What Is Design Thinking & How Can it Be Used in Classrooms?

The style of classroom teaching is continuously evolving. Teachers now need to bank on creative thinking to come up with newer ways to make teaching interesting for students. It is hard to predict the future working environment, so teaching professionals need to find innovative ways to prepare students for the challenges ahead.

Teaching professionals should not only teach children specific skills, but should also provide them with a holistic learning approach for their development. Such goals can be achieved through design thinking.

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a process of learning, collaborating and solving problems. The process has been framed in a particular way to identify challenges, gather information, work on potential solutions, refine solutions, and implement them to solve issues.

Creative thinking is not limited to designers. It can be easily incorporated into various fields and can be used for problem-solving. Design thinking revolves around the development of an idea to solve an issue for specific people. This helps a user to develop creativity and empathy towards other people by understanding their issues.

There are five phases of design thinking which can be applied to any field to bring out the best solutions for issues.

1. Empathize - A professional should understand the problems of the target audience. He/she should work on different methods to understand their pain points.
2. Define - After understanding the problem, the professional needs to define the problem statement.
3. Ideate - After understanding the problem in detail, the professional should come up with various ideas through brainstorming with others. This process helps in generating various kinds of creative ideas to solve the problem at hand effectively. This phase is designed to eliminate the single-idea thought process in a team.
4. Prototype - Once the professional discusses various ideas, the best ones are developed into a prototype to understand how it solves the problem. The ideas are put forward to certain experts to understand their effectiveness and feedback is taken accordingly to refine the ideas.
5. Test - Now the professional tests the ideas in a real environment to finetune them. After testing various ideas selected from the prototype stage, the professional would get the desired result on which idea to follow.

Many professionals follow this five-step design thinking process to identify, and solve the problems in their organizations. The main element is understanding the phases so that they can be implemented in the right way to get the desired result. Design thinking provides innovative ideas and there is no specific way to get the results. It is an innovative process that requires loads of creative thinking to solve problems uniquely.

Design Thinking in Classrooms

The future of education is changing rapidly. Teaching professionals are challenged with complex issues, and they have to come up with unique ways to solve the issues. Students should use their creative thinking to understand problems, frame detailed problem statements, interact with experts for feedback and test ideas on their target audience. This design thinking process should be inculcated in students from an early stage so that it helps them solve any issue in their future.

Teaching professionals should understand that it is not always required to follow all the steps mentioned above. The main aim of implementing design thinking in classrooms is to prepare students for their future in a tough environment.

But how do the teachers implement design thinking in their classrooms? Let us break it into phases and understand the implementation process.

1. The first thing teachers should do is understand the pain points of students. They should feel the issues related to their students.
2. Once they have understood the problems, they should note down the problem statements explaining the concerns. That would give them a clear understanding of the issues.
3. Discuss the issues with other teachers to find solutions. The discussion can also revolve around finding unique ways to make students adopt design thinking.
4. Once teachers come up with various workable ideas, they should discuss the ideas with education experts to get feedback on them. This would help refine the ideas and also get an understanding of which plan to go ahead with.
5. Finally, teachers should test the ideas before making them available for all students. If the idea works well during the test, it should be implemented.

Teachers can involve parents to understand and brainstorm ideas. There are various challenges in the education sector. Understanding them and providing perfect solutions require a design thinking process to be implemented in educational institutions.

Design thinking in educational institutes is a human-centric approach, which seeks to solve real issues faced by teachers. Creative thinking plays a major role in this.

Teaching professionals should even approach this process from a learner’s point of view and make sure that their needs are addressed during the entire process. Teaching is a difficult process, and it is a huge responsibility for our teachers to find unique methods to make learning effective for students.

Conclusion

With the process of design thinking, implementing an idea has been simplified. By following the five steps, teaching professionals can bring about unique methods to make learning interesting. Understanding the pain points of students and providing solutions to these form the entire framework of design thinking.

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