Our Students Can Solve the World's Problems!

By -

Sit and Get - Lecture and Listen - Information Overload

Today's students are in need of a change when it comes to how teacher's teach and what students actually do during class time.  If we truly are to call ourselves educational professionals, then it is time for us to do what other professionals do in their line of work. Grow in our practice, advance our skills, learn new methodologies and provide our clients (students) with the most effective and up-to-date experiences that we can.  


Today, I am sharing with you one method that can make a change in your teaching and more importantly, make a difference in student learning. 

Design Thinking - What is it?

Design Thinking a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients.


The Design Thinking Model can be broken down into 5 steps:

Explanation


Imagine a classroom lesson where students become aware of a problem or issue that affects others. Students spend time getting to know and understand the people with the problem and empathize with them. Students work together to research and find solutions for the problem. Not just any solution, but creative, sometimes unimaginable solutions for the problem. Students design prototypes and test the solutions to see if they have helped others with the problem. 

Resources and Examples

Empathy and ideation are at the heart of Design Thinking. Here are some examples and resources to help explain Design Thinking further.

Powtoon Video Explanation 

An article about Design Thinking from Edutopia.


The blog of Dan Ryder, a high school English teacher, who writes about his students using Design Thinking in his class.

Mary Cantwell's Deep Design Thinking website full of resources and information.


A Livebinder by Thomas Riddle


The Teacher's Guild - a place for educators to come together to solve the biggest challenges in education today.

Solve for X - From Google - these are real life examples of Moonshot thinking, some of which fit very well into the concept of Design Thinking.

I challenge each of us teaching students today to give Design Thinking a try. No matter what your discipline or who you teach, every student can be guided to use Design Thinking to solve problems.  And along the way, students will learn how to use their thinking skills, creativity, cooperation, empathy, and determination to solve the problems of the world that they will encounter later in life.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concrete Poetry Sites - This Is So Much Fun!

By -
Image
Poetry Month is Right Around the Corner Are you getting ready for Poetry Month in April? If so, I have some resources to share with you for creating concrete poems. Concrete poems are words written in a shape to convey a poem. They look like this: Recently I went on a mission to search for a site to use with a fellow colleague and her students. They wanted to make concrete poetry on their Chromebooks. There aren't many sites that allow the user to actually write words into any shape.  There is the Read, Write, Think interactive for Theme Poetry.  Here is what it looks like. The words can be added inside of a shape. The interactive guides students through the writing process There is a site from WildAboutWoods.org  where a person can choose a shape or draw one of their own and add words inside of the shape. There are word banks to choose from or a person can type in their own words to add to the shape. I like that adding words is as simple as click ...
Read more

My Blog Makeover - How I Did It

By Anonymous -
Image
I love change and and rarely do the same thing over and over.  So a blog makeover was  inevitable .  It takes quite a bit to make a blog look completely different, but I have found ways to make it easier on myself. Here are the resources I used to complete my blog makeover.   I found the background at the Dotty Dot Dot blog.  I chose Summer Sunset and simply had to copy the code and insert it.  I found directions on how to do this here .  I could have use the header (the title at the top of a blog) from this site as well, but I decided it was too plain, so I searched for a different header. Shabby Blogs provided me with a header that fit my background perfectly.  I found directions to change my header here . I wanted to add my blog title to the header, so I used a photo editing site called Fotoflexer .  This was the first time I had used this site and I loved it!  I have since used Fotoflexer for some other projec...
Read more