Design thinking is a hot topic in education from elementary school to continuing professional education in a wide variety of industries. According to IDEO, a global design firm and one of the key players in this space, design thinking is “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” While not dramatically different than other approaches to creative problem solving, the focus on empathy, rapid prototyping and iteration make design thinking highly relevant in courses and programs that attempt to encourage innovative thinking.

Interest in design thinking in higher education in particular has exploded in recent years. I was introduced to design thinking through Professor Michael Luchs from the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary. In this Luminaris podcast episode, Luchs explains why design thinking resonates with him and how he leverages the approach in a course he teaches on Sustainability Inspired Innovation and Design. Since their initial forays into design thinking, the Mason School has launched the Jim and Bobbie Ukrop Innovation and Design Studio – an amazing space that encourages innovation and creativity. Under the guidance of Mason professor Graham Henshaw, we recently engaged in a design thinking bootcamp to help reimagine a more student-centered approach to high school.

Just as with personalized learning, it can be difficult to wade through the myriad resources available online to learn more about design thinking. In this post, I wanted to provide a quick annotated list of resources related to design thinking that I’ve found helpful. Like in the personalized learning post, I hope that these resources will help to get you started on your own exploration of this engaging approach to innovation and problem solving.

Curated list of design thinking resources
Design Thinking – A Unified Framework for Innovation – In this article from Forbes written by Reuven Cohen, readers are introduced to design thinking. Cohen walks us through his three-day bootcamp experience at the Stanford d.school. This walkthrough of engaging in a substantive design thinking experience really provides some insights on the process from a participant’s perspective.

Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking – Offered through the d.school at Stanford, this toolkit provides everything you need to host a design thinking short course using the design thinking methodology. The site provides step-by-step instructions on how to prepare for the short course, a playbook for facilitators, videos, and sets of really interesting “mixtapes” to go for a deeper dive into understanding and experimenting.

Design Thinking for Educators – IDEO has created this helpful toolkit for educators to integrate design thinking in their teaching. The site provides a great overview of IDEO’s approach to design thinking, four great examples of design thinking in schools, a number of high quality videos, and a free design thinking toolkit. While designed for K-12 teachers, the toolkit can be useful for educators at all levels to create design thinking activities for the classroom.

IDEO U – IDEO has designed and offers three online courses exploring different aspects of design thinking. While I haven’t taken any of the courses, given the high quality of IDEO’s materials and deep expertise in design thinking, I’m sure they will be good.

Design Kit: Facilitator’s Guide – This free, online course will equip you to offer your own design thinking workshop. The outcome of this asynchronous course is that you will develop the plan for a full-day, hands-on, introductory workshop for 5-20 participants on design thinking. The Facilitator’s Guide includes all of the materials you’ll need as well. I’m looking forward to beginning this experience in early February.

What resources have you found useful for design thinking?
Please post your comments below.

Like many of you, I enjoy reading about teaching, listening to podcasts and watching videos for inspiration. I find it very interesting the many different ways faculty engage their students in learning. Many times, I'm inspired to incorporate some of these strategies or activities I discover in my own teaching.

It is risky, though, to try something new. Just because a particular approach works well in one class, doesn't mean it will work well in others. Any time we incorporate something new, it takes time to plan and implement. This means that there are opportunity costs. If we incorporate a new activity in class, it means that we need to make time for it by eliminating another activity. It also means that the extra time it takes to plan for the activity is less time we can spend on our work outside of teaching as well. Finally, we also have to take into account student evaluations of our teaching. If we take a risk that fails, we may come to regret it at the end of the semester. With all these reasons not to take risks in our teaching, why should we consider it?

Why take risks?
I've found that when I teach one of my courses in the same way each semester, it's disadvantageous for myself and for my students.  First, I'm not growing - in my teaching and in the way I approach my course content. One example that comes to mind for me is the way in which I teach my preservice education students to integrate technology through instructional planning. I have worked with colleagues to develop a particular strategy with materials to assist students in the process, but I essentially used the same series of in-class lessons to introduce it. I realized over time that sticking with the same way to engage students with the material had some issues. Working together with them in class didn't give students the time they needed to work with the materials, grapple with their ideas and produce good work. Consequently, through several different iterations, I have developed a new self-paced, online approach that I think works much better and improves my course.

Trying new strategies and activities also helps us to better respond to students' learning needs and preferences in the classroom. One way I've taken a risk to provide my students with more choice to better meet their needs is through offering more choice in the materials and different strategies to approach their work. Giving them a range of different materials to introduce new content allows them to pick the mode and format that works best for them. I also like to provide options for both the specific focus for course projects and how they present their work as well. While these efforts do require more time for me to plan and prepare, my students consistently have positive things to say about the choice they have in my courses.

Taking risks and trying new things can also increase our enjoyment and engagement with the class. Even when things don't go exactly as planned, experimenting with different strategies for class discussion, student writing assignments, and different ways to present content can keep us engaged and interested in our own work. A few years ago, one activity I had to help students understand TPACK, a theoretical construct to describe teachers' knowledge for integrating technology, had become stale. I traded out a series of readings and a paper with a project where students developed TPACK teaching cases. Not only were these teaching cases much more effective in helping students to understand TPACK, it was also much more satisfying for me to design, facilitate and assess their final projects.

Tips for getting started with new approaches
Despite the potential payoff for trying new approaches in teaching, it can still be daunting. I've learned over time that a few tips can be helpful in taking the leap and being successful with new strategies.

1. Try small "hacks" rather than huge changes. If you can identify small, manageable changes to explore you can build confidence to take bigger risks. So, for example, rather than building your course entirely around case studies, try planning and implementing a single, brief case in one class session. This experience will help you to determine if you want to try additional cases in future class sessions.
2. Consider your rationale for change. I think that when we make a significant change in our teaching, we ought to have a reason to do so. If we identify a challenge or opportunity in our teaching, we'll be much more likely to invest our time and energy into trying a new approach.
3. Determine if the innovation is a fit. Even if we have identified a challenge or opportunity in our course content, a particular strategy or approach we come across may not be a good fit for the content or students in our class. To avoid a mismatch, be sure to clearly identify your learning goals and consider any new ideas against them.
4. Be transparent with your students. When you recognize you're taking a risk in trying something new, tell your students up front what you're planning. Tell them why you've decided to try a new approach. Ask them for their feedback afterwards. In my experience, being open and honest with students and then asking them for the input goes a long way towards getting their buy-in for a new approach.
5. Be reflective. When you try something new, take some time after class or at the end of the project to think about what you've learned. This reflection can help you to zero in on effective elements of an activity, how you might be able to improve, and what lessons you learned. Armed with these reflections, the next time you try a similar approach, you will have the benefit of your reflective experience.
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What risks have you taken this semester in your teaching?
Please post your comments below.   

Over the past few years, I’ve had the pleasure to co-facilitate a series of full-day Microsoft Technology Enriched Instruction workshops in colleges and universities around the world. TEI Workshops are designed to help college and university faculty find ways to integrate technology in their teaching in a way that both helps them to teach their content more effectively and to simultaneously find ways to engage their students in 21st century learning skills (21CLS). I also teach courses for novice and experienced K-12 teachers to develop these same skills.
 
The TPACK Game
These workshops and the classes I teach are very participatory, discussion-based, and action-oriented. By the end of the experience, each participant develops designs for their courses that integrate technology in some way to support teaching and learning. Despite the technology focus for the workshops and courses, one highlight is a simple sorting/matching game that can probably be easily adapted to a range of different learning activities and content foci.
 
In the context of the TEI workshop, this game is designed to help the participants match a content topic that they teach with learning activities and technologies that “fit” to create a powerful learning experience. In the game, participants are provided with blank white index cards, on which they write content topics for the courses they teach. We then provide them with a set of yellow pedagogy cards – each with a different type of learning activity (e.g., group discussion, simulation, demonstration, etc.). Finally, a set of green cards include different technologies that may be used in the classroom or online (e.g., presentation software, video recording, wikis, etc.).
 
Through a series of rounds, participants are directed to either randomly draw or strategically combine sets of cards (content, pedagogy, and technology) to learn to identify and generate good “fit” among the three. This is called the TPACK Game and was originated by Judi Harris, Punya Mishra, and Matt Koehler back in 2007 at the National Technology Leadership Summit. Punya provides a good history of the game along with other variations. This is always a favorite activity from the workshop. It generates great discussion, which often extends beyond the 1:15 minute time block that we allocate for it.
 
Considering new options
While this experience is focused on a particular learning goal with specific reasoning processes in mind, this kind of simple sorting game can be extremely helpful in two respects. First, as one Australian history professor noted, considering a range of different teaching approaches and learning activities helped him to consider new possibilities. It’s only human nature to fall into routines, but this game can help you to break out of your normal practice and consider new ideas. Another way it can be helpful is to consider new ways to use familiar tools. OneNote is one of the applications we work with in the workshop. Many of the Australian participants were already using OneNote for their own notetaking and organization. When they encountered this technology in the context of the TPACK game however, they began to see applications for group work – particularly research projects. There were similar insights related to the use of Skype and Padlet as well.

In my mind, however, these aren’t the primary benefits to the TPACK game. I think the most powerful aspect of the game is the conversations that are catalyzed as participants discuss their choices and alternatives. Groups often become quite animated as they discuss different possible combinations of content, pedagogy and technology. They share their unique experiences and insights as they discuss the cards they are dealt. It is in these collaborations that some of the most transformative new approaches are developed. In the academy, we often don’t have the forum to discuss our teaching practice. The TPACK game is one way to drive this discussion.

How else might we encourage these conversations on teaching practice in higher education?
Please post your comments below.  

Last weekend, I was catching up on my blog reading (as part of my personal learning network) when I came across a great post from Barbi Honeycutt on 5 Ways Students Say Their Role Changes in the Flipped Classroom. The post reports on her work with faculty and students at the Chapman University School of Pharmacy to design and implement a new curriculum using the FLIP model that Barbi has developed.
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One sentence in the article really jumped out at me: "The faculty and campus leaders have made it their mission to prepare Pharmacists, not just graduates." This idea implies a more active, applied approach to both coursework and learning in preparation for students to bring the skills and concepts to bear in their future careers. This is a core element of professional education programs like pharmacy, education or nursing. It strikes me, though, that this same kind of vision could (should?) be applied to any field. The flipped classroom offers students more opportunities to engage in this kind of work.

What does it mean to prepare students for their futures?
Author Daniel Pink wrote, "We need to prepare kids for their future, not our past." This was brought home to me in a really visceral way at a screening of the film, Most Likely to Succeed, as part of the William & Mary Homecoming celebration. One of the authors of the companion book and the producer of the film, Ted Dintersmith made a compelling case that we need to rethink school at all levels to help students find their passion, engage in deep work, and develop the kinds of collaboration and innovation skills that will serve them well in their future.

Co-author Tony Wagner and William & Mary alum (a double English and Physics double major no less), Dintersmith argues that “the core purpose of education [is to] teach the next generation the lessons needed to survive and thrive” (p. 21). What does this mean to you? What will students need to survive and thrive whether they go on to graduate school, enter the workforce or participate in community service? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but what follows are a few ideas you might want to consider in your teaching.

How can we prepare students for an unknown future?

• Give them real problems, situations and cases to grapple with.
• Encourage them to “try on” different ideas, discuss their merits and limitations and above all, make mistakes.
• Provide them with an authentic audience (beyond their professor and classmates) for their work.
• Encourage them to communicate their ideas in flexible, engaging and substantive ways.
• Provide students with independent study opportunities (within courses as well as through dedicated independent study courses) to explore their own interests related to course content.
  
  

This shift in thinking needs to happen at both the K-12 and higher education level. It isn’t an easy shift to make, but nothing important ever is. And it’s hard to imagine anything more important than helping to increase our capacity as a nation and world to solve the complex problems and unique opportunities in the modern world.

Need some inspiration? Watch the film trailer, buy the book, or host a screening for your school.

How do you help your students prepare for their futures?
Please post your comments below.