The Project Planner has five parts:

1. Project Overview: Key features of your project

2. Learning Goals: Standards, success skills, literacy skills, rubrics

3. Project Milestones: Significant steps in the project

4. Project Calendar: Day-by-day activities in the project

5. Lesson Planner: Supporting resource with guidance on planning daily lessons to meet the needs of all learners

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Start planning your next PBL project with confidence, using this step-by-step form as your guide. Why is a project planner important? When you're ready to design a project for your classroom, it's helpful to have a framework to capture your ideas and organize your plans.

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Your constantly-updated definition of Worst Possible Idea and collection of topical content and literature

What is Worst Possible Idea?

Worst Possible Idea is an ideation method where team members purposefully seek the worst solutions in ideation sessions. The "inverted" search process relaxes them, boosts their confidence and stokes their creativity so they can examine these ideas, challenge their assumptions and gain insights towards great ideas.

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See how seeds of wisdom grow from even the most "toxic" soil.
Why go for the Worst Possible Idea?

Some people clam up in group sessions such as brainstorming, although everyone in a design team technically should feel free to explore all possibilities on the road to the best solution. With their peers surrounding them, they may be reluctant to offer input, fearing their ideas will make them look silly or short-sighted. Team members may also hold back on mentioning-and then forget-fragments or beginnings of plans that are actually valuable, fearing someone will rip their embryonic brainchild apart and humiliate them. When your design team uses the Worst Possible Idea technique, you avoid this by flipping the playing field. The name of the game is to produce the silliest, craziest ideas. Therefore, as nobody can look silly, nobody will worry about losing face. Better still, because the premise of the approach seems ridiculous, the group's laughter relaxes us further as we proceed.

Author, president and co-founder of The Growth Engine Company LLC, Bryan Mattimore coined the term "worst possible idea" when he described turning the search for innovative ideas with a group of professionals upside down. The point was to kick-start a fruitful process for thinking up ideas by breaking with convention. Instead of getting stuck on trying for good ideas the group was encouraged to adopt a radically different approach. Soon, because everyone was searching for downright awful ideas, they could loosen up. And because the group could relax enough, they managed to overcome the impasse or mental constipation which the pressure of other ideation techniques can impose. In the case of the individuals Mattimore worked with, as they generated many seemingly terrible ideas, they found they could get on track towards what actually would work.

Steps in the Worst Possible Idea Method

The real power of Worst Possible Idea is what happens after we start to feel more at ease about offering our thoughts. Although you and your team are free to kick back and try for the most ludicrous-sounding notions, there is a method to the madness.

To practice Worst Possible Idea, as group members we should:

Mix and match various awful ideas to see what happens.

What can come from Worst Possible Ideas?

When design team members identify a rotten-looking or "preposterous" idea and deconstruct it to see what makes it tick as such, they can find powerful insights that may serve as foundations for good plans elsewhere.

"Bad ideas started flowing. "Here's a really bad idea," said one banker. "We could round down everyone's deposits to the nearest dollar. Most people probably wouldn't notice." Said another, "let's make mistakes in their favor, give everyone extra money every time they make a transaction. Now that's a bad idea!" More laughter," but if you've ever seen the Bank of America "keep the change" savings program, perhaps it began in this session."

- Bob Dorf, Co-author of The Startup Owner's Manual (writing about Bryan Mattimore)

Learn More about Worst Possible Idea

Find details on Worst Possible Idea and other Design Thinking techniques in the Interaction Design Foundation's course: https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/design-thinking-the-ultimate-guide

Read Bob Dorf's piece that sheds light on how Bryan Mattimore wielded Worst Possible Idea with powerful results: https://www.inc.com/bob-dorf/to-find-a-great-idea-try-looking-for-the-worst-ide.html

Psychology author Drake Baer examines the dynamic of shame-culture in ideation sessions, offering some valuable and amusing insights: https://www.fastcompany.com/3009118/you-just-proposed-the-worst-idea-possible-yeah-well-its-actually-pure-gold

Literature on Worst Possible Idea

Here's the entire UX literature on Worst Possible Idea by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Featured article

We all know what it is like when someone calls for new ideas. At first, no one wants to say anything; most people tend to wait to hear what others have to say, and-if they feel that their ideas are not as great-they may bottle up what they're thinking. Worst Possible Idea is a highly effective method that you can use to get the creative juices flowing and help those not so confident in expressing themselves by flipping the brainstorm on its head. And it's a lot of fun, too.
Instead of going for good ideas and putting the pressure on, call for the worst and, yes, the worst possible ideas your team can come up with. Doing this relieves the anxiety and self-confidence issues and allows people to be more playful and adventurous, as they know their ideas are most certainly not going to be scrutinized for missing the mark. It's way easier to say "Hey no that's not bad enough. " than the opposite. Better still, it helps ensure that mental constipation is never responsible for keeping a breakthrough idea from getting out into the open.

In Idea Stormers, the author and innovation guru to Fortune 500 companies, Bryan Mattimore, recalls a scenario where he was trying to get a group of bankers to come up with innovative ideas. They had gone through hours of ideation sessions and had come up with nothing worth considering. Mattimore introduced the Worst Possible Idea method as a last resort. As soon as the first of the bankers had thrown out a terrible suggestion, the rest of the group quickly joined in and finally had some fun as well, opening up the way for positive ideation sessions later.

The Worst Possible Idea or Worst Idea technique is not purely an icebreaker-style technique, though, as insights that may stem from really bad ideas may even be useful in generating really great ideas. On that note, it doubles as a-really fun-process of elimination.

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

- Thomas Edison, American inventor who developed the phonograph, the motion picture camera and the electric light bulb. As quoted in Behavior-Based Robotics (1998) by Ronald C. Arkin. p. 8

The Worst Possible Idea method is a fun and effective ideation icebreaker technique. However, your team may also very likely be able to extract and come up with amazing ideas from really bad ideas.

Best Practice: How

The technique is simple:

1. The facilitator briefs the ideation session participants about the problem statement (also called Point Of View), the overall goals and important user insights.

2. Then the facilitator asks the participants to come up with the worst possible ideas they can think of. There should be permission given to revel in unusable, impractical, stupid or foolish ideas; ones that are nonsensical, ridiculous, incorrect, mismatched, and against known best-practices, laws or guidelines. The intention is not necessarily to descend into toxic or gratuitously offensive concepts (the facilitator will need to use their judgement to keep the ideation session happy and healthy) but to escape constraints by opening the mind. You can do this as a collective brainstorm session, or you can ask all participants to write down their worst ideas individually-this method is called Braindumping. You could also use the Brainwriting method, where each participant fills out idea cards/papers with their worst possible ideas for 3-5 minutes and then passes on the idea card to another participant, who elaborates on their worst possible ideas, and so forth.

3. As the facilitator, be sure to push your group to generate extremely bad ideas! This will help get participants laughing and re-engaged. As a facilitator of ideation sessions, it's your job to help participants open their minds and hearts, and the Worst Idea method can help you do just that-especially if you combine it with the collective Brainstorm method.

4. The technique includes generating as many terrible ideas as possible.

5. It includes listing the attributes of the worst ideas.

6. Investigate which attributes of the ideas make them really bad.

7. Once the participants have generated a list of their worst ideas, you as the facilitator should challenge the group to turn those horrible ideas into good ones. They can either consider the ideas' opposites or look for aspects within the terrible ideas that might inspire a good one. Or, you can consider simply removing the worst attribute and replacing it with something else. Mix and match different bad ideas, and see what comes out.

Why

A closed mind will not be able to build on external stimuli. We've all witnessed this in some way or another-a person who is convinced that their own ideas are better than anyone else's becomes oblivious to the value of the contributions others have made. Group ideation functions best when all ideas can be expressed equally and then later mixed up in unconventional ways. This approach by the Worst Possible Idea produces novel combinations or completely new ideas. With ideas, one leads to another; bad ideas lead to good ones, sometimes in ways we could never have imagined. At times, the best idea stems from its exact opposite-the worst. This is why the Worst Possible Idea is actually an ideation method, one which you can use to provide disruptive insight within the ideation process.

This is a lateral thinking technique which seeks to solve problems through an indirect and creative approach. It's all about using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The purpose of lateral thinking is to help us break out of rigid thought patterns and to generate unpredictable and innovative ideas. Lateral thinking seeks to arrive at unknown solutions, as opposed to vertical thinking, which operates directly on perceivable data and analysis. Not for nothing are the horizons-and, by association, the possibilities-broader with lateral thinking.

Do you want to learn how you can get started using the Worst Possible Idea methods to break the ice and help open up participants' minds? Then download and print our Worst Possible Idea template:

Get your free template for "Worst Possible Idea"

The Take Away

The Worst Possible Idea method is a fun and effective ideation icebreaker technique. However, your team may also very likely be able to extract and come up with amazing ideas from really bad ideas. The Worst Possible Idea is a lateral thinking method which is very much about standing back, looking at the big picture and understanding concepts. It also requires that you focus on the parts that have perhaps been overlooked, challenging assumptions and seeking alternatives. It's a great way of zeroing in on what will work by exposing what won't, but then working out or working back elements from these "dud ideas" that may have a bearing on the true solution to the problem at hand.

References & Where to Learn More

Bryan Mattimore, Idea Stormers: How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs, 2012.

Edward de Bono, New think: The use of lateral thinking in the generation of new ideas, 1967

Edward de Bono, Lateral thinking: Creativity Step by Step, 1970

Edward De Bono, De Bono Thinking.

The de Bono Group. Six Thinking Hats: http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php

PDAgroup Blog. Design Thinking: The Ideal Design Space, 2013.

Ella Miron-Spektor, Miriam Erez, and Eitan Naveh, To Drive Creativity, Add Some Conformity, Harvard Business Review, March 2012.

Bob Riley, The Provocation Creative Technique, ThoughtEgg.com.

Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland, Rise of the DEO - Leadership by Design.

Images

Hero Image: © Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Learn more about Worst Possible Idea

Take a deep dive into Worst Possible Idea with our course Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide .

Some of the world's leading brands, such as Apple, Google, Samsung, and General Electric, have rapidly adopted the design thinking approach, and design thinking is being taught at leading universities around the world, including Stanford d.school, Harvard, and MIT. What is design thinking, and why is it so popular and effective?

Design Thinking is not exclusive to designers -all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering and business have practiced it. So, why call it Design Thinking? Well, that's because design work processes help us systematically extract, teach, learn and apply human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way-in our designs, businesses, countries and lives. And that's what makes it so special.

The overall goal of this design thinking course is to help you design better products, services, processes, strategies, spaces, architecture, and experiences. Design thinking helps you and your team develop practical and innovative solutions for your problems. It is a human-focused, prototype-driven, innovative design process. Through this course, you will develop a solid understanding of the fundamental phases and methods in design thinking, and you will learn how to implement your newfound knowledge in your professional work life. We will give you lots of examples; we will go into case studies, videos, and other useful material, all of which will help you dive further into design thinking. In fact, this course also includes exclusive video content that we've produced in partnership with design leaders like Alan Dix, William Hudson and Frank Spillers!

This course contains a series of practical exercises that build on one another to create a complete design thinking project. The exercises are optional, but you'll get invaluable hands-on experience with the methods you encounter in this course if you complete them, because they will teach you to take your first steps as a design thinking practitioner. What's equally important is you can use your work as a case study for your portfolio to showcase your abilities to future employers! A portfolio is essential if you want to step into or move ahead in a career in the world of human-centered design.

Design thinking methods and strategies belong at every level of the design process. However, design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers-all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. What's special about design thinking is that designers and designers' work processes can help us systematically extract, teach, learn, and apply these human-centered techniques in solving problems in a creative and innovative way-in our designs, in our businesses, in our countries, and in our lives.

That means that design thinking is not only for designers but also for creative employees, freelancers, and business leaders. It's for anyone who seeks to infuse an approach to innovation that is powerful, effective and broadly accessible, one that can be integrated into every level of an organization, product, or service so as to drive new alternatives for businesses and society.

You earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you complete the course. You can highlight them on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.

All Literature

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Your constantly-updated definition of Worst Possible Idea and collection of topical content and literature Worst Possible Idea is an ideation method where team members purposefully seek the worst solutions in ideation sessions. The "inverted" search process relaxes them, boosts their confidence and stokes their creativity so they can examine these ideas, challenge their assumptions and gain insights towards great ideas.

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An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which the design thinker will focus on solving. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the Design Thinking process, as the definition of a problem (also called a design challenge) will require you to synthesise your observations about your users from the first stage in the Design Thinking process, which is called the Empathise stage.
When you learn how to master the definition of your problem, problem statement, or design challenge, it will greatly improve your Design Thinking process and result. Why? A great definition of your problem statement will guide you and your team's work and kick start the ideation process in the right direction. It will bring about clarity and focus to the design space. On the contrary, if you don't pay enough attention to defining your problem, you will work like a person stumbling in the dark.
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 In the Define stage you synthesise your observations about your users from the first stage, the Empathise stage. A great definition of your problem statement will guide you and your team's work and kick start the ideation process (third stage) in the right direction. The five stages are not always sequential - they do not have to follow any specific order and they can often occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively. As such, the stages should be understood as different modes that contribute to a project, rather than sequential steps.
Analysis and Synthesis
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Before we go into what makes a great problem statement, it's useful to first gain an understanding of the relationship between analysis and synthesis that many design thinkers will go through in their projects. Tim Brown, CEO of the international design consultancy firm IDEO, wrote in his book Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, that analysis and synthesis are "equally important, and each plays an essential role in the process of creating options and making choices."

Analysis is about breaking down complex concepts and problems into smaller, easier-to-understand constituents. We do that, for instance, during the first stage of the Design Thinking process, the Empathise stage, when we observe and document details that relate to our users. Synthesis, on the other hand, involves creatively piecing the puzzle together to form whole ideas. This happens during the Define stage when we organise, interpret, and make sense of the data we have gathered to create a problem statement.

Although analysis takes place during the Empathise stage and synthesis takes place during the Define stage, they do not only happen in the distinct stages of Design Thinking. In fact, analysis and synthesis often happen consecutively throughout all stages of the Design Thinking process. Design thinkers often analyse a situation before synthesising new insights, and then analyse their synthesised findings once more to create more detailed syntheses.

What Makes a Good Problem Statement?

A problem statement is important to a Design Thinking project, because it will guide you and your team and provides a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered. It also creates a sense of possibility and optimism that allows team members to spark off ideas in the Ideation stage, which is the third and following stage in the Design Thinking process. A good problem statement should thus have the following traits. It should be:

Human-centered. This requires you to frame your problem statement according to specific users, their needs and the insights that your team has gained in the Empathise phase. The problem statement should be about the people the team is trying to help, rather than focusing on technology, monetary returns or product specifications.

Broad enough for creative freedom. This means that the problem statement should not focus too narrowly on a specific method regarding the implementation of the solution. The problem statement should also not list technical requirements, as this would unnecessarily restrict the team and prevent them from exploring areas that might bring unexpected value and insight to the project.

Narrow enough to make it manageable. On the other hand, a problem statement such as , "Improve the human condition," is too broad and will likely cause team members to easily feel daunted. Problem statements should have sufficient constraints to make the project manageable.

As well as the three traits mentioned above, it also helps to begin the problem statement with a verb, such as "Create", "Define", and "Adapt", to make the problem become more action-oriented.

How to Define a Problem Statement

Methods of interpreting results and findings from the observation oriented Empathise phase include:

Space Saturate and Group and Affinity Diagrams - Clustering and Bundling Ideas and Facts
Author/Copyright holder: Giorgio Montersino. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
In space saturate and group, designers collate their observations and findings into one place, to create a collage of experiences, thoughts, insights, and stories. The term 'saturate' describes the way in which the entire team covers or saturates the display with their collective images, notes, observations, data, experiences, interviews, thoughts, insights, and stories in order to create a wall of information to inform the problem-defining process. It will then be possible to draw connections between these individual elements, or nodes, to connect the dots, and to develop new and deeper insights, which help define the problem(s) and develop potential solutions. In other words: go from analysis to synthesis.

Empathy Mapping
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
An empathy map consists of four quadrants laid out on a board, paper or table, which reflect the four key traits that the users demonstrated/possessed during the observation stage. The four quadrants refer to what the users: Said, Did, Thought, and Felt. Determining what the users said and did are relatively easy; however, determining what they thought and felt is based on careful observation of how they behaved and responded to certain activities, suggestions, conversations etc. (including subtle cues such as body language displayed and the tone of voice used).

Point Of View - Problem Statement
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
A Point Of view (POV) is a meaningful and actionable problem statement, which will allow you to ideate in a goal-oriented manner. Your POV captures your design vision by defining the RIGHT challenge to address in the ideation sessions. A POV involves reframing a design challenge into an actionable problem statement. You articulate a POV by combining your knowledge about the user you are designing for, his or her needs and the insights which you've come to know in your research or Empathise mode. Your POV should be an actionable problem statement that will drive the rest of your design work.

You articulate a POV by combining these three elements - user, need, and insight. You can articulate your POV by inserting your information about your user, the needs and your insights in the following sentence:

[ User . . . (descriptive)] needs [ need . . . (verb)] because [ insight. . . (compelling)]

"How Might We" Questions
Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
When you've defined your design challenge in a POV, you can start to generate ideas to solve your design challenge. You can start using your POV by asking a specific question starting with: "How Might We" or "in what ways might we". How Might We ( HMW) questions are questions that have the potential to spark ideation sessions such as brainstorms. They should be broad enough for a wide range of solutions, but narrow enough that specific solutions can be created for them. "How Might We" questions should be based on the observations you've gathered in the Empathise stage of the Design Thinking process.

For example, you have observed that youths tend not to watch TV programs on the TV at home, some questions which can guide and spark your ideation session could be:

How might we make TV more social, so youths feel more engaged?

How might we enable TV programs to be watched anywhere, at anytime?

How might we make watching TV at home more exciting?

The HMW questions open up to Ideation sessions where you explore ideas, which can help you solve your design challenge in an innovative way.

Why-How Laddering

"As a general rule, asking 'why' yields more abstract statements and asking 'how'yields specific statements. Often times abstract statements are more meaningful but not as directly actionable, and the opposite is true of more specific statements."
- d.school, Method Card, Why-How Laddering

For this reason, during the Define stage designers seek to define the problem, and will generally ask why. Designers will use why to progress to the top of the so-called Why-How Ladder where the ultimate aim is to find out how you can solve one or more problems. Your How Might We questions will help you move from the Define stage and into the next stage in Design Thinking, the Ideation stage, where you start looking for specific innovative solutions. In other words you could say that the Why-How Laddering starts with asking Why to work out How they can solve the specific problem or design challenge.

The Take Away

The second stage in a typical Design Thinking process is called the Define phase. It involves collating data from the observation stage (first stage called Empathise) to define the design problems and challenges. By using methods for synthesising raw data into a meaningful and usable body of knowledge - such as empathy mapping and space saturate and group - we will be able to create an actionable design problem statement or Point of View that inspire the generation of ideas to solve it. The How Might We questions open up to Ideation sessions where you explore ideas, which can help you solve your design challenge in an innovative way.

References & Where to Learn More

Course: "Design Thinking - The Ultimate Guide".

d.school: Space Saturation and Group.

d.school: Empathy Map.

d.school: "How might we" questions.

Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: gdsteam. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

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Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results

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The second stage of the Design Thinking process involves synthesizing observations about your users from the first, empathize stage to create problem statements.

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Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students.

We are grateful to The Hammer Family Foundation for supporting the development of our on-demand learning and teaching resources.

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Find compelling classroom resources, learn new teaching methods, meet standards, and make a difference in the lives of your students. We are grateful to The Hammer Family Foundation for supporting the development of our on-demand learning and teaching resources.

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A technique for proactively building the skills and relationships students will need when challenges arise.

Our students come to school with many issues on their minds and in their hearts. As educators, we can help them process their thoughts and feelings so they can better handle their situations and be more present in class.

Restorative circles are a useful practice to do just that. While frequently used to replace punitive forms of discipline, restorative circles are equally important in proactively building the relationships and skills students need to support one another and collectively address the challenges they face.

Restorative circles are most effective when they're an integral part of school culture. After all, you can't "restore" a community that you haven't built or sustained.

7 Steps for Facilitating Meaningful Circles

1. Cocreate a safe, supportive space: Circles work best if teachers invest time up front to build relationships, skills, and practices to draw on throughout the school year-especially if the going gets tough.

Early in the process, teachers and students together explore values-like empathy, patience, kindness, courage, and open-mindedness-that need to be respected for people to be willing to share openly and honestly in circle. They also determine best ways of working together (circle practices). These include honoring the talking piece, which goes around the circle as an invitation to share while everyone else listens (participants may pass if they don't wish to talk). People are encouraged to speak and listen from the heart. And what is shared in circle, stays in circle, though educators should let students know at the outset that we are mandated by law to report when a student threatens to harm themselves or others, or when students divulge abuse.

2. Be prepared: Make sure that you, the facilitator, are well rested, calm, and focused.

To hold the circle space effectively, it's important to be fully present and able to sit with other people's stories and feelings as well as your own. Center yourself. If you're exploring sensitive issues that may require follow up, consider alerting support staff.

3. Plan ahead: Decide together on a topic or theme that sustains students' interest.

Find a relevant opening ceremony to open the circle space, such as a poem, quote, or piece of music. A mindfulness activity can also be used to bring students into the space after a particularly stressful class or noisy hallway experience.

Look for information to ground the conversation, and develop questions and prompts to invite student perspectives into the circle.

Keep in mind that the bigger the circle, the more time you'll need for the talking piece to go around. Think about how things might unfold and be ready to adapt to what comes up.

Make sure to leave time for a closing ceremony, giving students a chance to transition into spaces that may be less conducive to being vulnerable. A closing ceremony can be a commitment to safeguarding the stories shared in circle, or a breathing exercise in which we provide students with prompts and time to put themselves back together again.

4. Invite student experiences into the space: Encourage students to connect with the circle content by sharing stories from their own lives.

Include storytelling rounds by asking students to talk about "a person in your life who..." or "a time when...." Share authentically of yourself. This gives others permission to do the same. Model good listening as the talking piece goes around the circle. Be fully present as others speak. Remind everyone that listening is the key ingredient in circles. True listening can create the kind of welcoming space that encourages even the quietest voices to speak.

5. Acknowledge, paraphrase, summarize, and practice empathy: Listen closely to what students share so that you can build on their experiences.

When the talking piece comes back to you, touch on what you felt, noticed, or heard. If you sense that there's more than surfaced in the first round, send the talking piece around a second or third time, asking students for their connections, reflections, or additions.

If challenging or painful issues come up, model agreed-upon circle practices for students to follow. Listening mindfully and being present with other people's ordeals and hardships can create supportive, healing experiences that strengthen community connections and build empathy.

If needed, let students know you're available to check in with them later in the day or week. You might also have them consider speaking with other supportive adults or students to find solace if they're troubled.

6. Explore what it means to be an effective ally: Beyond creating a supportive listening environment, ask what else, if anything, students need from you and from each other.

Explore how to be better allies in circle so that students know they don't need to face their challenges alone. Invite them to talk about a person in their lives who is a good friend or ally, or a person they'd like to be a better friend or ally. Discuss the qualities these people have (or lack) and how they make us feel. Invite students to talk about a time they've been a good friend or ally themselves, and what gets in the way of being our best selves with one another.

7. Zoom out to promote understanding on the systems level: Explore whether there are larger systemic forces that underlie the challenges students have touched on (such as racism, sexism, or lack of access to resources). Introduce information, stories, and voices that might shed light on how these systems operate. Look for examples of people who took action to interrupt these and other oppressive systems.

Invite students to connect to this information by sharing their thoughts, feelings, and related experiences.

Studying larger, systemic forces in society can help students better understand their situation, and can be a useful starting point for students to become more active themselves. Action and activism can inspire hope, connection, and healing.

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Building Community With Restorative Circles

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A technique for proactively building the skills and relationships students will need when challenges arise.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Corporate leaders aren't the only ones who need to consider how to adjust to the new world the 4th Industrial Revolution is ushering in. Educators, schools, government officials, and parents must re-think education and how to prepare the next generation to take advantage of the plethora of opportunities and overcome the challenges enabled by ever-increasing technological change. Here are some of the changes happening because of the 4 th Industrial Revolution and eight things every school must do to prepare for the 4 th Industrial Revolution.

The 4 th Industrial Revolution will dramatically change the way we relate to one another, live, work, and educate our children. These shifts are enabled by smart technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data, augmented reality, blockchain, the Internet of Things, and automation. These technologies are disrupting every industry across the world at unprecedented speed. For our children to be prepared to engage in a world alongside smart machines, they will need to be educated differently than in the past.
8 Things Every School Must Do to Prepare for the 4 Industrial Revolution

Redefine the purpose of education

Throughout time the purpose of education has evolved based on the needs of society during that period. It's no different during this transition. Currently, education serves to prepare people to take on the tasks of a job or discipline to "do" something. As we move farther into the future, education will need to support children to develop the skillset and mindset to do anything in their future rather than a particular "something."

Improve STEM education

STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) education needs to improve across the board regardless of income levels, age, or gender. There's no doubt every worker in the future will need some technical skills and improvement in STEM education is warranted, but it's important to note that we shouldn't adopt an either/or mentality. We still need to help students understand the values that will help us learn how to use this new technology ethically and morally; therefore, humanities training and professionals will still be essential. In fact, according to The Future of Jobs Report 2018 from the World Economic Forum, executives desired employees with critical thinking and collaboration skills even more than those with tech skills.

Develop human potential

Even though machines are mastering many tasks typically performed by humans, people are still more adept at creative endeavors, imagination, critical thinking, social interaction, and physical dexterity. The educational system of the future needs to develop these inherent abilities in humans, so they are equipped to partner with machines in the future rather than compete with them.

Adapt to lifelong learning models

In his book, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn." Not only is there the reality that machines will take over jobs humans do today, according to a Dell Technologies and Institute for the Future (IFTF) report, 85 percent of the jobs in 2030 don't exist yet. Structured education can no longer end after leaving school or college. Education must become a lifelong endeavor, and sources for education need to evolve to provide those opportunities. Attributes such as creativity, curiosity, and design-thinking will be essential for the future workforce. People will no longer start a career path and only grow with one role, so nurturing competent lifelong learners becomes essential.

Alter educator training

American philosopher John Dewey said, "If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." Even though he lived well before the beginnings of the 4 th Industrial Revolution, his words are very appropriate today. Rather than teachers distilling information to students that they then memorize, teachers will become guides to help students facilitate their own learning and lines of inquiry. Failure needs to be embraced as an essential step to learning. Additionally, teaching will be much more personalized, which will be supported by bringing in technologies such as AI and machine learning.

Make schools makerspaces

To allow students to practice their curiosity, problem-solving skills, inquisitiveness and the iterations of failure, schools need to provide learning environments that will enable students to be creators using a wide variety of physical and digital tools. This can help equip children with the love of learning that will allow them to make sense of their world through hands-on experiences that emphasize collaboration and creativity.

International mindfulness

In a digital, interconnected world, employees of the future will need to have a global mindset. Schools and educators must adapt learning to take this into account. For example, history might not be taught from the perspective of one country but rather with examples from around the world; and instead of teaching the same languages that have always been taught, schools should look at international demand and the languages of emerging markets.

Change higher education

From how long degrees take to forging stronger ties between institutions of higher learning and industry, changes will need to be made to our post-secondary education learning to prepare students for the 4 th Industrial Revolution adequately. During the 4 th industrial revolution, college qualifications will become shorter and more focused, and colleges will provide more life-long education with modular post-grad qualifications throughout the working lives of individuals. This will also impact how earlier education levels will need to modify their college preparatory classes. For example, it is essential that the seeds for this type of learning are set in schools by offering students the opportunity to learn topics beyond their core curriculum and develop a love for learning.

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8 Things Every School Must Do To Prepare For The 4th Industrial Revolution

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Corporate leaders aren't the only ones who need to consider how to adjust to the new world the 4th Industrial Revolution is ushering in. Educators, schools, government officials, and parents must re-think education and how to prepare the next generation to take advantage of the plethora of opportunities and overcome the challenges enabled by ever-increasing technological change.

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Design thinking is a methodology which provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It's extremely useful when used to tackle complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown-because it serves to understand the human needs involved, reframe the problem in human-centric ways, create numerous ideas in brainstorming sessions and adopt a hands-on approach to prototyping and testing. Learning about the five stages of design thinking will empower you and allow you to apply the methodology to your work and solve complex problems that occur in our companies, our countries, and across the world.
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that can have anywhere from three to seven phases, depending on whom you talk to. We focus on the five-stage design thinking model proposed by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) because they are world-renowned for the way they teach and apply design thinking.

What are the 5 Stages of the Design Thinking Process

The five stages of design thinking, according to the d.school, are:

Let's dive into each stage of the design thinking process.

Stage 1: Empathize-Research Your Users' Needs

Empathize: the first phase of design thinking, where you gain real insight into users and their needs.

The first stage of the design thinking process focuses on user-centric research. You want to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Consult experts to find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathize with your users. You may also want to immerse yourself in your users' physical environment to gain a deeper, personal understanding of the issues involved-as well as their experiences and motivations. Empathy is crucial to problem solving and a human-centered design process as it allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.

Depending on time constraints, you will gather a substantial amount of information to use during the next stage. The main aim of the Empathize stage is to develop the best possible understanding of your users, their needs and the problems that underlie the development of the product or service you want to create.

Stage 2: Define-State Your Users' Needs and Problems

Define: the second phase of design thinking, where you define the problem statement in a human-centered manner.

In the Define stage, you will organize the information you have gathered during the Empathize stage. You'll analyze your observations to define the core problems you and your team have identified up to this point. Defining the problem and problem statement must be done in a human-centered manner.

For example, you should not define the problem as your own wish or need of the company: "We need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%."

You should pitch the problem statement from your perception of the users' needs: "Teenage girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be healthy and grow."

The Define stage will help the design team collect great ideas to establish features, functions and other elements to solve the problem at hand-or, at the very least, allow real users to resolve issues themselves with minimal difficulty. In this stage, you will start to progress to the third stage, the ideation phase, where you ask questions to help you look for solutions: " How might we encourage teenage girls to perform an action that benefits them and also involves your company's food-related product or service?" for instance.

Stage 3: Ideate-Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

Ideate: the third phase of design thinking, where you identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you've created.

During the third stage of the design thinking process, designers are ready to generate ideas. You've grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you've analyzed your observations in the Define stage to create a user centric problem statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to look at the problem from different perspectives and ideate innovative solutions to your problem statement.

There are hundreds of ideation techniques you can use-such as Brainstorm, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea and SCAMPER. Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea techniques are typically used at the start of the ideation stage to stimulate free thinking and expand the problem space. This allows you to generate as many ideas as possible at the start of ideation. You should pick other ideation techniques towards the end of this stage to help you investigate and test your ideas, and choose the best ones to move forward with-either because they seem to solve the problem or provide the elements required to circumvent it.

Stage 4: Prototype-Start to Create Solutions

Prototype: the fourth phase of design thinking, where you identify the best possible solution.

The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the key solutions generated in the ideation phase. These prototypes can be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments or on a small group of people outside the design team.

This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes and, one by one, they are investigated and then accepted, improved or rejected based on the users' experiences.

By the end of the Prototype stage, the design team will have a better idea of the product's limitations and the problems it faces. They'll also have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think and feel when they interact with the end product.

Stage 5: Test-Try Your Solutions Out

Test: the fifth and final phase of the design thinking process, where you test solutions to derive a deep understanding of the product and its users.

Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified in the Prototype stage. This is the final stage of the five-stage model; however, in an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or more further problems. This increased level of understanding may help you investigate the conditions of use and how people think, behave and feel towards the product, and even lead you to loop back to a previous stage in the design thinking process. You can then proceed with further iterations and make alterations and refinements to rule out alternative solutions. The ultimate goal is to get as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.

Did You Know Design Thinking is a Non-Linear Process?

We've outlined a direct and linear design thinking process here, in which one stage seemingly leads to the next with a logical conclusion at user testing. However, in practice, the process is carried out in a more flexible and non-linear fashion. For example, different groups within the design team may conduct more than one stage concurrently, or designers may collect information and prototype throughout each stage of the project to bring their ideas to life and visualize the problem solutions as they go. What's more, results from the Test stage may reveal new insights about users which lead to another brainstorming session (Ideate) or the development of new prototypes (Prototype).

It is important to note the five stages of design thinking are not always sequential. They do not have to follow a specific order, and they can often occur in parallel or be repeated iteratively. The stages should be understood as different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps.

The design thinking process should not be seen as a concrete and inflexible approach to design; the component stages identified should serve as a guide to the activities you carry out. The stages might be switched, conducted concurrently or repeated several times to gain the most informative insights about your users, expand the solution space and hone in on innovative solutions.

This is one of the main benefits of the five-stage model. Knowledge acquired in the latter stages of the process can inform repeats of earlier stages. Information is continually used to inform the understanding of the problem and solution spaces, and to redefine the problem itself. This creates a perpetual loop, in which the designers continue to gain new insights, develop new ways to view the product (or service) and its possible uses and develop a far more profound understanding of their real users and the problems they face.

The Take Away

Design thinking is an iterative, non-linear process which focuses on a collaboration between designers and users. It brings innovative solutions to life based on how real users think, feel and behave.

This human-centered design process consists of five core stages Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

It's important to note that these stages are a guide. The iterative, non-linear nature of design thinking means you and your design team can carry these stages out simultaneously, repeat them and even circle back to previous stages at any point in the design thinking process.

References & Where to Learn More

Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd Edition), 1996.

d.school, An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE, 2010.

Gerd Waloszek, Introduction to Design Thinking, 2012.

Images

Hero Image: © Daniel Skrok and the Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

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The 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

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The Design Thinking process is a human-centered, iterative methodology that designers use to solve problems. It has 5 steps-Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.