Get Started with Design Thinking. What Is Design Thinking? 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. But here’s the thing: this is hard to pull off. This is what I love about design thinking. This is why A.J. The Student-Friendly LAUNCH Cycle For the last 15 years, I’ve used design thinking.
A.J. 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 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. A: Ask Tons of Questions Sparked by curiosity, students move to the second phase, where they ask tons of questions. N: Navigate Ideas Students apply that newly acquired knowledge to potential solutions. Will design-thinking strategies benefit students after class is dismissed? Roughly half the students were coached only about constructive criticism, and the other half were coached only on exploring alternative answers.
The teachers then encouraged the students to apply the strategy they had learned to several different projects. In math classes, for example, students were told to design a house or a novel candy box. In social studies, students were told to design a process for making classroom and school decisions more fair. The researchers’ big question was whether the classroom coaching made students more likely to apply the strategies to different problems, without anyone prompting them. To measure their openness to constructive criticism, for example, the students were asked to design posters for a school fair and were given a palette of images, phrases and fonts. The students could then revise their original posters, and the computer would evaluate their quality based on a list of graphic design principles. The results were striking. How Design Thinking Can Help Teachers Solve Real Problems—and Find Their Voice. During the last few weeks of summer as children cool off in lakes, pools, hydrants and beaches, some of our nation’s top teachers have been upping their game in preparation for this year’s students.
Teacher-led conferences are popping up nationwide, cultivating communities of practice where educators share their best practices, celebrate their work and prepare to innovate on instruction for the upcoming school year. What’s more, this models is scalable to schools nationwide, opening the floodgates for conversations around innovation and professional collaboration. But these conferences are not like an edcamp or an unstructured unconference of the kind you may have heard of.
This one focuses on getting educators to define some of their biggest challenges and then work together to figure out solutions in a workshop format that draws heavily from the world of design thinking. Circular Logic One potential fix? Raised Voices. Edutopia. A Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking. Getting Started with Design Thinking in the Classroom. 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. This is what I love about design thinking. This is why A.J. Every Child Is a Maker I believe that every classroom should be filled with creativity and wonder.
I realize that school can be busy. We can do better. I am convinced that creative thinking is as vital as math or reading or writing. I believe all students deserve the opportunity to be their best creative selves, both in and out of school. I have a crazy belief that all people are naturally creative. A.J. 1. 2. Design Thinking: Prioritizing Process Skills. To Come Up with a Good Idea, Start by Imagining the Worst Idea Possible. Executive Summary There are many creative tools a designer uses to think differently, but none is more counter-intuitive than “wrong thinking,” also called reverse thinking. Wrong thinking is when you intentionally think of the worst idea possible – the exact opposite of the accepted or logical solution, ideas that can get you laughed at or even fired – and work back from those to find new ways of solving old problems.
This method has helped chefs invent new dishes and scientists sequence DNA. To give it a try yourself, try seeing a problem as a beginner would see it; granting a beginner agency to tell you what to do; or, most radically, suspending hierarchy entirely. When we give ourselves permission to have bad ideas, we often come up with the best ones. There are many creative tools a designer uses to think differently, but none is more counter-intuitive than “wrong thinking,” also called reverse thinking. 1. 2. 3. Design Thinking and the Deskless Classroom. Back-to-school conjures images of desks in neat rows, and the smells of crayons and glue. Teachers work hard to make warm, inviting learning spaces for students, but let's take a step back.
What does a desk represent? Imagine a classroom that looked less like a traditional classroom and more like an artist's studio. Our physical environment, as explored in The Third Teacher, tells us what is possible in that space. What if, instead of making our space for our students, we made it with our students? Last September, the day before students returned, I looked around my classroom and panicked.
Why Design Thinking? Increasing student engagement by taking the leap into a deskless classroom required an introduction to design thinking and the support of my admin. How to Use Design Thinking for a Deskless Classroom Step 1: Create empathy Students explored where and how they work best and what might be done in this space if it could be remade in any way that they needed. Step 2: Ideate Brainstorm. The LAUNCH Cycle – John Spencer. 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 framework for getting the most out of the creative process. For the last 12 years, I’ve used design thinking. So, here’s a description of the design thinking cycle that AJ Juliani and I developed and included in our book Launch: Using the Design Thinking Process to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student.
Although there are many models for design thinking, we have developed the student-friendly LAUNCH Cycle. C: Create a Prototype In this next phase, they create a prototype. Small Change, Big Impact? Design Thinking in Action, Phase 1 - Matt Ives. This is a write up of an experiment in Design Thinking I recently went through. The task was to make a small change to my learning environment with the aim of positively impacting learning.
To jump to the end for a little bit, this process I’ve gone through has been a transformative one. It’s dawned on me, sitting here reflecting after it all, that even the smallest changes can have massive impacts. All it takes is an open mind, a juicy problem, and an eye to action. I hope that in telling my story others can take heart – make a small change, and see where the rabbit hole leads. So, here’s my story… I’ve always embraced the messiness and noise and buzz of learning “happening”. As I was watching, a student sat alone on a beanbag, trying hard to focus on his independent task at hand. The thing is, very few of these distractions were generated from off-task or silly behaviours.
So, thanks to this period of observation and empathy building, a few key questions emerged: Putting Power In the Hands of Kids Through Design Thinking. Two new North County schools will introduce design thinking to students when they open in two districts this week.