Design Thinking: A dynamic problem-solving approach to help educators become creators, innovators, and empathic beings
by Gerson Abesamis and Kaye Robles
Brainstorming has become the typical way to find a solution to a problem. As we often want to achieve immediate results, this approach seems to be the most ideal. But as we begin to implement mutually agreed solutions, we realize that the assumptions we arrived at during the brainstorming were not totally reliable. Maybe the root of your teachers’ low morale can’t be dredged up by a simple team building exercise, and your local internet service provider is undergoing an extensive upgrade, something beyond your city official’s control. In the end, the school might find itself with twice as many problems and a more confused community.
Having the mind of a designer
What you just did was a simple thought exercise to give you an idea how designers—visual designers, architects, and product designers—approach problems. They start with the people and focus on their needs, taking extra steps to understand these needs within their context. They examine the environment, human behavior, motivations, and the users’ personalities. Armed with those insights, they start designing ideas and solutions and iteratively refine them by gathering high-quality feedbacks before settling on a final version. This process of making consumer products is a powerful mindset when applied to education, since teachers and school leaders design lessons and activities.
Empathy
Put yourself in the shoes and perspective of others. When approaching a problem, designers need to be aware of their own biases and assumptions, and inform themselves through research and curiosity of how key people experience and feel about the problem.
Brainstorming
Designers don’t work alone; they devote time to include key people in the brainstorming process, and consult experts to get ideas from various perspectives, and a variety of solutions that they can choose from. The key is being open to considering all solutions, even if they seem ridiculous at face value.
Rapid Prototyping
Often, we spend so much time perfecting plans that we leave little to no time to determine whether our chosen solutions are truly the best solutions. Rapid prototyping of the chosen solution (or solutions) helps us quickly spot areas for improvement.
Continuous Feedback
Rapid prototyping also makes it easier to obtain concrete and continuous feedback from users, and other key people.
As a mindset for solving problems in school. As a teacher, you are in a uniqueposition to solve school problems because you are in contact with students every day. You know them well and you can empathize with them. Here’s what you can do:
- Create a team of teachers, parents, and students, and together, use design thinking to address a pressing need in your school. Use your collaborators’ varied experiences to design solutions that will benefit the whole community.
- You can also invite this team to give feedback on existing school policies so that existing solutions can be improved. This empowers the community to have a stake in the decision-making process.
As a process for lesson planning and designing materials. When applying design thinking to the process of teacher preparation, you are actually making learner-centered experiences. Some strategies:
- Use student surveys and logbooks to document what you know about your students. Don’t limit yourself to documenting achievement scores or attendance; include their hopes, interests, friends, contexts, etc. Use this data to design lessons specifically for them.
- Ask feedback from your students after a lesson. Not only will you acquire ideas on how you can better deliver your lesson next time, but you will gain an opportunity to teach students to be metacognitive, and gain ownership over their learning process.
The best way to proceed with design thinking
Go deeper. There are a lot of online resources on design thinking, and most of it is free and open source. For a fuller experience, your school can tap organizations such as Habi Education Lab that facilitates design thinking workshops for teachers.
Go deeper. There are a lot of online resources on design thinking, and most of it is free and open source. For a fuller experience, your school can tap organizations such as Habi Education Lab that facilitates design thinking workshops for teachers.
Form a team. Study together, try a small design challenge, or do some of the activities from online courses. Working in a group setting not only allows you to motivate each other, it automatically provides you a group of people to debate and collaborate with.
Begin with small activities. Before you design and implement a whole unit on design thinking, try one activity first. Incorporate empathy, collaboration, prototyping, or feedback in your classroom lesson.
With design thinking, you find creative, more effective ways to solve complex problems in your school, as well as meet the specific needs of various learners to better prepare them for the challenges of tomorrow. Apply empathy, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and continuous feedback in your teaching and enrich content with context, and create an authentic learning experience.
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