What Does Design Thinking Look Like?

Some have asked the question, “What does Design Thinking look like? “ Well, the simple answer is, “It depends.” From building models with egg crates, straws and pipe cleaners on the floor to small group discussion planning classroom rules, Design Thinking utilizes different formats for different types problem solving. What is consistent from each DT challenge is identifying the problem and working collaboratively to reach a resolution.

In the simplest terms, design thinking is problem solving with empathy, with a human touch. It starts with listening to and understanding the needs of those around you and working together to address the challenge. Students test their ideas, use one another’s creativity, see if they work, create new one if they don’t. It’s messy a process and it is designed to be that way. Students build a better end result by continually accessing their work. Rather than the teacher driving the process, the students have a voice, which increases their engagement and deepens their understanding.

Take for instance, Ms. Ravid’s Sixth Grade English class authentic problem: how to build a color coded library sorting system representing various genres of their choosing so that students could access their books more readily. The goal: students should be able to find a specific book title, locate a type of book or add and classify a new book to the collection.  Ms. Ravid. told the students to think through future problems that might arise. Working in small groups of three to four, she said that each group should recommend possible solutions. Ms. Ravid said, “This is not a competition to win. Our most important resource is each other.”

Everyone had a job to do: a recorder to capture the ideas and suggestions, an individual to collect a selection of various books, another to read the book jackets to understand the genre. After twenty minutes of this exercise one member of the group rotated to another group and discussed their findings. Eventually the four groups became two as they continued to brainstorm working together and in different combinations.

From this exercise, the students developed and defined seven categories that were common to each group: biography and autobiography, realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, non-fiction, reference and science fiction. Although the categories may not be academically correct, the process challenged students to think about nuances between the different genres. For instance, the students defined fantasy as a genre that “uses powers beyond the forces of nature such as magic or superpowers”. Their definition for science fiction includes books that feature “futuristic technology that the world has not seen yet but seems reasonable given our current understanding of the universe.” Additionally, the class researched various classifications of books authentically learning as they developed their own categories. For the outlier books that the students could not fit into easy classification, the class will review and see how they may fit into the current classifications. Students will then color code the books and live with their classifications for a few weeks. Next, the seventh grade class will be invited to use the library. The true test is to see if someone who was not part of the original group can readily use the library and locate a book.

Ms. Ravid’s  project engaged the students on a whole new level. As the students worked through the library project they were able to name their problem, grow their ideas and critique their ideas as a group. Why did this project work so well? Because the students made their own definitions, solved a problem and dug deeper into the material they were learning. The students were invested .They had a voice. Not only did they master the objective of the assignment by defining what each book category means, they went beyond to figure out how their own definitions need to be adjusted to accommodate books that don’t fit into any category yet. This is Design Thinking. It is always a work in progress. These are skills that will serve our students for a lifetime.