Design Thinking in the Classroom


Book Description

A teacher’s guide to empowering students with modern thinking skills that will help them throughout life. Design thinking is a wonderful teaching strategy to inspire your students and boost creativity and problem solving. With tips and techniques for teachers K through 12, this book provides all the resources you need to implement Design Thinking concepts and activities in your classroom right away. These new techniques will empower your students with the modern thinking skills needed to succeed as they progress in school and beyond. These easy-to-use exercises are specifically designed to help students learn lifelong skills like creative problem solving, idea generation, prototype construction, and more. From kindergarten to high school, this book is the perfect resource for successfully implementing Design Thinking into your classroom.




Design Thinking in Schools


Book Description

School innovation expert John B. Nash demonstrates how design thinking can be adapted successfully by busy school leaders seeking student-centered solutions to a range of challenges. Based on a decade of work teaching school leaders nationally and internationally, Design Thinking in Schools shows how leaders can adopt a design thinking mindset to uncover problems and harness the ideas and energy of students and other stakeholders to create unique, effective solutions within a single semester or school year. The book is a step-by-step guide that offers critical guidance and field‐tested tools for choosing design teams, developing prototypes, and selecting promising ideas to take to scale. It includes rich examples of educators at the elementary, middle, and high school level who have used design thinking to find creative solutions for improving student engagement, school climate, and parent-teacher conferences, among many other challenges. Nash illustrates how school leaders can use the design thinking process to access a range of student voices for a diversity of opinions and feedback on topics that better inform school change. Lively and inspiring, Design Thinking in Schools is a critical resource for school leaders seeking to leverage the untapped wealth of knowledge and experience contained within their own buildings to make schools innovative places of learning.




Design Thinking for Education


Book Description

This book explores, through eight chapters, how design thinking vocabulary can be interpreted and employed in educational contexts. The theoretical foundations of design thinking and design in education are first examined by means of a literature review. This is then followed by chapters that characterize design thinking among children, pre-service teachers and in-service teachers using research data collected from the authors’ design-driven coursework and projects. The book also examines issues associated with methods for fostering and assessing design thinking. In the final chapter, it discusses future directions for the incorporation of design thinking into educational settings. Intended for teachers, teacher educators and university instructors, this book aims to provide them with the theoretical foundations needed to grasp design thinking, and to provide examples of how design thinking can be interpreted and evaluated. The materials covered will help these groups of professionals to consider how design thinking can be integrated into their own teaching and learning contexts. The book will also promote a discourse between educational researchers on the theoretical development of design thinking in educational settings.




Teacher as Designer


Book Description

This book offers insights into how design-based processes, principles, and mindsets can be productively employed in diverse P-16 educational spaces by a myriad of educational actors including teachers, instructional leaders, and students. It addresses concerns about the theoretical and practical implications of the still emergent emphasis of design in education. The book begins by examining a number of prominent design processes being used by educators including human-centred design, designing for authentic inquiries, and Universal Design for Learning. It then delves into how teachers, system leaders, and students can engage in educational design within the complex spaces of K-12 contexts. Finally, the book takes up design in education within a maker and making context. Each chapter includes a vignette, a series of guiding questions, along with specific design principles that can help address common challenges and issues educators encounter in their practice. This book provides both theoretical and practical elements involved in educational design and is beneficial to scholars, graduate students, educators, and pre-service teachers.




Design Thinking for School Leaders


Book Description

"Design is the rendering of intent." What if education leaders approached their work with the perspective of a designer? This new perspective of seeing the world differently is desperately needed in schools and begins with school leadership. Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson, widely recognized experts on Design Thinking, educational leadership, and innovative strategies, call this new perspective design-inspired leadership—one of the most powerful ways to ignite positive change and address education challenges using the same design and innovation principles that have been so successful in private industry. Design Thinking for School Leaders explores the changing landscape of leadership and offers practical ways to reframe the role of school leader using Design Thinking, one step at a time. Leaders can shift from "accidental designers" to "design-inspired leaders," acting with greater intention and achieving greater impact. You'll learn how viewing the world through a more empathetic lens—a critical first step on the path to becoming a design-inspired leader—can raise your awareness of the uniqueness of your teachers and students and prompt you to question the ways in which they experience your school. Gallagher and Thordarson detail five specific roles to help you identify opportunities for positively impacting students, teachers, districts, parents, and the community: Opportunity Seeker. Shifts from problem solving to problem finding. Experience Architect. Designs and curates learning experiences. Rule Breaker. Challenges the way things are "always" done. Producer. Gets things done and creates rapid learning cycles for teams. Storyteller. Captures the hearts and minds of a community. Full of examples of Design Thinking in action in schools across the country, Design Thinking for School Leaders can help you guide your school to the forefront of the new design + education movement, one that will move traditional education into the modern world and drive the future of learning.




Design Thinking for Every Classroom


Book Description

Designed to apply across grade levels, Design Thinking for Every Classroom is the definitive teacher’s guide to learning about and working with design thinking. Addressing the common hurdles and pain points, this guide illustrates how to bring collaborative, equitable, and empathetic practices into your teaching. Learn about the innovative processes and mindsets of design thinking, how it differs from what you already do in your classroom, and steps for integrating design thinking into your own curriculum. Featuring vignettes from design thinking classrooms alongside sample lessons, assessments and starter activities, this practical resource is essential reading as you introduce design thinking into your classroom, program, or community.




Taking Design Thinking to School


Book Description

Design thinking is a method of problem-solving that relies on a complex set of skills, processes and mindsets that help people generate novel solutions to problems. Taking Design Thinking to School: How the Technology of Design Can Transform Teachers, Learners, and Classrooms uses an action-oriented approach to reframing K-12 teaching and learning, examining interventions that open up dialogue about when and where learning, growth, and empowerment can be triggered. While design thinking projects make engineering, design, and technology fluency more tangible and personal for a broad range of young learners, their embrace of ambiguity and failure as growth opportunities often clash with institutional values and structures. Through a series of in-depth case studies that honor and explore such tensions, the authors demonstrate that design thinking provides students with the agency and compassion that is necessary for doing creative and collaborative work, both in and out of the classroom. A vital resource for education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, Taking Design Thinking to School brings together some of the most innovative work in design pedagogy.




Design Thinking in Education


Book Description

Education needs new ways to prepare individuals and societies for the multitude of changing challenges in the twenty-first century. In today's world—characterized by digitization, increasing speed, and complexity—design thinking has established itself as a powerful approach to human-centered innovation that can help address complicated problems and guide change in all areas of life. Design thinking formats not only teach skills that benefit people as they expand their "toolbox," but also create affective and cognitive outcomes. This book includes experiences, approaches, and reflections on design thinking in education from different perspectives of renowned design thinking experts from the network of the Hasso Plattner Institute and its School of Design Thinking. Using real-world examples, the book provides insights into requirements and protocols that design thinking practitioners can apply to transform their academic or professional ecosystem. It will be of interest for readers who work in or are interested in a wide variety of educational contexts.




Design Thinking in Higher Education


Book Description

This book addresses the contributions of design thinking to higher education and explores the benefits and challenges of design thinking discourses and practices in interdisciplinary contexts. With a particular focus on Australia, the USA and UK, the book examines the value and drawbacks of employing design thinking in different disciplines and contexts, and also considers its future.




Design Thinking


Book Description

Design thinking is a human-centered problem-solving process that organizations can use to address wicked and complex problems of practice. Within the PK-12 space, design thinking has been employed to engage educators in an innovative approach to address challenges like curriculum redesign, instructional engagement, and designing physical spaces. The use of design thinking in the PK-12 space is a result of the evolution of an organizational improvement process that puts people at the center of problem-solving initiatives. Design thinking is seen as both a process and a mindset that enables people to look at problems in new ways and address these problems through creative approaches. In this book we share case studies of PK-12 schools and other educational organizations that have used design thinking, as well as research studies that have studied aspects of design thinking in the PK-12 space. We have brought together a variety of research-based and illustrative case studies around design thinking in PK-12 education that explore the development and implementation of design thinking in practice.