Education & Technology

As schools focus on building students’ capacity to learn and solve problems outside the formal classroom, many educators have embraced “design-thinking” strategies as a promising approach.

The appeal of design thinking, which evolved out of strategies to improve product design, is that it fosters brainstorming and collaboration skills that are valuable in a changing world where many challenges don’t have textbook answers.

But do design-thinking strategies actually improve a student’s performance? Perhaps more important, will students use those strategies outside of school? Until now, both questions have been hard to measure.

A new study by researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) provides some answers: yes and yes. 

Via John Evans

What I love about Design Thinking is that it's flexible. There are teaching approaches out there that tell us what to do, but it makes more sense for every teacher to teach differently every year, because we each get different students.
Think about it. We don't treat all our friends and family the same. Our interactions with them are largely based on our experience of who they are and what makes them tick. Teaching is the same way. One size fits all approaches do not work.

The challenge is that, in the grand scheme of things, we only know our students for a short time. However, personalization of education is not a fad; it's a thing. So. let's use the Design Thinking Cycle (Empathy, Definition, Ideation, Prototyping, Testing) to improve Teaching, shall we?

Via Ariana Amorim