Design thinking

Design Thinking for Educators is… A creative process that helps you design meaningful solutions in the classroom, at your school, and in your community. Design Thinking is the confidence that everyone can be part of creating a more desirable future, and a process to take action when faced with a difficult challenge.

Introduction from: Design Thinking for Educators

5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. 

More detail:

Learning Through Doing

Design thinking processes combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analysing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. They can be powerful ways of creating new possibilities in education. It is one thing to have new ideas, but implementing them, growing new organisational cultures and system conditions to support them requires careful work and considerable amounts of energy. With design thinking, it is important that ideas are rigorously tested and challenged at every stage of development to ensure that energy is well spent.

Examples:

Design Thinking in Education: Empathy, Challenge, Discovery, and Sharing

The Beginner’s Guide To Design Thinking In The Classroom

Web resources:

45 Design Thinking Resources for Educators

Taking Design Thinking To Schools

An Educator’s Guide to Design Thinking

Application:

Design Thinking is a tool that can be used in a variety of contexts - projects, challenges, entrepreneurial ventures, etc. It places all participants as learners. It will be relevant to some learning experiences and not others.

Learners within Learnlife methodologies will experience design thinking as a strategy to develop their ideas or create learning experiences. Design thinking can be both a skill used in specific contexts, or the framework for a wider learning experience itself.

Design thinking is one of the 25 learning methodologies in the Learnlife learning paradigm toolkit. Learn more about the different ways to engage learners through the different learning methodologies.