Design Thinking for Educators
Learning Module
- Creator(s):
According to the World Economic Forum, complex problem solving is now top the list of skills that a person needs to succeed in today’s highly technological and globally competitive world. While it is true that AI can solve some problems that humans cannot, there will always be problems that only humans can solve. These are issues that are not clearly defined, have no precedent, or require a deep understanding of human emotions.
Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods. (Dam & Siang, 2019)
This module is designed for K-12 teachers and educators. Through this module, participants will master the process of Design Thinking and apply this approach to design solutions for their classrooms, schools, and community. After grasping core knowledge and concepts through instructor-provided videos and readings, participants will work on projects to apply what they've learned to solve real-world problems, like creating an onboarding process for new students or developing new approaches to connect with parents. They will also participate in peer activities to contribute ideas and receive helpful feedbacks for their projects to improve the project and deepen their learning.
This module is based on IDEO's Design Thinking for Educators course. I have taught this course in a live format before. However, with this work, I decided to develop it as a hybrid course, which includes synchronous and asynchronous components. Participants can learn by themselves the critical concepts of Design Thinking through videos and readings. Time of face-to-face meetings will be used mainly for applying those concepts in specific practice exercises. According to Westover & Westover (2014), this flipped instructions allow class time for practical work and benefit both the advanced and less advanced students because they can help each other.
The course is delivered in a hybrid mode consisting of:
Asynchronous component: Participants watch the course's videos and read relevant materials at stated deadlines. For each update, participants are also required to comment a stand-out idea or new thought prompted by the given materials and make an update of their own to contribute content and examples to the course.
Synchronous component: Participants meet (virtual or face-to-face) with instructors and other group members to participate in activities that help them apply the key concepts gained from the asynchronous component into practice. These are often group exercises that help participants experience the steps of Design Thinking by using learned techniques to solve a real-world challenge. During these live sessions, they will get constructive feedback from peers and instructors to improve their project work.
Pre-survey and Peer-reviewed Project: Before starting the course, students need to take a survey to identify a challenge they want to use Design Thinking to solve and be placed in a suitable group. After completing the coursework, each team will need to submit a project showing how they applied Design Thinking principles to solve a specific challenge in the classroom/ school.
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
Please refer to The Professional Standard for Teachers and Trainers, a framework developed in 2014 by the Education and Training Foundation (ETF), enabling teachers and trainers to identify areas for their own professional development and provide a reference point that can be use to support the development of the learners.
We use the information from these surveys to help us to better understand your background and course goals in order to make the course better serve your needs. We also use the data from these surveys in order to understand the kind of challenges that you are facing in your clasroom/ schoo/ community and would like to use Design Thinking to solve.
Please be noted that this data will also be used to create project groups. Usually, participants with a similar interest in a certain type of challenge will be in the same group. However, there will also be a few other exceptions, to ensure that the group always has members from new and critical perspectives.
This survey will help you to understand your participants better and get a sense of the class before the first day. You can also use the data from the survey to configure project groups. Because group members will work together throughout the course and are jointly responsible for creating the final project, setting up an effective teams is important. There are few factors you should consider when composing groups:
OBJECTIVES:
COURSE MATERIALS
1. The future of job
You are going to watch the video “Last Job on Earth” about a fully automated world. While watching the video, think about the following question:
What jobs do you think will be replaced by robots in the future? What jobs are still available?
What is in us humans that technology will not be able to replace?
VIDEO: The last job on Earth: imagining a fully automated world
2. What unique skills can we improve to stay relevant?
With the threat of automation setting to claim as many as 800 million jobs, what unique skills can we improve on to stay relevant in this changing landscape?
VIDEO: What Technology Cannot Replace
VIDEO: The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't | Anthony Goldbloom
Machine can only replace human in frequent, high volume tasks but not tackle novel challenges.
According to the the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report:
3. What is Design Thinking and why we need it in our schools?
Design Thinking is a powerful tool to tackle the unknown. It's a means of going on an expedition, without a map, without even knowing the destination, but with the confidence that you'll end up somewhere great.
VIDEO: What is Design Thinking
VIDEO: How Design Thinking Can Empower Young People
RELEVANT READING MATERIALS
COURSE WORK
Comment: Mention a stand-out idea, or new thought prompted by this material.
Individual update: Share a situation where you/or someone you observed successfully solved a problem using empathetic understanding of the user / stakeholder.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 5 participants to share their updates with the whole class (about 8-10 minutes each). Comment, add your perspectives to help learners understand more deeply about the differences of Design Thinking compared to traditional problem-solving methods:
OBJECTIVES
Identify key steps in the Design Thinking process.
Explore through example how this process has been used by students/teachers to solve real-world problems.
COURSE MATERIALS
1. The process overview
The design process is what puts Design Thinking into action. It’s a structured approach to generating and evolving ideas. It has five phases that help navigate the development from identifying a design challenge to finding and building a solution.
VIDEO: THE DESIGN THINKING PROCESS
2. The five stages of Design Thinking
The five stages of Design Thinking, according to Stanford d.school, are as follows: Empathise, Define (the problem), Ideate, Prototype, and Test:
Stage 1: Empathize—Research Your Users' Needs.
Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems.
Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas.
Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions.
Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out.
3. Design Thinking Process Example
You are going to watch a video that showcases how students at Design 39 Campus in San Diego use Design Thinking to solve real world problems. After watching the video, use the table below to summarize the actions the students took for each step of the Design Thinking process.
|
Design Challenge: creating a water filtration system using natural resources. |
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| 1. Empathize | 2. Define | 3. Ideate | 4. Prototype | 5. Test |
|
Students watched a few videos to see how other people get water |
||||
VIDEO: DESIGN THINKING - A PROBLEM SOLVING FRAMEWORK
RELEVANT READINGS
5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process:
Taking Design Thinking to Schools
COURSE WORK
Comment: Mention a stand-out idea, or new thought prompted by this material.
Individual update: Parse an example of how the design thinking approach has been applied to create new solutions for a challenge in your classroom/ school/ community.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 5 participants to share their updates with the whole class (about 8-10 minutes each).
Point out that there are a consistent set of challenges that teachers and schools seem to face, and they center around the design and development of learning experiences (curriculum), learning environments (spaces), school programs and experiences (processes and tools), and system strategies, goals, and policies (systems).
Tell the participants they will be formed into groups. Assign each group a specific challenge (it could be on one of the four themes above or one that you find relevant to the interests they shared in the pre-survey). Ask the groups to use the following prompting questions to define the challenge more clearly and create a project plan to address it.
Inform the groups how they will submit the project plan once completed and how the instructor will give feedback to those plans.
OBJECTIVES:
COURSE MATERIALS
1. Stage 1: Empathize
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs.
VIDEO: EMPATHIZE
2. Empathy Interview and Observation
By entering and understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, we can understand the choices that person makes, we can understand their behavioral traits, and we are able identify their needs. This helps us innovate, and create products or services for that person. The following videos showcase some of the most popular techniques to understand user's insights.
VIDEO: WHAT ARE EMPATHY INTERVIEWS?
VIDEO: INTERVIEWING THE COMMUNITY WITH DESIGN THINKING
VIDEO: DESIGN THINKING OBSERVATION EXERCISE
3. Empathy Map
An Empathy Map allows us to sum up our learning from engagements with people in the field of design research. The map provides four major areas in which to focus our attention on, thus providing an overview of a person’s experience. Empathy maps are also great as a background for the construction of the personas that you would often want to create later.
VIDEO: WHAT IS AN EMPATHY MAP?
RELEVANT READINGS
Techniques for Empathy Interviews in Design Thinking
How to Prepare for a User Interview and Ask the Right Questions
Comment: A time when you/ (someone you observed) used empathy to understand a need.
Group work: Conduct an empathy interview/ observation with a source of inspiration. Capture what you hear and see during the interview/ field visit. Summarize the perspectives on the problem you are solving that you gained from this activity.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 8-10 minutes for each group to give a presentation about the empathy interview/ observation with source(s) of inspiration and summarize the perspectives that they gained from this activity.
Provide neccessary comments/ feedbacks on each presentation.
OBJECTIVES
COURSE MATERIALS
1. Stage 2 - Define
During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathize stage. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point. You should seek to define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centered manner.
VIDEO: DEFINE
2. User Need Statements
A user need statement is an actionable problem statement used to summarize who a particular user is, the user’s need, and why the need is important to that user. It defines what you want to solve before you move on to generating potential solutions, in order to 1) condense your perspective on the problem, and 2) provide a metric for success to be used throughout the design thinking process.
VIDEO: USER NEED STATEMENTS IN DESIGN THINKING
3. “How Might We”
Challenges are often opportunities in disguise. The “How Might We” method creates an atmosphere for innovative solutions by reframing known challenges that surround your product, service or initiative.
VIDEO: HOW MIGHT WE NOTES
RELEVANTS READING
Methods to Help You Define Synthesise and Make Sense in Your Research
COURSE WORK
Comment: A situation where you identified insights from collected data.
Group work: Generate a list of How Might We questions. It is good to have a mix of different types of prompts. After generating your How Might We prompts, it is helpful to gather a group of at least 4 people who can test the prompt. Make a presentation about the process and what you learned from it.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 8-10 minutes for each group to give a presentation about their group's How Might We prompt and and the perspectives they get after testing these promts.
Provide neccessary comments/ feedbacks on each presentation.
OBJECTIVES
COURSE MATERIALS
1. Stage 3 - Ideate
During the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to start generating ideas. You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you’ve analyzed and synthesized your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement. With this solid background, you and your team members can start to "think outside the box" to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem.
VIDEO: IDEATE
2. Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a good way to come up a solution or two. As the name suggests, the idea is that you storm on the neural pathways through the brain to pick a lot of thoughts quickly and intuitively. It's best to do this with a group of diverse people, so you have lots of different brains to explore. This leads to the creation of more ideas and maybe new solutions.
VIDEO: BRAINSTORM TECHNIQUES: HOW TO INNOVATE IN GROUPS
VIDEO: IDEO BRAINSTORMING
3. Elevator pitch
Elevator pitch is a slang term used to describe a brief speech that outlines an idea for a product, service, or project. The name comes from the notion that the speech should be delivered in the short time period of an elevator ride.
VIDEO: THE PERFECT ELEVATOR PITCH - BEST EXAMPLES AND TEMPLATES
RELEVANT READINGS
How to select the best idea by the end of an ideation session
The Change-Maker's Guide To Pitching Your Project Idea
COURSE WORK
Comment: What do you think are the roadblocks that make people afraid to share good ideas in group discussions?
Group update: Hold a brainstorming session in your group to choose one or two solutions that best match the findings you got from the previous steps. Take note of what your group did well/did not do along the way and prepare a presentation to share with the whole class.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 8-10 minutes for each group to give a presentation about their brainstorming session.
Provide neccessary comments/ feedbacks on each presentation.
OBJECTIVES
COURSE MATERIALS
1. Stage 4 - Prototype
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 either accepted, improved and re-examined, or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences.
VIDEO: PROTOTYPE
2. Ways of prototyping
There are many different types of prototyping. These are the top eight which cover most industries and allow you to get a model of your merchandise or digital product ready rapidly. You’ll find details about each and the best ways to utilize them below.
VIDEO: THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF PROTOTYPING
3. Prototyping in Classroom - an Example
Watch kids become master problem solvers and collaborators by designing, building, and iterating on prototypes.
VIDEO: DESIGN THINKING - PRIORITIZING PROCESS SKILLS
RELEVANT READINGS:
Design Thinking Phase 4 - Everything you Need to Know About Prototyping
COURSE WORK
Comment: Mention a stand-out idea, or new thought prompted by this material.
Group work: Challenge yourself to come up with at least three different versions of your idea to test multiple aspects of the solution your team has come up.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 8-10 minutes for each group to give a presentation about three different versions of their idea to test multiple aspects of the solution they have come up.
Provide neccessary comments/ feedbacks on each presentation.
OBJECTIVES:
COURSE MATERIALS
1. Stage 5: Test
This is the final stage of the 5 stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathize. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.
VIDEO: DESIGN THINKING: TEST
2. Feedback Capture Grid
A “Feedback Capture Grid” is a structured way of organizing feedback that is gathered from your testing sessions. You can use it during the test, as a way for you to capture feedback from your users systematically, or after the test, when you need help organizing the various feedback you have gathered.
3. Design Thinking Feedback in Classroom - Examples
RELEVANT READINGS
How to give designers feedback they can actually use
The 7 Essential Qualities of Effective Feedback
COURSE WORK
Comment: Have you ever shared some feedback that helped others improve their ideas/self? What makes your feedback such a positive effect on the recipient?
Group work: Make a presentation that demonstrates how your solution has evolved based on the feedback received from customers, advisors or stakeholders.
Host a live session/ face-to-face meeting (approximately 60-90 minutes). Allow 8-10 minutes for each group to give a presentation that demonstrates how their solution has evolved based on the feedback received from customers, advisors or stakeholders.
Provide neccessary comments/ feedbacks on each presentation.
PROJECT PLAN (1500 words)
For this assignment, you will integrate elements of the Design Thinking steps from previous lessons into a comprehensive plan.
The integrated Project Plan should, at a minimum should include the following items and topics:
When you have completed your project plan, you will submit a draft. This draft will then be reviewed by two or more peers. In addition, you will be asked to peer review 3 other participants submissions.
D.school Stanford Design Thinking Rubric
Peer-reviewed Project Rubric
We have three major metrics for evaluation:
(1) Demonstrated Knowledge
(2) Focus, or the amount of effort you have put into the course
(3) Help, or the amount of collaboration based on your contribution to the community and peer interaction
Dam, T. F & Siang, T. Y. (n.d.). 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process. Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process
IDEO. (n.d.). Design Thinking for Educators. https://www.ideo.com/post/design-thinking-for-educators
The Education and Training Foundation. (n.d.). Professional Standards for Teachers and Trainers - The ETF. https://www.et-foundation.co.uk/supporting/professional-standards/
Whiting, K. (2020, October 21). These are the top 10 job skills of tomorrow – and how long it takes to learn them. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-work-skills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them/
Westover, Jonathan & Westover, Jacque. (2014). Teaching Hybrid Courses across Disciplines: Effectively Combining Traditional Learning and e-Learning Pedagogies. International Journal of Information and Education Technology. 93-96. 10.7763/IJIET.2014.V4.376.
VIDEOS
The Guardian. (2016, Feb 17). The last job on Earth: imagining a fully automated world. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvs7f4UaKLo
Goldbloom, A. [TED]. (2016, August 31). The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWmRkYsLzB4
SGInnovate. (2018, July 19). SGInnovate: What Technology Cannot Replace. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KwPzjeoj0Q&t=7s
Daylight. (2014, May 13). What is Design Thinking. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee4CKIPkIik&t=7s
Edutopia. (2013, December 18). How Design Thinking Can Empower Young People. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lovNaojdXYY
Sprouts. (2017, October 23). The Design Thinking Process. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0VX-aU_T8
Edutopia (2018, September 20). Design Thinking: A Problem Solving Framework. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfBa2AdjRB4
Mindful Marks. (2018, June 9). 1. Design Thinking: Empathize. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q654-kmF3Pc
O'Briant Group. (2019, December 5). What are Empathy Interviews. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C79Ou-i3T-E
DavidLeeEdtech. (2018, June 16). Interviewing the Community with Design Thinking. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJQh9dTp1OE
DavidLeeEdtech. (2019, September 15). Design Thinking Observation Exercise. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQcxVZlSqwM
Playbook UX (2019, March 9). What is an Empathy Map? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwF9a56WFWA
Mindful Marks. (2018, June 9). 2. Design Thinking: Define. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNAdanuvwtc&t=0s
NNgroup. (2019, December 7). User Need Statements in Design Thinking. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT0ZqwdPYRM
Odell Keller. (2019, October 7). H
Mindful Marks. (2018, June 9). 3. Design Thinking: Ideate. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLxs6te5to&t=0s
Sprouts. (2018, November 27). Brainstorming Techniques: How to Innovate in Groups. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZamW4-Ysk
TUFU. (2017, July 10). IDEO Brainstorming Video from IDEO U. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdJzeO9yN8
Patrick Dang. (2020, December 14). The Perfect Elevator Pitch - Best Examples and Templates. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-iETptU7JY&t=406s
Mindful Marks. (2018, June 10).
Lexie Lu. (2019, May 23). The Different Types of Prototyping. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKDbVDz3BbI
Edutopia. (2017, April 7). Design Thinking: Prioritizing Process Skills. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7-MVYjZYOE
Mindful Marks. (2018, June 10). 5. Design Thinking: Test. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVEQCNM6X-A
DavidLeeEdtech. (2018, June 22). Design Thinking Feedback Tool. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XC4JqXUJbw