In the 21st century, those who are most successful are always thinking at least one—sometimes two, three, or four steps ahead. Why? Because they have to. No longer can the most successful workers and students get by on basic skills. The times have changed and now essentially require them to have increasingly innovative skill sets just to survive. One of the most important of those newfangled skills is design thinking—something that can be taught to children from a young age and something that has a whole lot of value in the real world.
Design Thinking in Education
If you’re not familiar with one of the 21st century’s second-tier education trends, we think it’s time you get to learn a little something about design thinking. It is commonly defined as a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems and find the most efficient solution while drawing upon logic, imagination, and systemic reasoning to explore all possibilities. If that definition sounds useful to you, that’s probably because it is very useful—especially in K-12 education, though that’s not exactly where it got its start. Think about how we just defined design thinking. It’s used to solve complex problems, which teachers try to get students to do every day to in order to mimic the real world. It also draws on logic and a constructed thinking process, including trial and error, to maximize efficiency, which is another thing teachers want from their students. Now, it should be a little more clear why design thinking has found its way into some of today’s most innovative classrooms.
Perhaps the most useful place to deploy design thinking in education is in project-based learning classrooms. Design thinking is a continuous experience of the student innovation process and, in PBL, it’s extremely important for kids to be able to break the learning process down in order to better understand all aspects of what they are doing. Design thinking is a very valuable tool for educators to deploy in their classrooms since, among other things, it helps teachers reconnect with their creativity and aspirations for developing deep thinkers. When schools launch an innovation space or a makerspace that students can use to learn and pair that with design thinking-specific professional development for teachers, they’re able to mold doers—not just successful test takers. The design thinking movement has since broadened in the last few years, which has led to educators customizing the way they teach so that they can reach their students on their own individual levels and do so more effectively.
Creating and maintaining a school culture that thrives off of design thinking is actually pretty easy to accomplish as long as school leaders follow some specific guidelines. Since design thinking is a student-centered endeavor, it’s important for teachers to practice empathy as much as possible. At the same time, however, it’s also important that they challenge assumptions, meaning that when they encounter a problem, they use it as an opportunity to learn and do better than they were doing before rather than just simply moving on and forgetting about it. Also, learning from action is just as valuable in design thinking as it is in other areas of 21st century education. Whatever educators are doing in the classroom when it comes to design thinking is a step in the right direction, but there will always be ways to improve. When they’re constantly looking for minor ways to tweak the process, teachers are leaving themselves open to innovative suggestions that will make the whole process run more smoothly and shape the real world-ready students they want to create.
Design Thinking’s Place in PBL
Despite the longtime presence of project-based learning in schools, design thinking has only begun to weave its way into the conversation over the last handful of years. Combining the two, however, has proven to be very successful for a lot of educators, especially when their schools face difficulty in launching and maintaining innovative instruction, including flipped classrooms and adding technology. This is where a design thinking approach can pay substantial dividends for both teachers and students. Educational innovation generally requires three things to change in order for it to be successful: the school environment, teacher beliefs, and teacher behavior. It’s easy to get the first one done, but the other two take a bit more work, though design thinking can help push each of them over the hump to greatness.
Scientifically, we can say that real learning takes place when there is a bridge between discovery and justification. When students engage in hands-on work (project-based learning) and use a systemic process to break down all of the components of what they are doing and what they hope to accomplish (design thinking), this bridge is constructed and cemented. By promoting design thinking throughout the course of a child’s education, teachers are simultaneously teaching them to embrace inquiry, explore the real-world context and implications of problems, and share their learning. With this last example in particular, design thinking can play a beneficial role as students will likely take more time to create a step-by-step plan when they know they will be sharing their projects with others. Plus, when they combine PBL and design thinking, teachers can meet their curriculum requirements much more quickly and effectively.
In many cases, students are willing to employ design thinking in their learning right away—once they’re taught what it is and how to leverage it. So, what they need then is guidance for how to combine it with project-based learning to spark some serious learning shifts. Some of the things teachers can focus on when trying this include guiding student problem solving and supporting their collaboration and critical thinking skills. Kids can also pair the two to create greater voice and choice especially in how they demonstrate what they have mastered. Further, design thinking can help students realize that they are able to make legitimate contributions to society every day while making a noticeable difference. Though it may seem daunting take on the task of combining two different things, the similarities shared between design thinking and PBL significantly lessen the complications and help create an exceptional environment for 21st century learning.
Design Thinking Paves the Path to Innovation
The challenges we face today are not the same as they were 10 years ago, nor are they the same ones today’s students will face in the next 10 years. The world is evolving and so too are the skills successful people need, the tools that can help them build those skills, and the methods in which they will learn them. The current generation of students will live or die based on their ability to meet each of the challenges they encounter in the real world and how they use unique skills to find innovative solutions to the problems of tomorrow. If you had a hunch about design thinking playing a role in this innovation, you would be right. When we show children that they can use design thinking to solve problems rather than just dealing with them, they’re able to move past getting by and power towards proficiency.
When using design thinking, we aim to solve a problem using a totally different mindset than the person who created that problem was using. Design thinking requires that students enlist a creative approach while thrusting themselves into the center of this process. This kind of approach can help students solve tougher, longterm problems over the course of an entire school year or it can be used to help them refine their skills on more of a day-to-day basis. Using a design thinking mindset, students can solve problems big and small as it draws on creativity-based innovation to ignite new idea sources in their minds.
The best design thinking includes a handful of common characteristics, though it will tend to flow differently depending on the student and their personal learning process. In general, when teachers help students learn to highlight problems and leverage their curiosity through collaboration, the design thinking process is amplified. Design thinking is also at its best when it is constructive, holistic, and empathetic, meaning that students should think about old ideas in a brand new way while putting themselves in the shoes of the person experiencing the problem they are trying to solve. Perhaps the best part about design thinking is the fact that students can refine and improve their problem-solving process as they go, making use of new ideas and realizations they have along the way to unleash maximum creativity and help them solve universal problems.
How Design Thinking Became a Hot Topic in Schools
So much of modern education is likening learning experiences to those that students will soon be facing in the real world. That’s because students are able to get much more out of hands-on learning than they are able to achieve by reading a textbook. When they’re compelled to solve a real problem (or a simulated one), students will benefit from trying design thinking. Design thinking became popular because it is super effective at bundling a bunch of different mindsets and philosophies and helping kids look at learning in a new way. With empathy, emotion, and stepping into the shoes of other people, students are able to try something incredibly innovative—and that seems to be why design thinking has taken off.
Another reason that design thinking became so popular is due to its similarities with the Maker Movement. Design thinking requires that students gather a bunch of ideas and then try to make sense of them all. Oftentimes, they won’t do this very well on their first go and will need to rely on trial and error (just like in making) to refine their approach and get closer the second and third times. Besides that, design thinking requires students to be the ones to generate ideas rather than being handed a specific assignment and going through the motions to get it done. Again, like in the Maker Movement, students and teachers must be willing to embrace failure and move past the frustration. Design thinking forces students to keep their minds open to all ideas instead of becoming fixated on just one, which enlightens them to ideas from all angles.
In just a short amount of time, design thinking has become a popular and powerful tool for learning. The reasons for this are actually fairly simple to recognize when you take a second to break it down. Some of the central tenets of design thinking are empathy, creativity, and innovation—all of which are crucial skills that today’s students need to master. The large amounts of educators who have jumped aboard the design thinking train have spoke about the proper mindset going such a long way in enhancing their classrooms and sparking learning breakthroughs for their students. As long as teachers don’t rush to create a design thinking classroom, the results should speak for themselves—the ultimate reason that design thinking in education became so popular in the first place.
Design Thinking and a Better Future for Students
People who may not be familiar with design thinking, which included us up until a couple of years ago, might hear the term and think it’s referring to a few different things. Most commonly, since it is associated with innovative education, people will assume it has something to do with graphic design. That’s not quite the case, however. What is true is that when utilizing design thinking in education, students need to bring all of their different perspectives together (or even those of others as well) and find an answer that’s greater than what any one of those perspectives could have led them to on its own. Much of the school day now is multidisciplinary as students are regularly combining subjects to incorporate STEM into learning in new ways and design thinking is actually quite similar to that.
Instead of students assuming they know the answers to complex problems, design thinking helps them activate special skills that connect them with outsiders and expose them to different points of view. Initially, many people believed that this concept of design thinking would not work in education, but, when you think about it, it’s really just a creative approach to problem solving and that’s a pretty big chunk of what modern education has become. Since it requires students to get up, get out, and talk to people, design thinking helps them imagine their ideas, iterate them, and then ultimately put them into practice. During this process, they’re exposed to optimism in learning, to collaboration, and to finding their role in the innovation process—all thanks to using design thinking as a new approach in the classroom.
Design thinking can be used by students to tackle the tiniest challenges as well as some of their toughest ones. Using design thinking, students can become part of a consistent system for problem solving, but they can also put their skills to use and eventually develop a new and better system that helps them accomplish the same thing. As soon as design thinking begins catching on among students, the positive results start flying and teachers start spreading the word, telling their peers how powerful this new pedagogy is. Educators are always innovating and, just as the scientific method has helped them teach students for decades, design thinking is doing the same now, but in a different way. The scientific method starts with a hypothesis, but design thinking begins with a question, which is colossally important for students to realize. There is always a question behind the problem they’re facing and a design thinking approach can help them break it down and solve it in the most efficient way possible.
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